Editor’s note: International News Editor Michael K. Lavers and Photo Editor Michael Key were on assignment in the Netherlands from July 28-Aug. 10.

AMSTERDAM — A transgender American couple who live in the Netherlands say President Donald Trump prompted them to leave the U.S.

Jack Reaves, who is a trans man, and his wife, Iskara McCoy, who is a trans woman of color, moved to the Netherlands from Reno, Nev., in 2024. The couple now lives outside Utrecht, a university city that is roughly 30 miles south-southeast of Amsterdam.

“We’d been keeping an eye on things during his (Trump’s) first term in 2016, which was pretty terrifying,” Reaves told the Washington Blade on Aug. 24 during a WhatsApp interview with him and McCoy. “We knew that there was a lot of anti-trans legislation and just anti-trans feelings from the Republican/MAGA party at the time.”

The Biden-Harris administration took office on Jan. 20, 2021, two weeks after thousands of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol — the insurrection took place shortly after Congress began to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election that Joe Biden won.

“Joe Biden was elected, and we were like, okay, well maybe things will turn around,” said Reaves. “But it was very clear very early on in the Biden presidency that that wasn’t going to happen.”

“There weren’t any meaningful changes, and then with Trump getting ready to win the next election and MAGA really looking like they were going to continue to gain more power, we were like, well time to get out.”

Reaves and McCoy are two of the four trans and nonbinary Americans who have moved to the Netherlands with whom the Blade recently spoke. The interviews took place during World Pride, which took place in Amsterdam from July 25-Aug. 8, or in the days after the biennial event ended.

The Dutch American Friendship Treaty, or DAFT, allows American citizens to live and work in the Netherlands as self-employed entrepreneurs.

DAFT visa recipients must keep at least €4,500 ($5,244.19) in a Dutch business bank account and need to register their business with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce. DAFT visa recipients can apply for permanent residency in the Netherlands or the European Union seven years after they receive it.

Reaves and McCoy and the two other trans and nonbinary Americans with whom the Blade spoke for this story either received a DAFT visa or plan to apply for one.

Kai, who is nonbinary, and their husband, who is a trans man, moved from New England to the Netherlands in August 2021. They now live in Haarlem, a small city that is roughly 12 miles west of Amsterdam.

Kai told the Blade on Aug. 20 during an interview from their home that friends moved to the Netherlands in 2017 after they received a DAFT visa.

“The prompt was the 2016 election for them,” said Kai.

Kai and their husband were living in a collective household in August 2020 when they “decided we wanted to have some kind of change.”

“We suspected that politics was going to get worse, even if it got better soon, that it would probably get worse again later, and that the country politically was going downhill,” they said.

Kai told the Blade a lack of promised disability payments and poor health in the U.S. were also factors.

“When I had been to visit the Netherlands to visit the friends that were living here, I found that my body was healthier, even though I was only here for one or two weeks at a time,” they said. “I was able to do more things, eat more things that I couldn’t go or eat while living in the U.S.”

The fourth American with whom the Blade spoke identifies as a “disabled transgender queer” person. He asked to remain anonymous.

He and his daughter, who is also trans, arrived in the Netherlands in July. He referred to the Holocaust and its impact in the Netherlands when the Blade interviewed him in Amsterdam on Aug. 6.

“I’m the trans parent of a trans adolescent who knows our family history, which includes genocide from the Holocaust,” he said, pointing out 85 percent of Dutch Jews died in the Holocaust. “(My daughter) said my grandparents came to New York right before the occupation, and so my daughter said from our history that targeted communities have to get out early, so this was last summer, so how will we know we need to leave and where will we go?”

“I started looking into that, and we started planning our move,” he added.

He pointed out the “murder of opposition politicians” — specifically former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman, who were shot to death inside their home in June 2025 — and “harassment and prosecution” of journalists in the U.S. — federal authorities in January arrested former CNN anchor Don Lemon less than two weeks after he entered a Minnesota church with a group of protesters who confronted its pastor who works with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — since the Trump-Vance administration took office as signs he and his daughter may need to leave the U.S.

Federal authorities charged Lemon, independent journalist Georgia Fort and two protesters with conspiracy and interfering with worshippers’ First Amendment rights during the protest.

