We’re a small organization in our first year with a small budget. We’ll be submitting normal accounts at the end of the year. But it’s not easy to read accounts without training, and it seemed we should give an account of where the money has come from and gone.
Unless otherwise specified, all values are in Euros.
Current Balance
We maintain an account with Bunq bank in the Netherlands.
As of Sept 25, 2022, we had 5273 euros in the bank: 1193.7 in ‘incomings’, 158.66 in admin, 87.32 in operations, 1601 in savings, and 1432 set aside for Eden House.
Eden House particularly needs stable funding, hence the relatively large amount set aside for it. We’ve just spent 4804 setting up and operating our first 7 weeks, so this fund is currently depleted.
We never know when someone won’t be let on a plane or we’ll be approached by someone who needs moved NOW. So we set aside a relatively large amount for savings, and currently have 1601 in that account.
Like any organization we have administrative expenses (bank charges, IT charges) and have 158 set aside for anticipated expenses. We transfer money from incomings to Operations as a fiscal control measure, and fund operations from the Operations account.
Income
We have raised 32923 euros to date.
Most of our income has come from small individual contributors. Our largest contribution has been the initial 3000 euro donation from an individual that started us.
We have received no grants or corporate donations.
We received a 2500 euro interest free loan from one of our board members to help get started. This money isn’t included in the above figure, and was used to incorporate and obtain ANBI status.
Google now provides us with a graph.
Expenditures
Expenditures
It can take us a long time to get a passenger out. For this reason the largest item is ‘support’ – sending frightened trans folk money to stay alive while on the run, and renting rooms in dodgy places. Eden House has been an attempt to reduce this cost. Sometimes we’ve had to hold people somewhere simply because we didn’t have the funds to get them out. So this also inflates this number. This number also includes some items we’d rather not describe because it would compromise our methods. We spent 13485 on support.
Passenger travel is what we love to spend on – airline tickets, trains, and other transport. We spent 5153 on passenger travel. A separate category for ‘passenger paperwork’, we spent 162 euros on such items as passport charges.
Eden House has been our next largest expenditure. The 4804 investment is already greatly increasing our capacity to help people in East Africa and other places. Moving forward, we’ll spend 800-1000 euros a month for the next few months until self sufficiency programs kick in.
Sometimes we need to send a volunteer somewhere to physically help someone escape. These are often quite dangerous. We spent 1926 on staff travel.
We had charges of 553 for admin and 826 for IT. The large IT charge was because we were setting up systems, because we paid for TransEmigrate’s IT charges while TransAsylias was getting separated, and because it took us a while to be registered with Google for their Google for Nonprofits program.
Our only fundraising expense was 150 euros. We had a tent at “May Contain Hackers”, a ‘hacker camp’. This was an opportunity to ride along on activities a board member had to do anyway for their day job. While not a great success as a fundraiser, we developed many useful contacts.
We recently hired Arya Aurora for a combination role of Eden House manager and PR assistant. She’s been learning the PR role, but is already doing great work as house manager. Her salary is 250 euros/month, consistent with market rates for office worker jobs in Kenya.
There is a 340 euro discrepency in these figures. I believe it’s due to some refund, but since this post is not intended as a formal financial report, I’m simply going to acknowledge it and return to moving passengers.
What We’ve Done
In the past 9 months we’ve
Moved 18 people – some of them only partially
Helped another 6 survive while we figure out how to get them out
We are trying to help 4 more
Started Eden House
Started a program to advise people in non-emergency places like the US and UK how to get out
We had a program of emotional support for QTI folks stuck in dangerous places, run by a social worker, but we no longer have that resource.
Raised awareness of conditions for QTI folks outside EU/US
We feel like we’ve been good stewards of your donations. We do thank you for your ongoing, amazing support.
Header image based on photograph of Emirates Airliner by Arcturus~commonswiki used CC-by-CA-3.0
“Hii nyumba ni kama nyumba ya mungu luna ipa heshima.”
(This house is like a temple, and we respect it)
– Shilla
After months of planning, fund raising, and work, our trans haven in Nakuru, Kenya is a reality. This post is being written in the office of Eden House.
We moved the first passengers in on August 1.
