On the night of the election, Red Broadwell was home with his cat in Wilmington, North Carolina, working on his master’s thesis about transness and body horror in film. He tried not to doomscroll about the election results. But when the 23-year-old trans graduate student woke up the next morning to the news that Donald Trump had won the presidency, Broadwell began to panic.
He said the results were “genuinely sickening” and caused him to experience panic attacks and bouts of nausea. He worried about his ability to continue taking testosterone and whether he would have to scramble to sort out top surgery sooner than he expected. Broadwell was finally able to start hormone replacement therapy last summer after moving out of Florida, which has banned care for minors and limited which providers can administer hormones to adults.
“I’ve grown up in the South my whole life. I don’t really want to leave,” Broadwell said. “I love it down here, and I don’t want to abandon that.
It sucks that every time there’s an election, I have to ask, ‘What’s going to happen to me and my friends?’” After Trump’s victory, trans people across the country are grappling with questions about their legal protections and access to gender-affirming care and reproductive health, as well as concerns over their physical safety — in short, what survival will look like. The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ+ youth suicide prevention organization, saw a 700% increase in people reaching out .