“This is a state-created refugee crisis,” said Samantha Boucher, a political organizer based in Denver. Boucher used to work in disaster relief. “You know how some trans people overcompensate?” she asked me by way of explaining why, before transitioning, she had done the manliest of jobs in the scariest of situations. When S.B. 244 passed, she called a friend, a straight cis man she’d worked with on several disaster deployments, and together they started a rescue effort she named Operation Lifeboat. There is no public database of people in Kansas who are trans or who opted to change their gender markers, but it’s possible to use publicly available information to find people who have legally changed their first names. Using this and other creative sleuthing, Operation Lifeboat did a text blast to roughly 30,000 people who were likely to be trans or friends of the trans community, and several hundred responded to ask Operation Lifeboat for help.

I have written about many displaced people in different parts of the world. One thing I’ve learned is that the people who leave first are usually those who have resources, those who have connections elsewhere, those who have traveled. Generally speaking, these are not the people who are hit hardest by whatever disaster they are escaping. In Kansas, for example, it’s the working-class people who have jobs that require a driver’s license, the people whose bathroom breaks are timed, the people who can’t afford to pay a fine if they are issued a citation who are likely to feel the effects of S.B. 244 most acutely. “The people who call us are usually flat broke and desperate,” said Keira Richards, who is also based in Colorado and runs another organization for displaced trans people, the Trans Continental Pipeline. In November 2023, during an event for Transgender Day of Remembrance, an annual commemoration of victims of anti-trans violence, Richards and her friends noticed a lot of new arrivals. That year, state legislatures across the country considered a record-breaking 615 anti-trans laws and passed 87 of them, according to the research organization Trans Legislation Tracker. (In 2025, the group found that well over 1,000 anti-trans bills were considered and 126 passed.) These included bathroom bills; gender marker bills; bills banning drag, books and gender-inclusive language in schools; and bills restricting access to gender-affirming care. So trans people and their families were leaving states like Texas, Utah and Idaho. Many of them were moving next door, to blue Colorado.

“And then I was standing on a picnic table saying, ‘What if we created a Welcome Wagon?’” At the time Richards, who is now 27, was working in the office of the Colorado state auditor. She began with research. “And in the process I learned how horrible it was in other places. I met a girl who just got in her car and started driving.” This was a truck driver from Texas. Someone from Missouri got a one-way ticket to Denver, where they knew no one. Those people needed a lot more than a Welcome Wagon — they needed help deciding where to settle; they needed transportation and temporary housing; they needed help finding doctors, schools and other resources at their destination. Richards registered a nonprofit organization, quit her job, and started raising money by selling patches at punk music concerts. By June 2024, she had raised less than $6,000. Then Trump got re-elected and donations started pouring in, along with requests for help. The Trans Continental Pipeline has now raised more than $1.5 million, employs two part-time staff members and dozens of volunteers. It has assisted some 400 people, almost 100 of them with what Richards calls “full relocation,” and it has helped 10 similar organizations get off the ground. Most of their clients — internally known as trans-plants — left Texas, Oklahoma and Florida, though since the passage of S.B. 244, a majority of cases have come from Kansas.