Jeffrey Ricker and his partner Michael Wallerstein lived happily in the City of St. Louis for 18 years.
Then things in Jefferson City took a turn.
In February of 2022, Ricker and Wallerstein moved from their home in Botanical Heights across the river to Collinsville, Illinois.
Some of the reasons for the move were mundane, Ricker says: Houses are more affordable on the other side of the river and they wanted to escape the hustle and bustle of the city as they grew older. But the tipping point was the Missouri legislature and its regressive actions.
"In the time that I lived in the state it was never a terribly liberal place to begin with, but it just got more and more conservative and less and less welcoming," Ricker says. "Unless you're, well frankly, straight, old and white."
For Wallerstein, the slow slide backwards made him uncomfortable. He decided he didn't want to support Missouri's laws with his tax dollars.
"It feels threatening to me," Wallerstein says. "It's just a step in the wrong direction."
Ricker and Wallerstein represent just one example among many couples, families and activists who are making the decision to leave red states in pursuit of a place where they have more political safety. Nearly half (47 percent) of respondents to a 2022 survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality considered or were considering leaving their state because of laws targeting the transgender community.
Things in Missouri have only gotten worse since 2022. Another survey, this one by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, ranks Missouri among the worst states in the nation in terms of state-level commitment to LGBTQ+ equality in its new State Equality Index — even worse than Florida.
Missouri has been described as "ground zero for the fire-hose of anti-trans legislation" by journalist Erin Reed, who tracks and analyzes anti-trans legislation nationwide. This session, advocates are tracking the progress of more than 40 anti-trans bills in the Missouri legislature, according to independent research organization Trans Legislation Tracker. That follows 2023's fourth consecutive record-breaking year, which saw more than 308 anti-trans bills introduced nationwide, including 40 in Missouri.
Beyond that, Missouri lawmakers are also contemplating a bill that would make drag performances a felony. The state has failed to add sexual orientation and identity to laws that bar discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations, despite more than 20 years of attempts by sympathetic legislators. Abortion has been outlawed in Missouri since the state's "trigger ban" went into effect in June of 2022.
"It just kept getting worse and worse," says Wallerstein.
The good news is that, unlike many other residents of deep blue cities stranded in red states, for St. Louisans, fleeing is relatively simple: You can leave the state without even leaving the metro area. And Illinois could not offer a greater contrast to Missouri.
Missourians in Exile
St. Louis has a unique relationship with "the other side of the river." Folks from Illinois will drive across the Mississippi to buy fireworks and cheaper gas and to experience all the "big city" has to offer. And while folks from the Missouri side have historically come to enjoy the strip clubs that are banned in Missouri, they also often cross the river for different, often more dire reasons.
In the mid-1800s enslaved people in Missouri would flee across the river to escape to the free state of Illinois. In recent years, the two abortion clinics just over the border have done a brisk business holding the line after the fall of Roe v. Wade. And in recent months, folks have fled to Illinois for a different reason — protection from Missouri's ban on gender-affirming care for minors.
Wallerstein grew up in Chesterfield and lived in St. Louis for most of his adult life. He built and rehabbed multiple houses, and generally he considered the city the perfect place to be.
But the longer Wallerstein lived in the city, the more conservative the state became.
"Being a gay person, being someone whose rights seemingly can be taken away made me uncomfortable," Wallerstein says.
Ricker and Wallerstein didn't want to move away from their family and friends in the area, so moving nearly 20 minutes from the city to Illinois was a perfect solution. Wallerstein says it was a way for them to support their beliefs with their taxes.
"I have zero regrets. I still have access to everything I loved about St. Louis, my friends, my family, but I don't feel like I'm supporting a state that doesn't support me," Wallerstein says.
Joe Thebeau and Gina Dill-Thebeau lived in St. Louis for nearly 30 years. But, after watching the legislature attack transgender rights year after year, they decided to move 10 minutes outside of Belleville on the Illinois side of the river. Their two adult children are trans and they decided that they didn't want to give their tax dollars to a state that didn't support them.
"I don't want to pay taxes to a state where they would like to not see my children exist or help them with healthcare," Dill-Thebeau says.
It's tough out there for young adults, Thebeau says. And he and his wife wanted to live somewhere their adult children could always count on coming back to if they needed to.
"I think the breaking point for me was when we realized that it was real for our kids. As a parent your kids go through things and sometimes you give it time to see if it's going to stick," Thebeau says. "But this is all real. And I don't think those on the far right think it's real. And I don't have the energy or the time or any interest in teaching them that their church, or whomever is telling them what to think, is wrong. This is real and we had to do what we did to get away from people in denial of reality."
Thebeau and Dill-Thebeau didn't want to give up their votes in Missouri, but ultimately after watching the politics go from bad to worse starting in 2016, they decided staying wasn't an option.
"You can only vote so hard," Thebeau says. "At the end of the day the votes didn't even matter because they didn't even put some of this stuff to a vote."
