In Quiet Search of Freedom: Guest Writer Jess Drucker

July is when America talks about freedom. As more and more folks consider international relocation as an alternative to life in the U.S., I’ve been thinking a lot about what freedom actually looks like.

This past year, in my job as an international relocation specialist for LGBTQ+ people, I got to see a kind of freedom up close that I really need to talk about. 

It isn’t loud. It doesn’t wave a flag. Most people will never know the individuals seeking this freedom. But truly, they are heroic.

The heroes I celebrate this July are the parents of trans kids.

Building new lives

I started Rainbow Relocation Strategies to empower queer folks and their families to take advantage of the global lifestyle. Go, see the world, learn languages, gain international skills and connections, and build the kind of life usually reserved for the wealthy elite.

Living abroad, beginning when I was a student, allowed me to fail upward into a life I couldn’t have imagined as a child. I wanted other students to study abroad. I wanted queer folks ready to retire to find a safe place to do so and mid-career people to move somewhere where health insurance isn’t tied to their job. Plus which, helping queer people build exciting new lives was a fun way to spend my days.

But then, slowly throughout the summer of 2024, and then like an absolute flood once the dust settled on November 6th, everything changed.

Pushed, not pulled

Our inquiry volume increased ten, twenty, thirty-fold. The conversation completely flipped. Calls weren’t about opportunity anymore, or adventure, or finally chasing a dream. People no longer felt pulled abroad. They felt pushed. Their fear and anxiety is deep because the threats are coming from all directions: school systems, violent anti-trans activists, the federal government—even congressional Democrats.

For my clients, international relocation isn’t about inspiration anymore, but rather tactics. My team is over here doing two-tier math. Tier one: Get-The-F**k-Out strategies for people who must leave quickly. Tier two: working toward more permanent residency and citizenship.

We are constantly monitoring new threats around IDs, passports, ICE arrests, trans rights, marriage equality, and how all of this pushes people toward their own personal red line.

I get WhatsApp messages in the middle of the night from trans folks I have never met, abroad on vacation or scouting a city, suddenly terrified, asking whether it’s safe to return through customs. I’m half asleep, unsure, and feeling unequipped to respond. I want to say, let’s talk in the morning. But their flight leaves in a few hours. I want to give them a straight answer. But then I realize I don’t even know if they’re real.

Spiraling

I don’t know one hundred percent that they’re not someone untrustworthy. A bad actor. A bot. A journalist looking for a new angle of clickbait. I don’t know how to know who to trust anymore.

Our company has had relatively neutral press from places like Rolling Stone, Oprah Daily, and Der Spiegel. But what if tomorrow a right-wing publication decides we’re the next story? Suddenly I’m spiraling, feeling guilty, scared, and like I’m never doing enough.

And yet, when I’m stressed, I remember what my clients are feeling. Especially the parents of trans kids. I know how worried they are because I now work almost exclusively with these folks.

Gone quiet

Until 2025, maybe 5% to 10% of my clients were trans or nonbinary. Now roughly 75% of my clients are trans, nonbinary, and—the overwhelming majority—parents of trans kids looking for safety abroad.

I thought I was going to spend my career helping queer people build adventurous lives around the world. Instead, I had a front-row seat to something I wasn’t expecting.

I met my heroes.

And so, rather than growing a business, I have gone relatively silent so as not to draw too much attention. The parents I work with have been stealth, rearranging their entire lives while the people around them ask, are you sure you have to do this? Don’t you think you’re overreacting?

Overreacting.

Hospital records are being subpoenaed. No one knows what actions may eventually be criminalized. These parents’ beautiful, unique, precious kids have somehow become the focus of grown adults and government systems that have decided they are a threat.

These are parents who have created as safe a space as they can for their kids. They let their young genderqueer children stay almost oblivious to the outside world, protecting them from the constant noise while quietly carrying every fear themselves.

Those with older kids, or who couldn’t shield their kids, have moved from red states to blue ones, selling what they thought were forever homes, leaving generations of family behind, only to land somewhere with no guarantee that today’s safety won’t become tomorrow’s uncertainty.

Sight unseen

I’ve worked with families who have split themselves in two, one parent leaving for another country with their trans child while the other stays behind with the rest of the family because there is simply no other choice.

I've worked with chronically ill single parents who somehow found the strength to move with multiple children to countries where they don’t speak the language. 

Families are moving to countries sight unseen. Some invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into residency programs because they have the means. Others retire years earlier than planned, on impossibly tight budgets, because it’s the only visa they qualify for. Others leave careers behind to become entrepreneurs at age 50, opening bakeries or online businesses they never imagined running.

Every one of them is making impossible decisions.

Ordinary people

And the part I want to shout the loudest from the rooftops? These are parents just like me. People frame them as ‘activists’ to distance them from ‘ordinary’ parents. But these ARE ordinary parents.

The kind of ordinary parents who look for a tutor if their kid needs help. The kind who research schools and join PTAs. The kind who lose sleep trying to understand the obstacles their children face. Thoughtful. Funny. Completely exhausted. Protective. Deeply, fiercely protective parents.

And these are the people our country has decided are dangerous?

These are the families we're supposed to be afraid of?

Their children are the threat?

I still can't make those pieces fit together.

What I find, call after call after call, are some of the kindest, most generous, most earnest people I have ever met.

To listen, to believe

Many are straight and weren’t part of the queer community before having their queer kiddos. When their children told them who they are, they had the head and the heart to listen, to allow space for it, to believe them, and to support them. 

That shouldn’t be extraordinary. But right now, somehow, it is.

The more time I spend with these families, the more I find myself thinking these are the parents so many queer people wish we had had.

So many of us know what it feels like to have someone cry for the wrong reasons when we came out. To be told we are confused. Broken. Embarrassing. To have family members quietly disappear. To lose people we thought would always choose us.

Now I find myself sitting across from parents who are choosing their children over everything. I see myself in them far more than I ever expected.

We are just parents, sitting across from each other, on a zoom call, figuring out the next right step. 

Maybe that's what has affected me so profoundly. These are ordinary people responding to extraordinary cruelty with extraordinary love.

The next right thing

Quietly. Without asking to be celebrated. Without thinking of themselves as brave. Just doing the next thing their child needs, under incredible duress, with no guarantees. Making rational decisions in the midst of total chaos. 

I don’t know if history will ever fully understand what is happening right now. This movement is too quiet. Families aren’t marching; they’re packing, applying for visas, saying goodbye to grandparents, learning new languages, rebuilding entire lives so their children can simply grow up.

There won’t be monuments for this.

No one will know exactly how many families quietly crossed borders, how many jobs and careers were abandoned, how many marriages stretched across continents, how many children slept peacefully because someone made an impossible decision on their behalf.

The impact of this moment will be scattered across classrooms in Portugal, playgrounds in New Zealand, apartments in Spain, neighborhoods in Canada, and countless places where children get to become themselves a little more freely than they could have before.

In this month when we talk so much about freedom, I want to highlight the people who have shown me what freedom actually looks like.

Parents who quietly give up everything they thought their lives were going to be so their children have the freedom to become who they already are.

They are my heroes. This is what freedom looks like.

– Jess D.

Jess Drucker is the founder of Rainbow Relocation Strategies, a company empowering queer folks and families to move, live, and thrive abroad. This essay is adapted, with permission, from her recent blog post.

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