When driving around Denver, it’s normal to see Pride flags, and it’s rare to be the only trans person in coffee shops or grocery stores, according to Jessica Terry, who moved to the area from Utah in pursuit of safety, community, and acceptance.
For Liz Charles, who moved to Colorado from Oklahoma to support her trans daughter, what makes Colorado a welcoming place is the normalizing of transness—“folks simply living life and being boring,” she said.
There are currently no anti-LGBTQIA+ bills in Colorado, which cannot be said for the states that surround it. Across Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is tracking a combined 110 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills that seek to out students at their schools, restrict gender-affirming care, and prohibit trans people from correcting the gender marker on their birth certificates, among other attacks.
More broadly, as of June 13, there are 516 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills in the U.S. As states nationwide continue to introduce anti-trans legislation, Colorado has garnered a reputation as a safe harbor in a sea of red, one where trans adults and youth can thrive. According to a spokesperson for Queer Asterisk, a Boulder, Colorado, team of queer and trans therapists and educators who serve LGBTQIA+ communities, Colorado provides gender-affirming spaces for members of the community to connect and express themselves. The spokesperson said trans people are moving to Colorado in large numbers for health care and safety after facing “very real discrimination in their schools, workplaces, and communities.”
When faced with so many threats in their home states, many trans people come to the difficult conclusion that moving to another state might be the only way for them to seek safety. According to impacted people who spoke to Prism, no one really wants to flee from home, but feeling endangered on a daily basis takes too big of a toll.
Fleeing harm
While it’s difficult to know the exact number of people who are fleeing transphobic state laws, the 2022 U.S. Trans Survey of more than 92,000 respondents found that 40% of trans people surveyed thought about moving to another area because they experienced discrimination or unequal treatment where they lived. Meanwhile, nearly half (47%) said they thought about moving to another region because their state governments considered or passed laws that target transgender people for unequal treatment. This includes bills that ban access to bathrooms, health care, and sports.
“Unfortunately, if you are a family fleeing your state and you start looking at your options, you quickly realize there aren’t that many safe states out there,” said Ellie Brooks, a representative from PFLAG Denver, one of the nation’s largest organizations dedicated to supporting, educating, and advocating for LGBTQIA+ people.
One family from the PFLAG Denver community moved to the state to find protection and support for their transgender child after facing pushback and discrimination from schools and neighbors when their child began transitioning. They told Prism moving wasn’t ideal, but they didn’t feel like they had much of a choice.
“The move was hard enough. It’s incredibly difficult financially; it’s incredibly difficult mentally, emotionally,” said a parent in the family, who asked to remain anonymous. “There’s a pretty small number of states that feel ‘safe’ … We don’t want to do this again, so we need to go somewhere where [my child’s safety] is not a maybe. It has to be a certainty.”
Last year, the family tried to find other schools in their area for their child, but they quickly realized she wouldn’t be accepted anywhere in the district. Around the same time, the state legislature proposed multiple anti-LGBTQIA+ bills, most of which targeted the trans community. It was then that the family decided to uproot their lives in search of a safer place.
Before the move, they watched local school board meetings online, monitored proposed bills for upcoming state legislative sessions, and factored in how long it would be until the next gubernatorial election. When this information was combined, the family had a relatively short list of places they could potentially live and feel safe for more than a few years. They ultimately chose Denver and moved in the summer of 2023. The family has since turned their state monitoring efforts into a comprehensive relocation guide that they now share with other families considering a move to support their LGBTQIA+ children.
“Our goal is for no one else to have to go through what we went through with having no idea where to start or what to look at,” they said. “It could be a drastic difference in your life trajectory based on where you go.”
Terry echoed this sentiment. She fled Utah after a series of harmful interactions with individuals in the community and within local health care organizations in the state.
“I had to drive two hours to see the only gender-affirming therapist,” Terry said. “Changing my name in Utah was hell. People closest to me said they’d rather see me in a casket than as a woman. I only stayed in Utah for so long because of guilt for leaving my kids behind. I really love my kids so much and want to be part of their lives. In order to do that, I have to be alive, so I decided to leave Utah.”
Charles’ family had support in Oklahoma City, but they still decided to move to Colorado after the 2022 midterm election.
“There was already a sports ban and a bathroom ban … [My daughter] had an overarching anxiety,” Charles explained. That November, the governor won reelection, and Ryan Walters, who ran on an anti-trans youth platform, won the state superintendent seat. “[It told] me everything I needed to know about where the climate is and what’s coming down the pipe. There was not just a tolerance of hate speech and vitriol and extremely polarizing platforms and language, but there seemed to be a desire for it. I can’t keep sustaining this level of protection and shielding if there’s going to be more.”
Shortly after the election, Charles said she began to look into moving the family, and relatively quickly, she settled on Colorado because of the efforts the state has made to protect trans people. Only after she left Oklahoma did she fully understand the weight of tension from constant transphobia.
“The lowering of that hypervigilance, I didn’t realize how much energy I was expending because I had normalized it,” Charles said. “When that is removed, that’s when the grief comes. All the things that are underneath the surface that you didn’t have the time, energy, capacity, bandwidth for. But the more relief that comes, the more grief we feel. There is guilt for getting out while so many others can’t … This has been this way across the state line this whole time. And I’ve been living on another planet where none of this is possible. That paradox is just so infuriating.”