Micah Ballard, director of development and finance for the St. Louis Metro Trans Umbrella Group, reached a similar conclusion. In August 2023, Ballard made the difficult decision to leave his home in St. Louis for St. Paul, Minnesota.
"As legislation continued to come out, and we saw that the attacks were moving from being just focused on trans youth to slowly trying to figure out how to take healthcare away from trans adults, we just decided it wasn't an option to stay in Missouri," Ballard says.
He hopes that he and his partner, who is also trans and non-binary, will be safe enough to start a family of their own in St. Paul.
"It was a tough decision to leave. But my partner and I are thinking about starting a family and we couldn't risk it," Ballard says. "It felt like too much of a risk to try to stay somewhere where I didn't even know for sure that I would be able to find a doctor who would support me as a trans man pursuing pregnancy."
While Ballard misses his community (and favorite eateries) in St. Louis, he sees a stark contrast in state politics in Minnesota, which is a sanctuary state for transgender individuals seeking gender-affirming healthcare.
He now works remotely for the organization, so he is still fighting for his home even though he has moved away from it.
"It has been important for me, making the choice to leave physically, but to stay and continue to fight through my work," Ballard says.
Pamela Merritt also made the choice to leave the state even while continuing to fight for her community. Merritt has worked in various roles supporting reproductive rights for years and currently works as the executive director for Medical Students for Choice.
Merritt grew up in St. Louis County, left for college and returned to the area in 2003. She lived in the city's Shaw neighborhood for years before moving to the Metro East.
She still considers the St. Louis area her home and calls herself a "Missourian in Exile."
A Different Kind of Diaspora
Merritt saw the writing on the wall for Roe v. Wade after the 2016 presidential election, and in 2018 she became increasingly worried as states began to enact trigger legislation.
Missouri had its own trigger ban in place, and the ramifications of what that legislation could mean for her and her family as an abortion rights advocate drove her decision to move across the river.
She takes pride in living in an area that has not one, but two, abortion providers, and where her rights as an activist are more certain.
"I love the certainty of knowing that these rights are not just subject to target practice every session but that the debate in Springfield is over whether to expand access and to expand rights," Merritt says.
The analysis to decide to stay or leave was difficult, Merritt says. But the first night she spent in Illinois she slept like a baby, when she hadn't slept well in years.
Illinois Representative Kelly Cassidy (D-Rogers Park) hopes to pass legislation to support more families making the decision to move over the border.
Last month, Cassidy introduced HB 5152, which would provide a $500 tax credit to new Illinois residents fleeing their home states. The bill is specifically focused on healthcare providers seeking to provide reproductive or gender-affirming care or people seeking such care, whether as patients themselves or the patients' parents or guardians.
Cassidy was inspired to introduce the bill when she saw an influx of new families moving into her district, which includes Rogers Park and Edgewater (near Chicago).
"This is an uncountable diaspora," Cassidy says.
Cassidy is hopeful not only that the bill will pass, but that it will assist people forced to move.
"I feel very strongly about this. I think that it is unconscionable that other states are creating literal medical refugees," Cassidy says. In Illinois, she adds, "I think that we've made clear what we want to be and I think this is a great way to evidence that we want to [be a state that] protects these rights."
Fighting to Stay
To most people, the son of Rabbi Daniel Bogard would seem to be having a perfect childhood. Bogard says the 10-year-old is popular, excellent at sports, accepted by everyone in his family, and raised by incredibly supportive parents. There's just one problem.
The boy is transgender in the state of Missouri.
The Bogard family has received death threats, likely due to Rabbi Bogard's very public advocacy for his son. (The RFT is not providing the boy's full name at his family's request.) Bogard has been making the trek to Jefferson City to testify against anti-trans legislation for the past five or six years now.
"Genuinely the only hard part about having a trans kid is that your government is at war with you," Bogard says.
Bogard lives in the same house he grew up in and works as a rabbi at the congregation he grew up within, St. Louis' Central Reform Congregation.
"We are fighting to stay, even as we watch so many of our friends who also have trans kids flee the state," Rabbi Bogard says. "It's really been stark this year to look around and realize that my family were the only ones left of all the other people who have been organizing, who've been showing up and testifying. They've left or they're leaving."
The totality of the bills weighs on the Bogard family, and may ultimately be the reason why they leave the state. The year-in, year-out debate and nature of the legislation being introduced in Jefferson City amount to an effort to remove the possibility of existing as a transgender person in the state, Rabbi Bogard says.
"In places like Texas, Family Services has begun opening up investigations into the loving families of trans kids. And that's terrifying, when your government comes after your kid," Bogard says. "So something like that would be a red line for us. This year, they had [something like] six different bills around trans kids using bathrooms in public schools. That might be something that would just make it impossible in a practical sense to stay here."
The wild part of this anti-trans legislative push, Bogard says, is that there's no other area in his life where it's difficult to have a trans kid, and there's nowhere else in his child's life that makes it difficult to be trans.
