help a visible trans person leave knoxville

hi, you might know me as Nate or Nel. i'm a local East Tennesseean, born in a tiny mountain town and living in Knoxville to attend school.

i love southern Appalachia more than anything in the world; i love the cool hollers in whose woods i ran barefoot as a child. i love the flora and fauna i went to school to try to protect. my heart is here.

and i have to leave. i am going to have to rip my heart out of my chest and run.

i'm visibly trans. even before i ever transitioned, when i was a small child, people called me names and hit me in public for looking gender non-conforming, even when i tried to conform. there was a small break from this once i transitioned and no one knew what trans people were, but after the trans awareness tipping point, my home has become unlivable for me. even other local trans people are flabbergasted at how much i am targeted. thanks to the media wanting a buck, everyone knows.

i have had:

all of these are because i don't pass as anything in particular in public. i just don't. whether i grow my beard out ZZ Top style or put on a dress, i'm not gonna pass as something comforting for these people either way. no choice that i can make here will save me. in t-shirts and jeans, people stare at me like i have three heads. i have to leave.

my long-distance partner's gotten into a prestigious school in LA, and is moving to attend there. i finish school in December, and am going to try to make it out there. I have no family support whatsoever, and I am disabled and struggle to work enough to save up money. my only chance to have a livable life is to pack up everything i own and drive west.

these expenses have been tweaked as I have lost my job due to transphobia, and I've been experiencing health crises, gone to inpatient, and had to toss a lot of money down the drain on medications and tests this summer and fall:

I no longer have my part time job. I live pretty frugally, but my medications end up being at least $200/month most months nowadays, not to mention appointments and blood draws. This plus gas, car insurance, having to get my truck fixed, my storage unit of stuff since the only place I can afford is a small room, and utilities has eaten through a few thousand in the past few months.

i wanted to end on an example of the treatment i get (this was left as a note for me at my campus), but i think i'd rather end on a high note and show you all some images of my partner and i. they're one of the main reasons my life is still worth living right now, and in their arms is one of the only places where i don't feel like a freak.

first update 06/12/2023

I'm amazed at the response this has gotten so far. It helps me have a little bit of hope for the future, even if it's just a little.

I cried a lot today. I cried every few hours at best, thinking about how little I've been able to keep in my life. Not just personal dignities stripped away from me through surviving abuse, and not just the loss of my mother and my cat, but also the loss of my home itself. I want to live with my partner; I don't want it to be in a big, hot city far away from anything I've ever known, with no clue if it will ever be safe for me to return.

I'm autistic and I don't like change.

I've also undergone such a long journey. I grew up deeply poor and Appalachian, in an impoverished farming family, and I grew up with internalized classism embedded just as deep. It took me so many years, in probably one of the hardest and fiercest and proudest arcs of my life, to unlearn it and come to love my home, my folk heritage, and my ancestors for surviving.

And now I'm hacking off my roots in a frenzy, and abandoning my old family farm to an abusive and evil man, abandoning my neighbors during a genocide, and abandoning my home region to a rising wave of alt-right self-professed Nazis grifters moving in.

I just keep trying to remember that if I can survive this amputation, I can maybe be happy and safe one day.