Our awesome volunteer, Simon Ng’ang’a, found us a really special place. It’s a lovely 3 bedroom 3 bath home with enough property for a chicken coop and garden. Its location on the outskirts of town is secure, quiet, and means we can move to the agricultural project vision gradually – renting a nearby field and expanding into it.
All of us in Nakuru have been working hard to turn the house from a rather dilapidated place that hadn’t been lived in for some time to a lovely home. We’ve cleaned a lot, we’ve had plumbers in and figured out the NASA like complexities of the plumbing, done a lot of small repairs, and are moving on.
We’re currently a bit in the ‘camping in our new apartment’ stage, with mattresses on the floor and a single cheap molded plastic table and chairs. But we’ve set up the kitchen (everyone but me seems to be a wonderful cook), and have daily basics like clothes washing, internet service, fridge, and so on established.
But we’re starting our move towards self sufficiency by building our own furniture.
The back porch currently has a lot of offcut lumber piled up, most of it with the bark removesd. We’re building 5 beds, a sofa, and a trestle type dining table. In preparation, I taught a basic tool use class (it’s not all one way – I finally got a proper lesson in how to wash clothes in a bucket from Sophia, I’d struggled with this before).
As much as teaching concrete skills, we’re working hard to get the women who grew up in the city used to the idea of doing for yourself. Most of the folks in the house had little experience with self sufficiency, but they’re learning fast. In fact, after several ideas of how to build beds, we settled on an idea Arya came up with, based on used tomato boxes. And the idea of learning skills from YouTube is new to them all.
We’re purchasing some basic tools, some chickens, a sewing machine, and some art supplies. Arya’s interested in starting clothing production, and Sophia’s a talented artist. Shilla brings many practical ‘farm’ talents – she’s going to start raising chickens and lead the project to put in a garden.
And yes, we have a large garden planted! Shilla took the lead on this project.
We’re doing more than we expected for this early phase of the project. We’re ready to start some skills training, but need equipment. The tools are purchased, but we could use more, and we need to purchase a sewing machine, sewing notions, some fabric, and some art supplies.
Eden House is on a residential lot on the edge of town, down a narrow dirt road. About 50% of the surrounding lots are used for agriculture. Our original plan was a house or apartment, then move into some self-sustaining agricultural project later as we grew. Instead, I think we can just grow the house where we are for some time, perhaps renting a nearby lot for agriculture.
The compound is the former home of a local MP. Politics can be violent in Kenya. For us, having a politician’s house means the property is very secure – it has a tall stone block wall topped with broken glass and a secure iron gate. All windows have secure steel bars. If (a realistic possibility here) there’s a violent protest, we’re secure.
Matching Funds For Eden House
One of our wonderful supporters (who wants to remain anonymous) has offered up a challenge. For every euro we raise, up to 2000 EU, she’ll match it 1 for 1. So let’s go, you can donate
In October 2018 the New York Times published a leaked HHS memo, a plan to “eliminate transgender identity”. Since then, even with the end of the Trump administration, anti-trans hate has steadily ramped up, and in the last few days a US Supreme Court decision overturned Roe v. Wade. American trans people seem to be seeing the writing on the wall. We’ve received many inquiries about fleeing the US in the last week.
We divide the world into safe countries, dangerous countries, and “countries of new concern”, countries where conditions for trans people were once somewhat hospitable, or at least on a path to progress, but are now in decline, often as part of a larger slide into fascism, such as Brazil, Poland. Hungary, the UK, and, yes, the USA.
At Trans Rescue we try to help trans people in countries like these, who may have never before considered fleeing their countries of origin, but now are seriously contemplating doing so and do not know what their options are.
This post is some advice for trans people in the USA, their families and partners.
This advice is based on our own experience with helping others migrate, with our knowledge of the international migration system, and to some extent our own experience (the writer is a trans US Citizen who emigrated to India in 2018, then the Netherlands in 2019). It is not legal advice, and we are not attorneys.
Don’t Despair, But Be Prepared For Sacrifice
We are painfully aware that advice like “deal with the custody arrangement keeping you in Georgia” and “have money” are very easy to say and very hard to do.
But we want to avoid a council of despair. Doing nothing is not a solution. Every day we deal with people in a LOT more trouble than you are in.
Distinguish between what you are planning to do – which might involve considerable sacrifice – and what you need to do right now – which could be simply to make plans.
