Support Zena's Move to Canada For Safety

We are raising funds for our dear friend Zena who has arranged for an emergency move out of the country due to growing racism and transphobia in the U.S. As many of you know, anti-trans legislation has been increasing over the last decade and is now set to be instituted at the federal level by the incoming administration. The removal of access to vital and life-saving gender affirming care and promises to criminalize trans and queer existence in public are a great danger to Zena, and she is doing what she feels is necessary for her survival and quality of life.

As members of her community in Portland who care deeply about Zena, our goal is to help her in whatever ways we can through financial and material support. She needs money for needed expenses including her and her partner's move to Canada, housing, essentials, and spousal sponsorship of her immigration (the sponsorship cost alone is $1290). She will need funds to move, land safely, and sustain her and her partner as they search for long term housing and settle into their new lives.

The sacrifices that Zena is being forced to make for her health, physical safety and emotional wellbeing are unfathomable. Please join us in donating whatever you can to bolster Zena in her new life and to help us show her how much community support she has in Oregon, in the broader queer community, and from her allies. If you know Zena, you know that she is uniquely creative, kind, hilarious, and that her presence enriches the spaces around her. We are so lucky to be connected to her and her necessary move is an incalculable loss for those who love her. But that cannot possibly compare to the loss of place, home, safety, and community that Zena is facing. Let's send her off with resources that exceed her modest goal!

Our goal is $4,500 but anything beyond that will be a welcome buffer for Zena and her partner as they navigate this difficult time of change. Please share this fundraiser widely with people you trust. Taking care of each other is how we survive and create better conditions for everyone. Thank you,

Iva and Kait

<3 <3 <3

Words from Zena:

"There are rare moments in which our hearts stop, and we understand that what has happened is to change the world, our lives. On Wednesday November 6th I came to know that feeling yet again, and in the grimmest of ways. Detailed in his Agenda 47 Donald Trump declared he “ would sign a new executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex, and gender transition, at any age” – erasing transgender people institutionally, and thus their capacity for transgender specific medical care. The accelerating speed of endangerment has made it clear that I must leave the United States, my home of Portland [OR], to find the safety needed to exist as a black, transgender woman. In Portland I have spent the majority of my adulthood, as a healer, that has bettered those in my community. Year by year, I gathered the company of many wonderful, striking, and marvelous queer people who helped encourage, and progress my maturing relationship to my womanhood. Leaving Portland abandons a life I knew, a life I wanted, and understood. But it is not a place I am able to remain under such a regime as the one to come.

My partner and I will be fleeing to Canada, by the kindness of friends and family of his we will have options for housing. Yet each of us enter the nation jobless, and I enter a nation entirely new to me. This fundraiser, initiated by those who have shown radical compassion towards me, reminds my swelling heart why I love, and will utterly miss Portland. Whatever is collectively raised by this fundraiser will help the life sustaining efforts of my partner, and I as we begin to acclimate ourselves to this unforgiving turn of events. It will help us feed ourselves, and clothe ourselves for Canadian winters. It will help me ensure I have the financial means to access my hormones as I connect to a new medical system. It will help us have the time to breathe, to grieve, to find work. Very importantly it will help my partner sponsor me as I begin my legal integration into Canadian citizenry. In short, each dollar adds to our ability for me to live in a nation that will respect my basic human rights as a queer, BIPOC woman.

At $4.5k it can help us add newer, studier tires for the Canadian winter landscape. For which in the months to come would be an incredible relief.

Thank you Portland, thank you for the solidarity, and your generosity."