Help Trans Couple Leave Ohio & Find Safety and Community

Benji Beard is organizing this fundraiser.

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Hello! My name is Benji, and my wife’s name is Aubrey. We are a transgender couple who no longer feel safe living in Ohio, a very red state. We don’t currently have much of a community where we live despite being here for years and being in a city. We’ve been harassed here, the laws are going against all of our rights, we don’t currently have health insurance and the cost of healthcare in Ohio and our hormones seems to keep going up. We have many goals and ambitions that frankly aren’t worth pursuing in a place where it’s legal for us to be hate crimed and it’s hard to have the motivation to persue your dreams when you live somewhere that doesn’t want you there. We want to legally change our names and gender markers on our licenses. We haven’t done it yet because the state of Ohio makes it very difficult and considering the recent inauguration, it’s just gonna get worse. We also have been wanting to get legally married for years, but we don’t want to get legally married under our deadnames, and also don’t want a marriage certificate from the state of Ohio (for many reasons). We’ve been here for 4 years and we need to leave. Our current lease will end June 27th, so that’s when we /have/ to leave. We don’t currently have a new home lined up, but we’re planning to fly to the West Coast in March so we can find a place to live. We’re aiming for Oregon or Washington for several reasons: The laws support us and care about us, we already have a very strong community there, there’s aid for us if anything were to happen to us, we will be able to change our names and gender markers with much less hassle, the cities have a large lgbtq population, and we will be able to get legally married under a state that actually recognizes us for who we are. We both have been living in the Midwest or the South for YEARS now (for me, my entire life) and have had too many weird and bad experiences to count, as well as just not being able to even leave the house without worrying that something bad might happen to us, and if it did, the state wouldn’t do anything to help. We don’t even feel comfortable dressing the way we want to here anymore, we wanna be able to live somewhere where we don’t have to constantly hide ourselves and never make eye contact with anyone who isn’t also queer. Being here is holding us back from being recognized as who we are, from a community of other queers that we so desperately want to have in our lives, from getting married, and from just being ourselves and having a life together that isn’t mostly filled with fear.

Please know, I’m not making this because we don’t have /any/ money for moving, I’ve been saving up for it, but considering we’re driving across the entire U.S, we’re paying completely out of pocket for everything (gas, paying for our trip in March to fly there to look at places which will also include renting a car and paying for hotels if there’s times we can’t find friends to stay with, packing up a pod, possibly movers, plus renting a new place, and getting brand new furniture and basic necessities once we get there, any possible car troubles along the way, PLUS, as a self employed artist, taxes in Ohio are crazy and a lot of the money I currently have isn’t even mine because it’s being sent to the IRS) I think it’s safe to say that a little extra help will be needed, and I’m always worried about having some large random bill that will come at an inconvenient time and I don’t want to get there and feel like we have to scrape by.

Also as someone self employed, I won’t be making any money for 1-2 months because my shop will be paused a month before moving as well as after we move, so we can pack and get settled. Trying to run a business that requires 100% attention because we ship out a lot of orders, won’t be realistic to be running while we are moving. And it’s possible we won’t even be able to unpack all of our merch once we get there for a while because we will need to focus on our necessities first, as well as our mental health (and also making sure our cat Beebo is safe and healthy and happy during the move too!)

To summarize, please know that 100% of your donations will be going towards everything I mentioned above.

so, thank you for taking the time to read this. If you donate, you have a sincere thank you from both of us. Thank you so much for helping out two trans people who you (may or may not) know, get to a place where we can feel safe and feel like human beings again. There’s no pressure to donate obviously, so even just sharing this around or sharing to LGBTQ groups in the PNW is also EXTREMELY helpful.