Leaving the UK with a heavy heart

Today, as a family, we have booked our flights and our one-way ticket out of the UK. This has not felt like a choice. This feels like fleeing to protect ourselves. For the past 7 years we have looked at our own heavy and escalating life challenges, at the UK law and policy-scape, at the immense threats to trans life and trans childhood in the UK, and said to ourselves, “things are really bad and getting worse – if they get any worse we really should try and leave”. Every year we have looked very closely at the options for leaving, discovered how hard it is to leave, even with white British middle-class privilege, and decided, not yet, we’ll slog it out here: inertia, fear of change, worry about finances, better the devil you know. Every year the legal, healthcare, school and social context has got worse. This year the equation is unthinkably bad. Trans children’s healthcare has been removed and criminalised, replaced with state mandated conversion. Medical doctors have been made to…