Report: Transgender People Leaving Red States Are Draining Democrat-Run Seattle's Nonprofits

Increasing numbers of transgender people are reportedly leaving red states for Democrat-run Seattle, Washington, and a nonprofit in the area is struggling to keep up with the demand.

The group called Traction has assisted over 1,000 transgender people in moving to the area since 2024 but it and other nonprofits, according to a Washington Post article published on Tuesday, are running out of resources.

“Though trans people make up just 1 percent of the population in Washington state, the nonprofits that help them say their budgets are drained and their staffs are stretched so thin that last month the Seattle LGBTQ Commission asked Mayor Katie Wilson (D) to declare a civil state of emergency. Such a declaration would free up general fund dollars to bolster the nonprofits’ finances as they help transplants find housing and jobs,” the outlet said.

The report also cited a poll that suggested about 400,000 transgender adults left red states not long after President Donald Trump beat former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.

A poll in 2023 found one-third of Seattle’s residents were considering leaving mainly due to home prices and crime, while homelessness has also been a major issue plaguing the area.

The Post article noted how those moving to the area would put additional burdens on subsidized health care.

“If the city chooses not to declare a state of emergency, commission leaders said, they worry what will happen not only to Seattle’s LGBTQ+ organizations but also to ones that help all city residents. Many of the newcomers need shelter, food aid, and subsidized health care. And the city’s homeless population has already reached a record high this year,” the article stated.

In light of the debate surrounding truth and biological reality, Trump in January 2025 signed an executive order titled, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government,” Breitbart News reported:

“Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers,” the order reads, explaining that this is “wrong” and adding that such moves — namely, attempts to remove the reality of biological sex — “fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being.” “The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system. Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself,” Trump’s order reads, blasting the left for replacing the “immutable biological reality of sex with an internal, fluid, and subjective sense of self unmoored from biological facts.”

A poll in May 2025 found Americans were increasingly rejecting transgender ideology and showed support for how Trump was handling the issue, according to Breitbart News.

Seattle has long been a center for controversy when it comes to transgender issues.

In 2019, a city official was placed on leave after it was reported she hired a transgender stripper to dance topless at a homelessness conference. A Seattle museum in 2022 planned to host a summer camp led by a cross-sex “drag artist” to train children on how to “create your own personas.” And Seattle’s public schools published a lesson plan telling fourth graders to write a letter with advice to a child who knew he was a girl “from the time she was two years old,” Breitbart News reported.