LGBTQ+ Internal Displacement and the Limits of Sanctuary in the Pacific Northwest

• In Event: LGBTQIA2S+ Studies in the Sociology of Sexualities

Abstract

This paper investigates whether politically coerced LGBTQ+ migration to the Pacific Northwest constitutes internal displacement. Amid accelerating anti-trans legislation, thousands of LGBTQ+ people are relocating to “sanctuary” states like Oregon and Washington. Yet these movements remain largely illegible within migration studies, which has historically privileged border crossing and formal asylum claims. Drawing on 34 qualitative interviews with LGBTQ+ migrants who moved to the region since 2022, we ask: How do intersecting experiences of disability, gender, sexuality, class, and race shape coerced internal migration? What does “sanctuary” deliver, and for whom? Challenging the dominant narrative of queer migration as a voluntary trajectory of self-realization, we center those least sheltered from the current political moment: those who, in an era of organized abandonment, could not afford to stay.

The sample is overwhelmingly trans or gender expansive (82%), and a majority (59%) identify as disabled or chronically ill. Through a mobility justice framework, integrated with the political/relational model of disability and theories of infrastructural violence, we analyze relocation as an ongoing project of reterritorialization: the material and symbolic work of making-home in an unfamiliar landscape.

Findings reveal a spectrum of coercion spanning social, legislative, and environmental domains. