If you are a British or American trans person, things are not looking good. For Brits there’s a horrifyingly speedy descent into a TERF utopia after the UK Supreme Court sided with transphobes, while for Americans there’s Trump and MAGA. As people scramble for the exit a lot of them are asking about claiming asylum in another country as a means to reach safety. We would not advise a British or American trans person to seek asylum because we think it’s a dangerous path, and that at the time of writing this piece such a claim would almost certainly be refused, leading to rapid removal from the place in which they have sought refuge. It seems many people don’t understand why that is the case, so it’s necessary to go into detail about it.
How Are Asylum Claims Evaluated?
There are a set of criteria by which asylum claims are evaluated, commonly called the “8 criteria test”. They are reasonable criteria, but are interpreted by the country you are seeking asylum from, not you as the person seeking asylum. They are not interested whether the conditions that led you to seek asylum are bad. They know they are bad. Instead they are interested in whether your situation meets their interpretation of the criteria. Inevitably that interpretation sets a high bar, and while some of the criteria will still meet those standards, others will not.
In short, someone seeking asylum needs to show they are in real, immediate, deadly danger. Discrimination and humiliation in the US and UK don’t qualify.
It’s time to look at those criteria one by one through the eyes of a country processing an asylum claim, and see how the average trans person in three countries qualifies or doesn’t. We will compare the UK and USA with another part of the world whose asylum seekers have a much stronger case, Uganda. We picked Uganda because the Ugandan parliament passed a law in 2023 setting out serious criminal penalties for homosexuality and being transgender.
This article was written in May 2025. In the future things may change for Americans and Brits. But an asylum claim is based on conditions at the time of the asylum hearing, not on what may happen in the future.
You must apply while outside your country
Asylum is a promise by a country that they will not deport someone back to a dangerous place. The person must be in the country where they seek asylum. You cannot apply before entering.
| UK | USA | Uganda |
|---|---|---|
| ✅ The UK is easy to leave, it has a strong passport and easy access to international travel. | ✅ The USA is easy to leave, it has a strong passport and easy access to international travel | ✅ Uganda has a weak passport, but it is possible to escape over land borders into neighbouring countries. |
You are genuinely afraid to return home
People seek to remain in countries for many reasons. Economic conditions may be better in the host country, or the person may be seeking to avoid unfavourable social or environmental conditions. Asylum requires that the person have “credible fear” of returning home.
| UK | USA | Uganda |
|---|---|---|
| ✅ There is a lot of fear among UK trans people. | ✅ There is a lot of fear among US trans people. | ✅ There is a lot of fear among Ugandan trans people. |
You have a credible reason to be afraid
The reason needs to be credible. Believing a rumour on the internet, or believing space aliens are following you, does not qualify as credible.
To claim asylum a person must show that they personally are credibly in danger. Not just that they are a member of a group that has suffered violence. If there are one million Pastafarians, and one is killed in anti-Pastafarian violence, the other 999,999 do not have a claim. But if the government decrees a death penalty for believing in Pastafarianism, then every Pastafarian is in danger.
| UK | USA | Uganda |
|---|---|---|
| ✅ Media and politicians target trans people, hate crimes are on the rise, a bathroom bill is in the works, and further more extreme measures are being tabled. | ✅ Trump’s regime is targeting trans people with a series of repressive laws including bathroom bills, removal of documentation, and removal of protections. Hate crime is on the rise. | ✅ The government has criminalised being gay or trans, and it unsafe to be seen in public. |
What you are afraid of is something deadly serious
What you are afraid of must be death, rape, serious bodily harm, long imprisonment, torture, or “conditions intolerable to life”. This last might cover a trans person escaping a place they cannot live as themselves, but even this is not settled law.
| UK | USA | Uganda |
|---|---|---|
| ❌ Life is becoming difficult and stressful for a UK trans person, but as yet it remains possible to live your daily life largely unhindered. Trans people are not being rounded up and shot. | ❌ Life is becoming difficult and stressful for a US trans person, but as yet it remains possible to live your daily life largely unhindered. Trans people are not being rounded up and shot. | ✅ Death squads, both government and vigilante, are actively seeking out Ugandan trans people and killing them in large numbers. |
You are singled out for this type of treatment because of your race, nationality, religion, politics, or membership of a particular social group
There has largely been a consensus that transgender people form a “particular social group”.