"He lives in a world where he has so many friends, he's so popular, he's always sleeping over at someone's house, or they're sleeping over here. He's great at athletics, his school loves him and supports him, his synagogue loves him and supports him, his entire family," Rabbi Bogard says. "There's no one in our lives who we've become distanced from because my kid is trans. So he lives in this amazing bubble, and even with all of that, if we can't protect him from his government, we can't stay."
At least once a week, Rabbi Bogard gets a call from a parent whose kid has recently come out as trans. The conversation he has with them is different depending on whether they are calling from a red state or a blue one.
"Having a trans kid and living in a blue state is really no big deal. It is harder to have a kid with ADHD than it is to have a kid who is trans," Rabbi Bogard says. "Unless you're in a red state, and then the fact that your kid is trans is about to define every aspect of your civic reality."
One of the families who called Bogard is M's family. The Riverfront Times spoke with M and her family on the condition that we don't include her name because her parents fear anti-trans targeting.
M is a freshman in high school in St. Louis, and her parents are business owners who are very involved with the community, but anti-trans legislation has made it difficult for them to stay in the area.
It is now illegal for M to obtain gender-affirming medical care in Missouri. Her family now drives her to Peoria, Illinois, some two and a half hours away, for care. That means missing school. The stress of the anti-trans legislation and the looming fear that someday the Missouri legislature could try to separate child from parent have driven both M and her mother to seek therapy.
Before M shared her identity with her family, she was anxious, depressed, cutting and attending a religious school.
When M opened up, her parents were immediately supportive, but the timing put them in a race against the Missouri legislature. They had just 11 days before medical care for trans youth would be banned in the state. That forced them to seek medical care before M was maybe ready, her mom says.
"I needed A, time to process it, and B, time to learn and research and just find resources, but it was all put in this pressure cooker," M's mother says.
Now M and her family have been thrown into an "underground railroad" of sorts. They met with a local doctor, but it had to be under the guise of something else because of the ban. He wrote them a prescription, M's mom says, but even that could cost him his license.
"It just felt ridiculous and totally unsound," M's mom says.
The clinic they go to now feels a little "fly by night" to M's mom. "I don't trust that I'm getting the best medical care for her, it makes me nervous," she says. "Yet if I look at where she has come on this journey, all I know is I've never seen my kid happy, ever, until now. I am not about to let somebody take it away now."
M is thriving at a new school, making friends and volunteers with a group that helps refugees. But the politics of not only the state, but the nation, weigh on her. She is hyper-aware that her rights could be taken away at any moment.
M worries that the anti-trans bills that are being proposed will be detrimental not only to her, but to her other friends.
"I've kind of struggled all my life just to be me. Once I get through one situation, the next arises, and it's like no matter how far I get, someone's always there to knock me right back down," M says. "I wouldn't have to deal with these struggles if I were just a normal cisgender kid. But all these people are genuinely convinced that I'm being experimented on or I'm part of this mafia that's trying to brainwash children."
She also fears that lawmakers will seek to separate her from her parents, just because they've supported her care. "I'm always worried that I'm going to be separated from them," she says.
M and her parents are in support groups with other trans parents and children in the area, but they are seeing this network of support grow smaller and smaller as more families flee the state.
M's family is fighting to stay in St. Louis, but is preparing for the worst. They sold a house to liquidate assets for a potential move and obtained passports. They have also found a website that offers alternatives to HRT if the official drug is banned completely, and M's mom used Bitcoin to order an emergency stock of hormones from overseas that she hopes they never have to use.
"I just need to get her to 18," M's mom says. "Then I can send her somewhere and she can live her life and be safe."
M doesn't want to leave St. Louis, but fighting to stay is taking its toll.
"This would be, easily, one of the highest points of my life had this not been an issue," M says. "Everyone is panicking and freaking out because not only is my state turning against me, the whole country is."
Home, Sweet Home
Despite the fact that moving from St. Louis to the Metro East means moving from a dark red state to a deep blue one, in some ways, such a move involves leaving a staunchly liberal area for a more conservative one. St. Louis twice elected Cori Bush as its congresswoman while many of its Illinois suburbs are represented by Mike Bost, a staunch Republican endorsed by former President Donald Trump.
These suburbs also feel drastically different from city life, and are home to cul-de-sacs and chain fast food drive-thrus instead of vegan restaurants and corner bars. They're also statistically whiter and straighter than St. Louis.
Ricker and Wallerstein were worried about these differences, but ultimately they found home and community on the other side of the river.
Ricker notes that the couple was given a literal sign when they were looking at houses across the river.
"I remember there was a billboard on the side of the highway that said, 'Welcome to Illinois, where you can still get a safe legal abortion.' And I thought, you know, that was something of a sign as far as where I felt better being," he says.
Wallerstein encourages anyone looking to make the move not to be afraid.
"I thought it was gonna be hard to meet other gay couples here. I thought it was gonna be very conservative. I have been shocked at how liberally we've been treated here," Wallerstein says. "My fears in moving away from St. Louis city to Collinsville were unfounded. It seems very open-minded and I haven't felt threatened in the least bit here. I have zero regrets. I would do it over and over again."
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