And be prepared for sacrifice. There are many depressing stories of Jewish families who didn’t emigrate before the Holocaust because “dad had just gotten a promotion”, or “we had just purchased a piano”.
A few steps down on the economic scale, don’t feel like you can do nothing towards leaving because you’re barely making ends meet. If you have a passport, in the extreme case you can take a backpack and head North over the border. If you have a passport that is, and have prepared.
In doing that preparation you might have to lose treasured possessions to pay for a passport or other necessities. You might even be committing yourself to homelessness. But doing that work is a necessity because if you put your plan into action, then things have deteriorated to the point where the alternative is death.
Decide On A Model Of The Danger
The first step in planning your move is to sit down and decide what you personally think could happen. Here are some possibilities:
Street level violence becomes overwhelming. Yahoos graduate from yelling at us to attacking us in broad daylight.
Street discrimination reaches a point where it becomes difficult to have a normal life. Keeping a job, renting an apartment, or going to a restaurant become difficult.
Our existence is outlawed. Cross dressing and impersonation statutes are brought back. Restroom laws with draconian penalties are enacted. Lawrence v Texas is reversed (it depended on Roe v Wade) and sodomy laws suddenly are enforceable.
Our documents are invalidated – e.g. a state or the federal government may declare that only documents in our “biological sex” are valid. Holding a document in one’s real gender might become fraud.
Trans people who are parents are declared unfit. Our children are taken away.
Affirmative care for trans children becomes illegal or cause to remove the parent’s custody.
We are declared mentally incompetent as a pretext to round us up, a start to concentration camps.
We are just rounded up, our existence made illegal. There is a night where many trans people have the knock at the door.
Our citizenship status is revoked (this is what Hitler did to the Jews).
As you plan, think about both how likely a scenario is, and the consequences. Don’t dismiss events simply because they’re unlikely. Instead, look at both. I have car insurance, even though I don’t expect to be in an accident today, because the consequences of an accident could be severe, accidents do happen, and car insurance is reasonably cheap. You’re 82% likely to be just fine after playing Russian Roulette, but I don’t recommend it.
Another question to ask yourself is what you expect to happen overseas. Americans are known worldwide for being insular. Our country is large and isolated. But you’ll need to consider what you think will be happening in places you’re considering going. Many Jews fled Germany to places like Belgium, only to later be engulfed.
Finally, how long do you imagine you’ll be gone? Is this emigrating forever, never to see the waving wheat fields of Kansas again? Or is it a long vacation while the fires sweep over the country?
Leaving Versus Emigrating
Lets look first as just ‘leaving’ – physically getting out of the country for a while- either being on a long vacation or working remotely, without obtaining a work permit in another country.
Fortunately, as far as visas, getting out of the USA is easy. An American passport will get you a tourist visa to any of the countries marked in green with no visa or with only a formality (an e-visa or visa on arrival).
Americans can visit any of the green countries with minimal visa hassles. Camoka4, CC BY-SA 3.0.
And once you’re out, you can at least prepare to permanently leave from a safe place.
If your model of what you need for your own safety is only to be out of the US for a relatively short time, then you just need to be prepared to go. Here’s a checklist of what you need to prepare:
Get a passport. It’s less relevant that it’s in your deadname than that you have a passport. If your passport is going to expire in the next 2-4 years, renew it.
Get a Covid vaccination certificate. You will not be allowed on an aircraft without one.
Have enough money saved to show you can support yourself for 90 days in the country you’re going to (discussed below).
Have enough money for a round trip ticket to your destination. You won’t be allowed into the destination without one. Technically, you need an ‘onward flight’ – so if your bug out plan is 90 days in country A, then 90 in B, an itinerary USA — A — B — USA is fine.
Clear up anything that would keep you stuck in the US, such as child custody issues or criminal complaints. If you are trapped by disability payments, you can perhaps ‘live’ in one place while spending your time in another.
Make plans to deal with your ageing parents. Have a frank discussion with your partner. An emotional bond that keeps you in the US will be no less a bond than being on parole.
Stop being insular. We’ve had passengers in truly dangerous situations – wanted by the police, with a price on their heads – reluctant to go to places where they’d be perfectly safe because they have fallen prey to negative stereotypes. Not all the world outside Europe and the US is a crime ridden hellhole. You may never have traveled before. Accept that this is going to be an adventure, and know that, while scary, it’s something many people have done. Watching happy YouTube videos of people traveling the world or living as expats can help.