| UK | USA | Uganda |
|---|---|---|
| ✅ The UK political and media establishment seems obsessed with trans people, and is targeting them specifically. But an individual trans person has to show how they themselves have been harmed, and that that harm was due to being trans, or that being harmed because they are trans is likely – not just that it has happened to some. | ✅ Trans people have been a target throughout Trump’s political career, and the rhetoric against them is continually increasing. But an individual trans person has to show how they themselves have been harmed, and that that harm was due to being trans, or that being harmed because they are trans is likely – not just that it has happened to some. | ✅ The Ugandan government have specifically criminalised being trans, and continues to actively seek out LGBT people. An average trans person might become a target of violence at any time. |
The government has harmed you, or can not or will not protect you
| UK | USA | Uganda |
|---|---|---|
| ❌ The UK government has shown itself as hostile to trans people and is working on legislation to make their lives difficult, but as yet this will not be enough to pass this threshold. A person who stabs a trans person on the high street will be apprehended. | ❌ The Trump regime has used anti-trans rhetoric for a very long time, it has passed anti-trans laws, and made the lives of American trans people difficult. The country you are asking for asylum in will say that American trans people are still protected by American law and order though. | ✅ Government police are killing trans Ugandans. There is no protection. |
It is not reasonable to ask you to move to another part of your country where you can be safe
Conditions can vary within a country, and the asylum convention assumes that moving within one’s own country is a better outcome than moving to another country.
| UK | USA | Uganda |
|---|---|---|
| ✅ ❌ The UK is a small country, and the anti-trans laws apply to all of it. However, all Brits have the right to live in the Republic of Ireland visa free, so you will be asked why you did not take that route. | ❌ There are still safe states and sanctuary cities in the USA that a trans person can travel to. If the atmosphere in Florida is bad, it remains possible to move to California. If the individual claim is based on federal law, it may be possible to meet this criterion. | ✅ The government campaign against trans people covers the whole of Uganda, there are no safe places within the country. The Ugandan government has little control over the extreme north of the country, but for various reasons this area is not safe either. |
If you return to your home country you will face a future risk of serious harm.
Demonstrating past harm is not enough. You must show you are likely to be harmed if you return. Certainly things look very ominous in the USA, but the criteria are concerned with the situation now, not with laws may be passed in the future.
| UK | USA | Uganda |
|---|---|---|
| ❌ As it stands at the moment, trans people returning to the UK will not face serious harm. | ❌ As it stands at the moment a trans person returning to the USA will not face serious harm in their daily life. | ✅ A trans person returning to Uganda will face very serious dangers. The law is still on the books, and trans people have been killed recently. |
The conclusions in the tables above may well contain some things you don’t like, and it’s likely that some of you will mount vigorous arguments against them. They don’t represent our personal views of the risk and damage to trans communities in the UK and USA, and we’ve thus been telling anyone who would listen to get out for several years now. But crucially they represent the likely response from any country in which you would try to claim asylum, and even if that is a bitter pill, it’s one that must be swallowed.
The Effect Of Claiming Asylum
We think that at the time of writing this article, British and American trans people should not try to claim asylum in other countries. But it’s worth now asking, what happens if you do make a claim?
Life as an asylum seeker
Think about what you know about the asylum system in your own country, the USA or the UK. It’s far from the paradise a right wing TV station or tabloid newspaper will tell you, instead years of demonising immigration has left it a very dangerous and nasty place to be. Asylum detention is a whisker away from prison in many places, plus as some of the people Trans Rescue have helped over the years have found out, it can be full of angry people from cultures which are not friendly to trans people.
Now, given the above, what do you expect the conditions for asylum seekers to be like in other countries? They have right-wing politicians and anti-asylum rhetoric too, so their asylum facilities are just as bad. Do you really want to spend a lengthy period (two years for the Netherlands as we write this) in those conditions while your application is processed?
If Your Asylum Application Is Refused
Having an asylum application refused will result in deportation and a ban on return. If you’ve applied in a bloc such as the EU Schengen zone then that will apply to the whole bloc, which will mean you are now banned from most of Europe.
Your failed application may be used as justification to restrict trans people’s ability to travel to a country, or to refuse asylum to other people like you in the future when conditions have worsened. Do you want to be the person who stopped everyone else getting asylum?
That Wasn’t Pretty. But We Needed To Talk
Nobody wants you to reach safety more than us, and we have been providing as much information about it for a very long time now. Some of you may be very annoyed at us for what we’ve said in this piece, because it may challenge long-held received opinion. But it represents our many years of combined knowledge and experience in this field, and we would be doing you a disservice if we didn’t say it. When so many in our communities are clutching at straws, we want to make certain they do so in a direction which will benefit them. There are still plenty of options for leaving the USA or the UK which do not involve asylum, and we believe at the time of writing that they represent a far better choice.