An ICE agent on Jan. 7 shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis woman who left behind her wife and three children. U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents on Jan. 24 shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse who worked for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in Minneapolis.

Pretti and Good were American citizens.

The shootings took place after the Trump-Vance administration deployed thousands of federal immigration agents to Minnesota during “Operation Metro Surge.”

“We were thinking, depending on what happens with the midterms,” said the trans person in Amsterdam with whom the Blade spoke. “But then you’re like, you know what, every day more people are coming and we should just do this thing.”

The Trump-Vance administration since it took office on Jan. 20, 2025, has implemented several anti-trans executive orders and policies.

Trump hours after his second inauguration signed the “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” that, among other things, declared the federal government will only recognize two genders: male and female. The directive also banned the State Department from issuing passports with “X” gender markers.

The Pentagon reinstated a ban on openly trans servicemembers. The Department of Education has rescinded agreements with school districts that were designed to protect trans students. The Trump-Vance administration’s anti-terrorism strategy specifically targets “radically pro-transgender” groups.

The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this summer upheld state laws banning athletes from school sports teams that correspond with their gender identity and block gender-affirming care for minors. The Trump-Vance administration since it took office has moved aggressively to curtail these treatments.

“On the one hand, it’s like as if people don’t recognize that that these things make it impossible to have a trans life,” said the trans person with whom the Blade spoke in Amsterdam. “But of course, that’s what Project 2025 is trying to do … make it be impossible to exist.”

McCoy said her and Reaves’s oldest child, who is also trans, has an “X” gender marker on their U.S. passport. McCoy’s grandmother with whom she was very close recently died, but her family attended her funeral virtually from the Netherlands “because we didn’t want to risk returning to the States at that point.”

Kai also noted trans and nonbinary Americans who are trying to leave the U.S., but don’t have passports and other documents with gender markers that match their gender identity.

“That’s terrifying, and it prevents you from doing things like leaving the country,” they said. “Even if it’s not a ban on leaving the country, it still prevents you from leaving the country if those things don’t match in the right way, depending on which immigrations person you get at the border.”

“On this end it wouldn’t matter as much,” added Kai. “But on the other end, it does matter and that is super frustrating and exhausting.”

Dutch ‘very into their bureaucracy’

Kai and the three other trans and nonbinary Americans with whom the Blade spoke said navigating the Dutch health care system upon their arrival in the Netherlands was one of their biggest challenges.

“They’re very into their bureaucracy and they’re very into following guidelines as if they’re laws, and they’re the only ways you do things,” said McCoy. “Once they start working for you. They work. Once you’re in the system, once you’re onboarded, once they’re caught up, then everything goes pretty smoothly.”

Reaves noted McCoy “had a little bit easier time as a trans woman who’s already passing.”

“They were just like, oh, well, it’s clear you’re a woman, so here’s your hormones, and here’s the fast path to diagnostics,” Reaves told the Blade.

Reaves, on the other hand, had been on testosterone for six years before he and McCoy moved to the Netherlands. Reaves said it took nearly a “full year of re-diagnostics before I could get back on testosterone and continue to determine care.”

“They were just like, ‘Well, you kind of look like a woman, so we’re gonna make you do the full diagnostic phase again,’” recalled Reaves.

Reaves told the Blade his doctor prescribed him the wrong type of testosterone. Health clinics that specifically treat trans and nonbinary people use what he described as “extremely outdated language,” but Reaves noted the facility’s doctor helped him get an appointment for his top surgery.

“Now that I’m fully onboarded, I think it’s actually been a little bit better than the U.S.,” he said, noting he receives testosterone blood tests at home. “The follow-ups are really easy.”

Kai also discussed the challenges navigating the Dutch health care system.

They said it would “have been a lot harder to receive care” if they had already undergone hormone replacement therapy, seen a psychiatrist, or had had surgeries. Kai told the Blade they “made the choice” to tell the clinic where they were receiving care that they were a man, as opposed to saying they are nonbinary.

“That’s not true, but I look enough like a man, and then I’m going to get the care that I need,” they said. “I’m sure it’s very different and difficult for folks, especially who are nonbinary, to say I am actually a woman, or I am actually a man, and to pretend that … and that’s still what the system says.”

