Abi Maxwell

Because trans kids’ lives are literally on the line

My daughter is transgender, and when she socially transitioned in 2019 at the age of six our small New Hampshire town, where my family had been for centuries, erupted in school board fights about her, and she was bullied so badly that the ACLU had to get involved and we had to move to keep her safe. We moved to a nearby city, but that was the year the legislative attacks against trans kids really began in full force. I spent that winter fighting two bills—one that would ban and criminalize her medical care, and the other that would block her from playing sports with all the other girls. The following winter, more bills returned, and one morning as I scraped ice from the car windshield my daughter—nine years old, all buckled in and ready for school—heard on the radio that the governor of Texas wanted to remove children like her from their homes. 

And still the bills did not stop. They just kept multiplying, and this year’s legislative session brought more than eighteen anti-trans bills to my home state. My family’s health declined and my daughter, then in sixth grade, stopped going to school, because her body—her actual physical body—had become a political tool, and it terrified her. She was an eleven-year-old who wondered, in every classroom she walked into, every conversation she had, whether she was accepted as a human being.

One morning this past March, I woke up to a text message from my mother saying that the bill to ban my daughter from sports had moved forward in our state. I got up and just started throwing our belongings into boxes: keep, get rid of. We got rid of almost everything, and my husband drove our dog and cat across the country to California to rebuild a life. My daughter and I had planned to drive with him, but then we looked at the map. There is no way to get from New Hampshire to California without passing through miles upon miles of land where our daughter does not have basic human rights. She and I took a plane. 

My daughter is only twelve years old now, but she’s already had to move twice to stay safe. And she is safe in California—she’s safe and happy and not only accepted for who she is but wanted and celebrated. Yet every single day, I’m aware of the immense privilege we had to get her out. Back home in New Hampshire, anti-trans legislation was signed into law on the day we finished unpacking our new apartment; and now, adults are following the trans female teen athletes around the state, attending their sports games to publicly bully them. I don’t know how those girls will make it through. And if it’s happening there, it’s happening everywhere. With this election, these kids’ lives are literally on the line.

Abi Maxwell is the author of One Day I’ll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman (Knopf, 2024), which was written to humanize her daughter and save the lives of trans kids and their families.