This stunning and provocative piece, from a necessarily anonymous author in Dame Magazine, is absolutely gutting. It starts forthrightly:

My family is fleeing the country.

We are not doing this in a panic; this is an orderly retreat from an unwinnable situation.

From there, it dissects, issue by excruciating issue, the multitude of ways the United States has moved, possibly irreversibly, toward fascism.

This decision is a result of both my professional analysis of the situation, as well as my own uniquely personal reasons. But I have spent the better part of a decade war-gaming out what is happening to our government, and here are the over-arching motivations spurring our move:

• Successful consolidation of power by the autocrat

• Failure of opposition to coalesce

• There is little hope of meaningful recovery

• Destruction of government capability

• A significant risk of genocide aimed at transgender people

• I personally can do far more to fight this outside the US than inside

It echoes many of my own deep fears, and reflects a question I’ve been asking for a long time: when do you know it’s time to leave? My fear for many of us is that realization will come too late. I don’t wish to flee based on pessimism, yet neither do I wish to be Pollyannaish about the country and suffer the consequences of remaining.

The author argues convincingly that our current path is irrevocably set, drawing from historic and contemporary examples to buttress her argument. It’s difficult to challenge her conclusions without sounding hopelessly naïve.

Considering all of this, I do not see a plausible path back to the America we once had. The Trump administration remains several steps ahead of anyone that offers even minor resistance. As they consolidate power, their ability to punish anyone who steps out of line grows, as do the penalties they can impose, tightening the spiral of intimidation and obedience.

Her perspective on the legitimate possibility of a transgender genocide is especially terrifying. She starts here:

There are very strong parallels between the legal and social assaults that Jewish people experienced during the run up to the Holocaust, and the actions that the Heritage Foundation and Musk have called for against transgender people. Trump’s own campaign website more or less directly stated how they intend to carry out the removal of transgender people from public life and into federal custody.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I will lay out the most important things that I am seeing that have convinced me that genocide is not only possible, but a deliberate end-state goal.

Her evidence is strong, persuasive, and strikes fear in my heart. This nugget was eye-opening:

[…] trans people are about .5% of the population, the same percentage as the Jewish population in pre-1933 Germany.

Of concern:

Musk and DOGE’s unfettered access to federal databases offers a near foolproof way to identify transgender people. Attached to everyone’s social security account is a marker that indicates their status with selective service. Unlike most gender markers, this one cannot be changed via any administrative process and is exclusively for people assigned male at birth. If other documents indicate a different gender or sex than their selective service SSA marker, they can be flagged as transgender. This is likely how the State Department is identifying transgender people applying for their first passport after having successfully changed their birth certificates and social security gender markers, along with their state driver’s licenses. There is nothing in any of their documentation identifying them as their sex assigned at birth, except the selective service SSA marker.

And Elon Musk has full access to the SSA database.

On my concerns regarding the “when” question:

This brings me to the central lesson of survival learned from the Holocaust: the ones who got out as early as possible were most likely to live. The further they got away from Germany, the more likely they were to survive. In most cases, that meant putting an ocean between themselves and the people driving them out. This is why Albert Einstein was already in the US by December 1932, even though he was considered an alarmist at the time.

Similarly, some of my most educated trans friends and allies are also preparing to leave. An Ivy League educated lawyer is abandoning their high-paying corporate job and fleeing to Europe. A family who used to be a prominent advocate for their transgender daughter picked up and left for the EU as well. Others who have written about theocracy and democratic decline have told me they too are getting ready to go (though they are not quite as far along as I am). And just to top it off, the two people who have offered material support to help get us out are Jewish colleagues whose grandparents survived the Holocaust by the skins of their teeth.

In short, the people who KNOW are all saying the same thing: get out, while you can, because there’s no guarantee the doors will remain open much longer.

Her conclusion contains this stark anecdote and advice:

Very rarely has a country that has descended this far into autocracy recovered without outside intervention (like, say, the combined allied armies fighting all the way to your capitol). Most warning signs of impending genocide are here. I know I’m a pessimist. But, as Jewish producer Billy Wilder once said in 1945, “The optimists all died in the gas chambers. The pessimists have pools in Beverly Hills.” This brutal observation reveals a truth: when it comes to the threat of genocide, listen to the intellectuals … and the pessimists.

I hope I’ll never need to chronicle my own exile—but the once-unthinkable is now undeniably plausible.