One family’s move to find gender-affirming care.  Photograph by Tonje Thilesen for The New Yorker Since 2018, conservative state legislatures across the country have proposed and passed laws targeting young transgender people’s freedom to to play on sports teams and use bathrooms that correspond with their gender, and to obtain gender-affirming health care. Advocates for trans rights argue that the increased interest in the subject has served to galvanize the energies of those who had fought an ultimately losing battle against gay marriage—and have observed how the anti-trans movement has used tactics that have proved successful in limiting abortion. As with much legislation of this type, amid the nationalized, culture-war politics, the effects are felt most acutely by the most vulnerable families and individuals. In a startling piece of reporting in this week’s issue, Emily Witt follows a mother named Kristen Chapman who moves her family from Tennessee to Virginia, in order for her daughter Willow to continue receiving gender-affirming care. “I genuinely feel we are being run out of town on a rail,” Chapman says. “I am not being dramatic. It is not my imagination.” With nuance and compassionate precision, Witt captures the urgency of the family’s relocation, and the sense, as laws seem to change underfoot, of pursuit. As she writes, “Chapman had chosen Virginia for their new life, she said, because it was still in the South, but there would be ‘multiple avenues of escape.’ ” Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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