Moving isn’t an option for everyone. According to 2018-21 data from The Williams Institute, 3 in 10 transgender adults currently live in poverty. One in four transgender people also report losing a job due to bias, and more than three-fourths have experienced some form of workplace discrimination. These conditions impact the ability of transgender people to pick up and move to a new state. There is the burden of costs associated with making a move in general, but a major challenge of moving to Colorado specifically is the cost of living. According to a recent series from The Colorado Sun about the high cost of living in the state, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is about $2,000, and the average price of a home is now more than $535,000.
Moving to a state like Colorado with many LGBTQIA+ protections is a privilege that few trans people can afford. Those who can scrape by often find themselves in supportive communities that now seem very far removed from Colorado’s history as a “hate state.”
From “hate state” to safe harbor
“It wasn’t that long ago that Colorado was known as a ‘Hate State,’ and we’ve come so far,” said Nadine Bridges, the executive director of One Colorado, a Colorado organization that advocates for LGBTQIA+ communities.
Colorado’s legacy as a “Hate State” largely began with Amendment 2, a ballot initiative passed by voters in 1992 that prohibited the state from enacting anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQIA+ people. The Supreme Court eventually struck down the law as unconstitutional in 1996, and as Bridges said, Colorado is now a very different place.
The state currently has a law that requires certain public buildings to have restrooms with amenities for all genders, an anti-discrimination law that extends to schools, and a ban on conversion therapy. Last year Colorado became the first state in the country to include gender-affirming care services in its health insurance plan. In many ways, Colorado’s laws are now in exact opposition to the laws of the states that surround it.
“Overall, Colorado has the most protections compared to any other state in the nation,” Bridges said.
This has certainly been Terry’s experience in the state. When she first accessed care through Denver Health facilities, Terry said she was “pleasantly surprised” that she was directed to the women’s health area.
“Within that department, there was a section for trans women with dedicated doctors and nurses. It’s hard to state how good it felt to have knowledgeable staff who could help me come up with a care plan in a setting that felt well funded, professional, and well staffed,” Terry said, noting that trans people are often left to figure out their own care plans with whatever information they can find.
Once in Colorado, Charles said the gender-affirming care her daughter received was exactly what she hoped for. Last year, Oklahoma banned gender-affirming care, which in part informed the family’s decision to leave the state.
But it’s not just the ability to access care, Charles said; it’s the thoughtful way doctors speak to her daughter and the fact that her medical records are protected. (Colorado has a minor consent law that offers medical record protection for those under 18 years old.) Additionally, there is a visible LGBTQIA+ presence in her school and the larger school district.
“There’s so much more space and capacity for creativity and risk and trying and effort and openness and fun and joy,” Charles said, attributing it to the abundance of out queer and trans people. “Everyone was so wonderful and treated her with such dignity and respect and kindness and care … That’s been so healing and is so beautiful and empowering for her.”
As families and transgender people move to Colorado from neighboring states, the demand for gender-affirming health care providers and resources only grows. However, some organizations are struggling to meet the demand.
The state’s largest provider of gender-affirming care for minors, the TRUE Center, received an “unprecedented” number of referrals this year due to the closure of pediatric programs in other states, according to a spokeswoman. The current waitlist for new patients is about a year long. Over the last two years, Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains has seen a 20% increase in adult patients seeking gender-affirming care, according to the organization. And the clinical team at Queer Asterisk “has grown significantly in response to the need for trans-affirming mental health services over the last few years,” the organization told Prism. The group has also expanded its clinical capacity for serving young trans people, but they frequently receive more requests for counseling than they can accommodate.
Providers say independent and state-run institutions in Colorado are stepping up to fill health care gaps created by long wait times. According to Queer Asterisk, local hospitals, such as Denver Health and Boulder Community Health, have expanded their options for gender-affirming health care. The TRUE Center for Gender Diversity, housed inside Children’s Hospital Colorado, recently announced it will double the size of its team to reduce wait times and increase services to patients and families. Advocates are also working at the legislative level to assess the status of gender-affirming health care providers in the state and increase protections for patients seeking reproductive health care or gender-affirming care.
A blueprint
Charles said it baffles her that a child likes hers simply showing up as who they are can elicit such fear in adults that they choose to support laws that harm young people. She told Prism that her hope for the future is that people in the U.S. will stop dehumanizing LGBTQIA+ communities because of their discomfort regarding things they don’t understand.
Terry said she had to reevaluate her own feelings when she began to consider coming out as trans. It was a matter of giving herself permission to say, “Maybe I’m trans. And maybe that’s OK … Maybe it’s not sinful. Maybe I’m not broken. It’s just who I am.”
In 2022, Colorado’s only transgender state lawmaker, Democratic Rep. Brianna Titone, led the charge to secure protections for providers of gender-affirming care and patients seeking it—including those traveling from out of state. And while a number of states nationwide have laws and policies in place that aim to improve conditions for LGBTQIA+ communities, few have taken the steps that Colorado has to protect the nation’s more than 1.6 million trans people.
Bridges said she hopes Colorado won’t be alone in the battle to protect transgender rights.
“Colorado is a state focused on individuality and pride and making the decisions that best suit your family,” Bridges said. “I’m proud of Coloradans for recognizing the need for families to support their young people and for adults to make decisions that best suit themselves … I think Colorado can be a blueprint for other states to move forward.”