“Just like with any system, if you want to get your needs met from the system, sometimes you have to meet the system where it’s at, and then once you get your needs met, then outside of the system you can be whoever you want,” Kai added.

Kai noted Dutch activists are “working to get some of those laws and some of those policies changed.” Their husband is working with one group “that is working to change things from if you don’t have a psychological diagnosis of being trans, then getting that care is going to be really hard.”

“What this group is working on is trying to get trans care to be — it’s what they use in the U.S., which is like informed consent, which is not what they use here,” said Kai. “But they’re working on putting together something to like push to governmental level to policy level to say that trans care should be informed consent, not the diagnosis.”

Gay PM: Netherlands needs to do more to defend trans people, rights

The Netherlands in 2001 became the first country in the world to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples.

The country’s nondiscrimination and hate crimes law include gender identity and expression. The Dutch government in 2021 formally apologized to trans and intersex people who were forced to become sterile in order to legally change their gender — The Gender Change Act, which was also known as the Transgender Act — was in place from 1985 until 2014.

Prime Minister Rob Jetten, who is the country’s first openly gay head of government, during a World Pride Human Rights Conference panel conceded the Netherlands needs to do more to defend trans people and their rights. Boris Dittrich, the Dutch Senate’s First Vice President and a member of Jetten’s D66 party who was previously global advocacy director for Human Rights Watch’s LGBTQ Rights Program, at the end of the panel asked about protecting intersex babies from what advocates maintain are unnecessary surgeries.

Reaves admitted he and his children are struggling to learn Dutch, but he added he and his family “appreciate” the Netherlands and “really enjoy living here.”

“I struggle in the Netherlands,” Reaves told the Blade. “I don’t speak the language

“It’s hard being away from home and your own culture and the things you grew up with,” he said. “But I’m safe here, and so that like gives it extra points.”

McCoy said their daughter has “experienced zero transphobia here so far.”

Kai told the Blade that their friends warned them that Dutch people would “call you out or they’ll stare at you or will be mean to you” if they “look nonbinary.”

“I had never had that experience,” they said.

All four of the people with whom the Blade spoke said they plan to apply for their Dutch or EU citizenship once they are legally able to do so. They all expressed reservations about returning to the U.S., even once the Trump-Vance administration is no longer in office.

“I’m actually very nervous that even if things turn around in the U.S. as far as getting rid of Trump, that people are still going to be anti-trans,” said the trans person with whom the Blade spoke in Amsterdam. “The poison’s in the water.”

Reaves said the U.S. “doesn’t really feel like it’s a safe place for trans people to come to.” McCoy added she would consider visiting the U.S., but “I would not move back.”

“That’s too risky,” she said. “It can change anytime.”

“It would probably take like a decade of democratic legislative changes before I would feel safe coming back,” added Reaves.

Editor’s note: International News Editor Michael K. Lavers and Photo Editor Michael Key were on assignment in the Netherlands from July 28-Aug. 10.

AMSTERDAM — The first openly gay man elected to the Thai Senate says the law that extended marriage rights to same-sex couples in Thailand has positively impacted his country’s global image.

“It totally changed how the world perceived Thailand,” Sen. Pornchai Witayalerdpan told the Washington Blade on Aug. 7 during an interview at the World Pride Human Rights Conference in Amsterdam.

Thailand on Jan. 23, 2025, became the first country in Southeast Asia to allow same-sex couples to legally marry.

The marriage equality bill received final legislative approval in June 2024 when the Senate approved it by a 152-130 vote margin. King Maha Vajiralongkorn signed it a few months later. Then-Prime Minister Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra is among those who supported the law.

Witayalerdpan was a freelance interpreter before he took office in July 2024.

The independent senator noted Thailand’s marriage equality movement began to gain traction with a lawsuit that the Foundation for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Rights and Justice, a Thai advocacy group, filed.

The Constitutional Court in 2021 upheld a law that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. MP Tunyawaj Kamolwongwat of the Move Forward Party later introduced the marriage equality bill that became law.

“It was a coalition of efforts between the civil society organizations, the LGBTQ organizations, and also the Pride movement in Thailand,” Witayalerdpan told the Blade.

