I wrote a very different post about the past two weeks, two weeks ago. It has to remain forever in my drafts, though, because the two weeks didn’t happen the way I expected them to. In fact, what started out as a trip to cement my freedom and independence has now become a situation where I am likely to lose everything– my personal belongings, my livelihood, my very home.

I set out last Wednesday, three days after the inauguration, on a string of train journeys that were to take me from Pittsburgh to Vancouver, British Columbia. I chose Vancouver because I was hoping to leverage my skills and experience as a video editor to a job in film. Or, failing that, I could strike out for a comedy career. I spent three full days on trains, watching the US heartland fly past me, and believing that I was headed to a place of improved safety.

And then, Saturday night, at the Vancouver train station, literal steps away from freedom, I was stopped by the Canadian border patrol and refused entry into Canada. I was told that I did not have a strong enough claim to suffering a threat by staying in the United States. I was told that if I tried to press the issue and was denied, I would never be allowed back into Canada. I was effectively forced to admit that I didn’t really want to go to Canada and that I would go back home.

That was a week ago. Now, government websites are scrubbed of anything even hinting at permitting transgender people to exist. Hospitals are canceling operations and appointments for trans people– regardless of age or how far they’ve come in their transitions– because the government is threatening to pull funding from them if they perform those vital services. In less than a week, the situation became so dire that reports of suicides in our community are spiking.

And here I am, still traveling. Backwards. Back to Pittsburgh. I tried to become self-sufficient, and now I’m slinking back to a town I had said my farewells to. I feel like such a failure. I know objectively that I’m not. But that doesn’t make it hurt any less.

I can’t say that I didn’t know the risk I was going to take. There was always a chance that I would be turned away. But as the miles stretched onward and the traumatic wounds to civil rights started piling up, I believed that my case would be stronger, not obliterated. I had a significant amount of knowledge of events that were all but snuff films. The border patrol agent was unconvinced. She had only seen the vast disinformation campaign that claimed that it was only going to affect trans children (as if that was in any way acceptable).

This is what happens when a lie is allowed to roam the world without a passport or scrutiny: the truth, the lived truth experiences of flesh and blood people, becomes irrelevant. This is what happens when people refuse to say “don’t believe that”: the people who don’t have to believe it, who know it, are told, “I don’t believe you“.

This is what happens right before everything that happened a hundred years ago, happens again.

I’m still in shock that my country has made it abundantly clear that it will use violence against its own people for the crime of calling out their abuses. Worse, I’m in disbelief that behavior that would be reprehensible in literally any other nation on earth– and has been declared as such, repeatedly, even by nations that once suffered that level of misgovernance– that to declare a segment of its citizenry to be undeserving of the rights guaranteed by virtue of the nation’s founding documents to all is, apparently, not a deal-breaker.

And while I know that my fears of being disappeared are minimal, they are very much not zero. They grow bolder and nearer with every ICE abduction of American citizens born on the shores of a country that their parents risked their lives to reach. I hold no illusions that ICE will stop with their current target list. The Oval Office has unilaterally declared that the people who come to America are “enemies invading” us in a “war”. If we are at war, then who is to say that wartime rules do not apply? If we are at war, then why not just declare dissent to be treason? Oh, right. He already has.

What do you do when neither the country you want out of and the country you want in to will accept you? How am I supposed to proceed with my life when at any moment I could be taken for the crime of being transgender? How do you live when your nation becomes a police state overnight?

Whatever happens from here on out, I can’t guarantee that I will be able to survive it. But I have to try. Even if it costs me everything. Especially because it will cost me everything. Because the last thing that they will want to take from me is my life, and I won’t give that up without a fight.