So many LGBTQ Texans are moving to this city, it may declare an ’emergency’

Read more at the Houston Chronicle.

Amid a glut of anti-LGBTQ+ laws passed by the state legislature over the past half-decade, many queer Texans have decided to pack up and move to greener, more supportive pastures. So many have chosen Seattle that the  Pacific Northwest city is now considering declaring an emergency.

As first reported by the Seattle Gay News, the City of Seattle is close to declaring a state of civil emergency in response to LGBTQ+ refugees from red states moving there. That comes after Seattle’s LGBTQ Commission, an advisory committee that counsels local leaders on matters related to Seattle’s queer community, reportedly sent a letter last month asking the city council to make an emergency declaration. The commission said that the city needed “an effective and empathetic response” to protect a “rapid influx of 2SLGBTQIA+ persons seeking refuge in Seattle.”

For some ex-Texans, Seattle has become a haven. Victoria Scott, a trans woman and freelance writer, lived in Houston working as a programmer at NASA after college in 2018. After coming out as transgender, she said that she found both Houston and Texas hostile. Scott moved around and lived briefly in Reno, Nevada, before settling in Seattle with her wife at the end of 2023. In Seattle, Scott found the foundation she had long needed.

“It’s done more for my day-to-day lived experience and mental health as a trans woman than basically any other thing I’ve ever done,” Scott told Chron.

For her, Seattle was everything Houston wasn’t. (For one, it isn’t nearly as hot.) Scott appreciates the city’s relatively decent cost of living and protective state and local laws for LGBTQ+ residents. But Scott also said that there were more queer and trans people out and about in Seattle, noting that she could form physical communities in a way she couldn’t in Texas. She attributed that to Seattle’s long, vibrant queer history.

“Trans people here are normalized to a degree they’re not elsewhere,” Scott said. “I get culture shock visiting other places now because I return pretty suddenly to people staring or murmuring about me … Here, I genuinely feel like just another woman.”

Seattle isn’t perfect, but Scott noted that many of the problems she encounters in the city have nothing to do with her being transgender, something she couldn’t say while living in the South. In addition to writing, she now works with a Washington state non-profit called TRACTION that serves transgender people throughout the state. The group’s Open Arms program helps transgender people across the nation resettle in supportive states and cities, mostly in Seattle. Scott says she’s seen plenty of queer and trans Seattle transplants both through her work and out in the community.

“It is very much an ongoing migration,” Scott said

In its letter, the Seattle LGBTQ Commission cited data from a 2025 survey by the non-profit Movement Advancement Project. That survey found that after the 2024 election, queer and trans people were moving from Republican-led states that have passed anti-LGBTQ legislation to Democratic-led states like Washington. Texas was noted as one such hostile state in the Seattle LGBTQ Commission’s letter.

“Many [internally displaced persons] have relocated from states such as Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Kansas, and Idaho due to anti-trans legislation, threats to personal safety, and barriers to healthcare and legal recognition,” the commission wrote. 

In response to a wave of anti-trans legislation in both Texas and in statehouses around the country, some transgender Americans have migrated out of red states like Texas and Florida and into large cities with established LGBTQ+ communities like Chicago, New York City and San Francisco. Minnesota, which has notably strong non-discrimination laws and protects gender-affirming care at the statewide level, has also become a hub for trans Americans looking for safety. Some have even sought shelter in Canada. 

Aspen Coyle, who manages the Open Arms program at TRACTION, told Chron via email that the group matches trans people in need with volunteers who help them through the process of moving. Coyle said that of the 533 people TRACTION has been in contact with, 117 have been from Texas, the highest of any state, followed by Florida and Ohio. That tracks, Coyle said, with a 2025 study by Plume, an online gender-affirming care provider, which found that Texas had the highest number of trans residents who fled their home state: nearly 20 percent. The top location trans respondents moved to in that Plume survey? Washington state. 

Coyle said Texas transplants she’s worked with have described trans people leaving the state as an “exodus,” and that many tell her “they’re the last trans people in their area.”

“It is absolutely dire. People are leaving because they can’t get healthcare, they can’t get a job, they might get arrested for going to the bathroom, they get harassed in public,” Coyle said. “The baseline hostility to their existence is unbearable.”