On the night of the election, Red Broadwell was home with his cat in Wilmington, North Carolina, working on his master’s thesis about transness and body horror in film. He tried not to doomscroll about the election results.
But when the 23-year-old trans graduate student woke up the next morning to the news that Donald Trump had won the presidency, Broadwell began to panic.
He said the results were “genuinely sickening” and caused him to experience panic attacks and bouts of nausea. He worried about his ability to continue taking testosterone and whether he would have to scramble to sort out top surgery sooner than he expected. Broadwell was finally able to start hormone replacement therapy last summer after moving out of Florida, which has banned care for minors and limited which providers can administer hormones to adults.
“I’ve grown up in the South my whole life. I don’t really want to leave,” Broadwell said. “I love it down here, and I don’t want to abandon…