When you fly, don’t carry anything that indicates you intend to look for work (resumes, work clothes, tools). Scrub such items and incriminating discussions from your phone and laptop (customs can, and will, demand you unlock them and then will look through them, including your social media accounts). Don’t post about leaving on your social media. Store your data in the cloud and retrieve it on the other end.
Tourist visas are either 30 or 90 days. If you plan on being gone longer than that, but not so long that you need to work, you can often go to country A, then go to country B as little as overnight, then back to country A.
Money
Many folks say to us that they don’t have the money to leave.
You’re going to need $160 for a passport. Bluntly, yes, you’re an adult, you can raise it somehow.
After that, don’t feel you’re stuck because you’re broke. The majority of immigrants in the world are penniless people fleeing war, persecution, or poverty. You can reach the Canadian border somehow.
Now let’s look at what money you’ll need for a reasonable ‘leave’ scenario.
Besides, well, needing to live, you need to show you have funds to be allowed into the country (or even onto the plane). This means you might want your 90 day ‘vacation’ to be in a country where things are cheap. And you might be happy camping or living like a local, but customs might want to see enough for you to live like a tourist anyway. You’ll need to research prices and visa regulations where you plan on going.
When estimating the cost to live in a country, remember that with a tourist visa you may not be able to rent an apartment. In some countries it’s impossible without a permanent residence card. And you’ll be a foreigner, so when you tire of the local cuisine you’ll want ingredients from the expensive foreign food store, and not know many of the local tricks that make life cheaper.
Expatistan has a useful cost of living calculator to compare the expense of different places worldwide.. Take not only the overall value, but read through the individual prices – sometimes you’ll discover rent is expensive but other expenses are not, or sometimes a single item (often the cost of a car) is skewing the data. And sometimes there isn’t much data.
If you’re lucky enough to have a career you can do remotely, you may not need to truly ’emigrate’ to stay away longer than you can live without an income. Just keep your US bank account active and deposit your income into it like normal. You can ‘live’ in the US without physically being there. Thousands of US retirees already live in Mexico under such an arrangement.
If your threat model includes the US suddenly invalidating your passport, then you want to be abroad, not trapped inside.
Finally, don’t be last. A lot of cis people will be leaving, too, and as the ranks of American refugees swell, the “easy” places such as Canada will become less, rather than more, welcoming.
Emigrating takes time, money, and effort. As the jaws close, it will become harder and harder to get out. If you lose your job because you’re trans, you may suddenly not be able to afford to emigrate, for example. Get out earlier than you think you need to.
Emigrating
The other option is to obtain permission to work in a foreign country and move there permanently.
If you have salable skills, this can be as simple as going to your destination ahead of time on a tourist visa and passing resumes. You may have to sell yourself well or offer to compensate the firm for the substantive hassle of dealing with a work visa.
If you have substantial savings, almost any country will make you a citizen if you invest. The amount is usually around 250,000 dollars, and purchasing real estate is a common choice of investment.
If the Netherlands is your chosen destination you can come and operate a business as long as you keep 5000 Euros on deposit in a Dutch bank, under the “Dutch American Friendship Treaty”. While you won’t be able to work as an employee, you can take contracts for your business. Plan an additional 2500 euros in fees and legal expenses to set this up.
Another option, if you can work remotely, is a ‘digital nomad’ or ‘rentista‘ visa. These are a recognition that there are many people who can earn money in one country while living in another.
These visas allow the visitor to remain long term (up to 5 years in many cases) and to do such things as rent an apartment, have utilities, and make use of the public health care system. In return, the visitor is earning income from outside the country and spending it inside the country.
The biggest stumbling block to a digital nomad visa is often the income requirement. Some countries demand the applicant show they have a recurring income source of over a certain amount. This rather short sighted rule is often inconsistent with how freelancers actually work. A 3D artist might have a very steady income, but it’s different clients in different months. Many freelancers find a substantive portion of their actual income isn’t usable for this requirement due to the ‘recurring’ clause.
Finally, you might hit the jackpot if grandad came from the old country. Can you claim citizenship somewhere? Many European countries will grant citizenship to close descendants of their citizens, so it’s worth scrutinizing that family tree.
