Though there are still vastly more people moving to Austin — and Texas generally — than leaving it, interviews suggest a new wave of migration may take hold as people desperate or well-off enough aim for states they deem less limiting of LGBTQ+ rights.
Roughly 100,000 people in the greater Austin metro describe themselves as LGBT,"All the legislation with trans kids in schools, that was our moment of knowing the Texas we grew up in really was no longer safe," said Ava Cole, who moved with her wife, a software engineer, and 2 1/2-year-old child to Asheville, North Carolina, in May.
Cole says she's "very attached" to her identity as a Texan — family lore holds that her ancestors arrived in the Lone Star State in the early 19th Century — but in North Carolina, where a Republican legislature faces off against a Democratic governor, she said, "there's a still a fair fight.""Liberal Austin has always felt a little like a joke to me," says Cole. "It's not queer. There's not a queer neighborhood.
"I'm an activist and I like to make change, so there's some guilt leaving," Haab told Axios."But there is legislation against my child's body, his actual, physical body." "I don't feel like my child is safe in Texas. We're not going to stay. I don't feel defeat, I feel rage."I waver about leaving Texas, because I Iove so many of my friends here, and it's going to be hard to start over from scratch," says Axios Austin reader Allison M. "But when I start thinking about my son, and possibly grandchildren, then Texas seems impossible.
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