“Life in Kakuma was a constant battle for survival. My fellow LGBTQIA+ refugees and I were frequently targeted by other camp residents who attacked us, stoned us, stabbed us, and even set fire to our shelters. The trauma we endured was unbearable, our only ‘crime’ was being ourselves.”

Huzaifa Mageni, who goes by Sammy, is a Ugandan transgender woman currently living in Juba in South Sudan. She first fled her home and the violence and persecution she faced there in 2021, hoping to find safety and systems of resettlement first in Kenya, and later in South Sudan. Instead, like thousands of other queer trans people who have been displaced due to climate disaster, conflict, or targeted violence, Sammy feels like she and her community have been forgotten, if they were ever considered to begin with.

“Left with no hope, many of us fled Kakuma, fearing for our lives, and crossed into South Sudan, desperate for any place that could offer us sanctuary,” Sammy shares about her journey. “But life in Gorom Camp is unimaginably hard. As LGBTQIA+ refugees, we are jobless, marginalized, and barely surviving. Food is scarce, and many go days without eating. Children among us suffer from malnutrition. Queer women with infants are in desperate conditions, and all of us live under constant fear. We are traumatized not only by our pasts, but by the present, the uncertainty, the hunger, the sickness, and the violence around us.”

Promises of relocation from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have not materialized, and instead Sammy and her community have been pushed out of Gorom camp into the city, where they struggle daily just to put food on the table for the most vulnerable among them. Many of the 450 queer refugees in her community go without any food to eat or even clean water to drink for days at a time. The makeshift tents in which they live have grossly inadequate facilities, leading to “an environment of filth and disease, where there is no privacy, no safety, and no space to breathe.”

And still, despite everything they face not just as refugees, but as targeted queer and trans people, with tips from UNHCR on how to hide their queer identities for their “safety,” Sammy and her community hold tight to who they know they are in their hearts.

The growing humanitarian crisis of displacement, exacerbated by political and environmental instability, has hit a lot closer to home than usual for a lot of transgender people living in the US recently. As more and more “once in a generation” wildfires rage through urban areas, as yet another increasingly damaging hurricane season approaches while FEMA suffers unprecedented cuts, as the federal government draws closer to banning virtually all gender-affirming care, more and more LGBTQ+ people in the US are being displaced from their homes and left with very few options.

The disparities between the trans people I spoke with in South Sudan and those I talked to in the US are quite clear. Currently, the decision to leave the US for safer access to gender-affirming healthcare is still a privileged one—a decision that often comes down to having enough money to legally immigrate somewhere else. And while it’s difficult to see spending tens of thousands of dollars to relocate in order to save your child’s life as a privilege, this is the dichotomy of disaster and displacement for queer trans communities.

Some of us are forced to stay. And some of us are forced to leave.

A Williams Institute survey of 302 transgender, nonbinary, and gender-diverse adults conducted in December 2024—after the US election, but before the current and pending federal care bans were proposed—found that nearly half of the respondents had already moved to a different state, or wanted to leave the US entirely. But more than 80% said that the cost of relocating presented a major barrier to them.

Our struggles, while worlds apart, are nonetheless reflections of one another, where violent homophobia and transphobia create an atmosphere of terror meant to keep LGTBTQIA+ people silent and invisible. “In a place where being different is considered a crime,” Sammy says, “being transgender is a death sentence. We live with the constant fear that if we are recognized, we could be killed. And in such situations, there is nowhere to turn. We cannot report these threats to anyone. The danger is always present, and our silence becomes a shield for survival.”

Sadly, Sammy and her community are getting the same advice as many people in the US are hearing today. “The very people who are meant to protect us, including UNHCR, offer us only the instruction to ‘hide’ or ‘move to the city.’ But we are jobless, marginalized, and voiceless. How can we move to a city we cannot afford to live in? How can we find safety in a world that refuses to recognize our right to exist?”

Fellow trans folks reading this, wherever you are, I know you’re nodding along.

I took the question of displacement to Reddit, asking trans folks, especially those in the US, if they had already left, or were considering fleeing their state or the country. More than a dozen people responded to share their stories, which will be forthcoming in a future story.

“Gender affirming care was already increasingly inaccessible for me even before the election and care bans,” a trans woman named Lucia told me. “I have pretty much given up on having consistent and effective healthcare. I doubt I'll ever get surgery. I often worry about violence and discrimination in my day-to-day life. I'm educated and hard working but barely able to afford to live.” Lucia would love to move to another country where the administration isn’t openly hostile, but says she doesn’t want to add to anyone else’s problems by migrating without legal status. “I just want a decent life and I often think about trying to legally move to somewhere like Canada, Germany, or New Zealand. I expect the situation in this country to deteriorate and I just hope I'm able to survive it all.”

Royal, a nonbinary transfeminine person, fled via air travel with five suitcases from Tennessee to California after repeated harassment from neighbors and an attempted hit and run. But the vast majority of people who responded felt as if leaving was just not an option for them, physically or financially, and like they had nowhere to go that would accept them.