Taiwan in 2019 became the first country in Asia to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples.

The Nepalese Supreme Court in June issued a landmark ruling that ordered the country’s government to guarantee full marriage rights to same-sex couples.

The Japanese Supreme Court in March said it will consider six marriage equality lawsuits that have been filed in the country. The Indian Supreme Court in 2023 ruled against marriage rights for same-sex couples. South Korea is among the other Asian countries in which marriage equality efforts are gaining momentum.

Witayalerdpan said Thailand’s marriage equality law could have a direct impact in Japan, which is the only G7 country that does not legally recognize same-sex couples.

“It’s been nothing but a positive effect (in Thailand) after the same-sex marriage law (took effect),” he said.

InterPride, the organization that coordinates World Pride events, has announced Bangkok and Barcelona, Spain, are the two finalists to host the biennial event in 2030. (World Pride took place in D.C. in 2025.)

Witayalerdpan told the Blade that World Pride in Bangkok would further improve Thailand’s global image. He also said his fellow lawmakers, in turn, should pass LGBTQ rights bills — including proposals that would allow transgender people to legally change their name and gender and enable same-sex couples to have children via surrogates from in vitro fertilization. Witayalerdpan noted the most important bill to him is one that would strengthen Thailand’s LGBTQ-inclusive nondiscrimination law that took effect in 2015.

Impact of US funding cuts has ‘been very hard’

Witayalerdpan also offered advice to activists in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world.

“Keep on pushing forward,” he told the Blade. “I know that it’s hard for activists in Thailand as well.”

Witayalerdpan acknowledged the loss of U.S. government funding since the Trump-Vance administration took office — which has forced advocacy groups in Asia and elsewhere around the world to close — has “been very hard.” Witayalerdpan noted the global LGBTQ and intersex rights movement in response to these cuts has turned to the European Union, the U.K., Canada, and the Netherlands to help fill the gap.

“It’s very good that these countries are providing more funds to the activists in Asia than before because of the Trump situation,” he told the Blade. “It can increase their soft power as well.”

Witayalerdpan said American activists should “wish for a positive result in the mid-term elections.”

“Then there is some resistance,” he added.

Witayalerdpan specifically highlighted efforts to fight against the Trump-Vance administration’s efforts to restrict gender-affirming healthcare.

A federal court in Massachusetts on Aug. 15 struck down a key provision of a U.S. Department of Health and Human Service rule that would have limited access to gender-affirming care under the Affordable Care Act. Maryland and California are two of the 21 states that sued the Trump-Vance administration over the issue.

“You have to show more resistance … to show that we are still here and we will push back when we can,” said Witayalerdpan.

A Russian LGBTQ advocacy group on Monday announced it will shut down after a court declared it an “extremist” organization.

A St. Petersburg court in April in response to a Russian Justice Ministry lawsuit made the declaration against the Russian LGBT Network.

“For many years, Russian LGBT Network brought together initiatives and activists and supported queer people across the country,” said the advocacy group on its Facebook page. ” However, its ‘extremist’ status has made the previous public format of its work impossible: any connection to the organization may create additional risks for the people we seek to support and protect.”

The Russian LGBT Network formed in 2006.

The group on its Facebook page said it “made this decision” to close “after a thorough assessment of the risks.”

“Continuing our public activities could have put at risk those who took part in the organization’s work, supported it, or received assistance,” said the Russian LGBT Network. “We cannot control the repressive environment, but we can do everything possible to avoid creating additional risks for people. People’s safety comes first.”

The Kremlin over the last decade has faced global criticism over its crackdown on LGBTQ rights.

The Russian Supreme Court in 2023 ruled the “international LGBT movement” is an extremist organization and banned it.

Russia in January designated ILGA World, a global LGBTQ and intersex rights group, as an “undesirable” organization. ILGA World in response to the designation noted Russians who are found guilty of engaging with “undesirable” groups face up to six years in prison.

Human Rights Watch in May noted the Russian LGBT Network is one of nine LGBTQ groups that Russia this year has banned after authorities deemed them “extremist.”

“Russian LGBT Network may close; but dignity, solidarity, and people’s right to be themselves cannot be destroyed,” said the Russian LGBT Network in its statement. “Take care of yourselves.”