Aslyum? Not So Fast
You may be yelling, “I’ll show them! I’m going to claim asylum!”. Sadly if you’re a US citizen then that is to all intents and purposes not an option. The US and most of the other countries where you might be interested in claiming asylum in have treaties in which the two governments each agree that the other is generally safe, and that, exceptional circumstances not withstanding (which are SO exceptional that it is very unlikely they will apply to you), it’s safe to return people to the other one.
Most such agreements also limit asylum seekers to only one country in the treaty. For example, the “Dublin Accords” treaty says asylum seekers must seek asylum in the country where they first enter the EU. You can’t apply in Italy, be turned down, then apply in Germany.
If you’re an American planning on filing an asylum claim and you think that yours might be an exceptional case, then you should of course contact an attorney. Beyond this, you should contact organizations like the Transgender Law Center, as such a case would be likely to establish precedent for all transgender Americans. Don’t be forever known as the person whose attempt to subvert the system for yourself closed the door permanently for everyone else.
Now It’s Time For You To Act
It’s clear American politics is heading toward a dark place. There is still a window of opportunity for transgender Americans to place themselves out of harm’s way. We’ve tried to lay out some options in this article and as events unfold we’ll do our best to share any further resources as we have them. Below is a sign up for our newsletter. Sign up to stay informed. If we have enough signups we’ll organize a webinar to answer questions.
This was originally written in 2018, and has aged somewhat. But still seems valid, and hence I’m publishing it.
Trans people have been whispering to each other for a while now that it’s time to go.
Many of us have been quietly getting affairs in order to go. Me among them. [note: that was 2018. I left late that year. TransEmigrate, Trans Rescue’s prior incarnation, was founded May 2020].
I’ve had a number of disturbing conversations during this with, usually, young trans people who seem to have far less social capital than I have.
They’re saying “I won’t leave, I’ll stay and fight”, “My conscience won’t let me leave”, etc.
This is addressed to those of you who feel this way. I’d like to say first, I admire your courage. I don’t want to dismiss your level of commitment.
But I’d like to suggest that the first step in staying is, paradoxically, to go.
To talk about the future of the US over the next few years, I need to make a side trip to establish some model of resistance.
Resistance comes in graded levels. It’s actually the great genius of democracy, realizing that by accommodating less violent forms of protest, violent revolt becomes less likely.
Suppose a group finds a condition in their society intolerable. Here’s a graded series of steps they can take:
They can approach their representatives. Sometimes all it takes is to get those in power to understand what’s wrong in order to get it fixed.
But their representatives may choose to ignore their pleas. Then they can apply various sorts of political pressure – donating to opponents, peaceful protest.
If this still results in no relief, if, for example, they’re a small minority deeply hated by a majority, or political power is undemocratically skewed, this turns into more vigorous protest. And it’s here that the authorities typically start retaliating, and also where we start thinking about the safety of those involved in resistance. And people were killed during the BLM protests and during the Viet Nam war protests.
One form more vigorous protest can take beyond the ‘vigorous protest’ of the 60s anti-war protest sort is rioting. Rioting is effective in that it usually is undertaken by an impoverished underclass, and directly transfers wealth into their hands, but it’s sometimes counterproductive in that its strong conflation with simple criminal greed means it also turns the majority against the resister.
Another form is satyagraha – nonviolent resistance. While effective at turning the majority against the tyrant, it’s very difficult to organize without at least a somewhat liberal government in place. Nonviolent resistance is a centralized tactic that depends on the resisters being what Gandhi called “well disciplined cadres”. This rather military term is not coincidence. It’s very, very difficult to get a group of people to agree to walk up to a line of police and be clubbed, arrested, and, in the case of trans women, probably sexually abused and then killed in custody. It’s an entirely different sort of action than, say, antifa, which belongs more to ‘vigorous protest’.
Organizing satyagraha requires a willingness to be organized I just don’t see likely in American society’s left today. Frankly, this is a good thing – the right has demonstrated that they are willing to be so organized (think Charleston, the white polo uniforms, the ranks of men, the tiki torches).
[This was written prior to Portland. It is perhaps a demonstration of it’s truth that the Portland street fighting became a fine example of anarchists being ‘well disciplined cadres’ – blak blok, consensus based tactics, people taking on specialist roles like street medic].
More importantly, it’s a more effective technique against an opponent who is pretending to be moral. People who tear children away from parents and traumatize them are not pretending to be moral, and are being cheered on by those who want them to be immoral. Reading a bit of anti-trans rhetoric on twitter rapidly convinces me that these are not people who will be swayed by a valiant stand.
Further, it’s become the default. And is often effectively used as a cudgel by oppressive forces, who, themselves violent, are happy to claim the oppressed have lost the moral high ground by taking the final resort of violence.
If you are a firefighter and flee the burning building you’re a coward. If you’re a homeowner and your house is burning, flee. Grab your loved ones, get out, and only then start thinking about putting the fire out. “Put your own oxygen mask on first”.
Yet another form is bloody revolution.
Against a well organized government like the US government, that’s going to look like one of two things.
It might look like millions of people swarming to Washington DC, a protest that just keeps growing, a la South Korea, until the fences around the White House cave in, the crowd rushes in, and some secret service agent has the common sense not to start firing. The original March on Washington was predicated on this sort of display. It’s a classic satyagraha move – demonstrate to the government that the movement leaders, and not the government, control the country.
I’d remind you that a fair fraction of the US still supports Trump. So I don’t know if this mode can happen. I’d be delighted to be wrong.
[This was written prior to the Jan 6 coup attempt. A good lesson that the other side has all these options as well! And when written, I envisaged a 10,000 person protest of the Nixon white house variety, not a few hundred people and a bungled or politically compromised police response. ]
The remaining mode is revolution. Small bands of young people moving along back woods trails. Underground cells in cities blowing up TV stations.
This mode eventually becomes guerrilla warfare.
Now, to have successful guerrilla warfare, one needs three things.
First, one needs support from outside the zone of conflict. War is expensive, money is needed. Small arms are, “we’re the ones with the guns” idiots notwithstanding, usually not a big problem for guerillas, but even guerillas need heavy weapons (the Mujahedin in Afghanistan only started winning against the Russians when supplied with US Stinger missiles).
Second, one needs the support of the general populous, or at least an identifiable subset of them. We have that.
Third, and this is crucial, one needs a rear area. Either an unpopulated, difficult to search area (mountains, jungle), or a border with a friendly, or at least tolerant area.
New fighters enter the rear area, usually having escaped the zone of conflict. They are recruited, turned around, armed, organized, and sent back in as fighting units.
There’s no ‘rear’ as in a conventional army, but there still has to be this strategic rear. For the Viet Cong it was North Viet Nam and Cambodia. For the French resistance, it was the French Alps. For the Russian partisans, it was the forests. For us, it’s Canada.
So, if you decide to stay and fight, your first stop is Canada, oddly.
This isn’t a position I’m committed to as some great principle. It’s just my observation, based on a fair amount of direct action work.
I’m an engineer by trade. We engineers have a saying, “If it’s stupid, but it works, it’s not stupid”. So I think about what will work.
And I just don’t think ‘stay and fight’ is going to work.
I’ll close with a quote from the movie Patton. “No one ever won a war by dying for his country. You win wars by making the other poor, dumb, bastard die for his country.”
Rita, a trans woman in coastal Kenya, was assaulted on May 15 at her restaurant chef job, after the restaurant owner learned she was trans. He and another employee attacked her, probably giving her a concussion and skull fracture.
The police came and arrested Rita, charged her with “impersonation” and “shaming” the restaurant. She was denied medical care, despite the severity of her injuries, and was placed in a cell with men. During the night she fended off a sexual assault.
Trans Rescue provided funds and some local trans women (some of the group starting Eden House) bailed her out. Trans Rescue also provided funds for medical and psychological care.
Anne Ogborn, a Trans Rescue staff member, said, “We’re particularly anxious to get Rita away from this area, since we fear she’ll be blackmailed now.”
As one of the women helping Rita said, “is it wrong to ask for a Job surely why are some people so heartless?”
We’re withholding the name of the restaurant and it’s owner to prevent retaliation against Rita. Rita is an alias.
Follow up. Rita collapsed during a follow up medical appointment and is currently in hospital. Trans Rescue is trying to raise 2000 EU to pay for medical care and to get Rita and the group of trans women she lives with out of the area on an emergency basis.