And these are just the responses from trans adults with regular access to Reddit.

To discuss these impacts on larger communities, I spoke with Jeff Le, disaster response expert and managing principal at 100 Mile Strategies. “When I think about these communities,” Le tells me, “I think about youth in particular. So these are youth who have had home disruptions and for any number of horrible reasons, are now out on their own, probably earlier than anticipated.” He’s speaking about the fact that LGBTQ+ youth are more likely to experience abuse in their homes, and also more likely to be abandoned by their families because of their identities.

When it comes to disaster and displacement, Le says, “I've learned that people who have the least tend to lose the most.” When someone who has so little to begin with loses everything, where do they even begin to rebuild?

“The suffering here surpasses even the hardships we thought we had left behind,” Sammy tells me about life in Juba today. “We are a forgotten community. While we wait endlessly to be relocated, our situation grows worse. Many of us had been promised resettlement in the United States before President Trump’s administration put a stop to the relocation of queer refugees. That decision shattered the last fragments of hope for many among us. Since then, we have seen no country come forward to offer us safety, no nation to call home, and no system to shield our lives from this slow erasure.”

All Sammy wants for herself and her community is the chance to thrive. “We believe in our right to safety, education, and the opportunity to contribute meaningfully to society. Many of us aspire to become lawyers and advocates for human rights, but without immediate help, these dreams are slipping away.”

After the immediate disaster is over, the disruptions left in that disaster’s wake, whether caused by fire or flood or fascism, will last for years. “That kind of trauma is significant,” Le tells me, and as queer and trans people have shown over and over again, when we do survive that trauma, it is through our communities. We keep us safe.

Alicia Johnson, emergency manager, community preparedness expert, and Founder and CEO of Two Lynchpin Road, thinks that community resilience often goes overlooked. “Community-based organizations play a role of utmost importance [in disaster response], not just for LGBTQ+ people, but for all marginalized individuals and communities,” Johnson says. “They’re already there, they’re representing their constituents with one voice, and amplifying that voice in a way that is heard by the community and understood by those who are in leadership, before a crisis hits. That amplification remains, post disaster.”

So what does it mean when we have to leave those communities behind? “I think it's shocking how little people know their neighborhoods or the people that live around them. It makes it a lot easier to rebuild if you already had relationships to build off of,” Le says. But for queer and trans people, any attempt to build new relationships and find a place in a new community is fraught with more potential violence.

Both Johnson and Le agree: When disaster strikes, it's already too late to prepare. The best time to think about disaster planning was yesterday, and the second best time is today.

Unfortunately, Johnson thinks that too many community groups fail to consider disaster scenarios, whether because they are just too overwhelmed with maintaining their existence in the status quo, or because they don’t really think of themselves as disaster-relevant. “Many community groups do not understand or recognize their capacity in a disaster,” she says. Community groups often see themselves as addressing one specific type of situation, so “when the wildfire comes, the earthquake comes, the hurricane comes, the tornado comes, they don’t necessarily see their skills and capacities translating over.”

I would add, when fascism comes. We could all do well to think about how our particular skills and capacities translate. “Bridging that gap is key to making sure that our marginalized communities are represented and heard from,” Johnson adds. And her number one tip for preparing? “This is going to sound so simple, but we really struggle with it as humans. We have to talk about the fact that disasters happen. Something will happen. To you. We know that. We’re living in a world now where disasters are happening more and more frequently, and they are more severe when they do happen. Being able, as a group, to come together and say, ‘Okay, what is your plan? How do we gather together and help support each other: physically, emotionally, mentally, financially?’ Having those initial conversations is really key.”

For trans people, disabled folks, and others in your care, that especially means having conversations about what an interruption in the availability of care might look like. Johnson recommends having conversations with your patients and clients about what it might look like if they can’t access their regularly scheduled hormone shot, for example. 

“There is a certain level of responsibility that you have, as a healthcare provider, in explaining to them that the connection they have to the resources they need might be severed at some point due to something outside their control. We need to do better at understanding and explaining what crisis means and what disaster means, because if we don’t fully appreciate it, we can’t fully address it.”

These conversations about crisis, care, and preparation must ultimately bring us back to the human cost—the people living in that severed reality right now. For queer and trans communities, especially those already displaced or on the brink, the question isn't just how we survive disaster, but whether anyone sees us in the wreckage. As systems falter and protections disappear, our responsibility becomes not just logistical but moral: to recognize the dignity, urgency, and humanity in every plea for help.

“We are human beings, with dreams, with dignity, and with a desperate plea for justice and compassion. Our lives hang in a delicate balance. And every gesture of support, every voice that speaks for us, becomes a lifeline,” Sammy tells me. “Even sharing it brings some small hope, that maybe, just maybe, someone will hear and help us find our way back to dignity, safety, and life.”

What small hope can you bring to the scared, isolated, and marginalized queer trans people in your communities and abroad today?

Sammy and her community are crowdfunding to try to escape the horrendous conditions in which they have been forced to live. I have independently verified her identity along with these two crowdfunding campaigns.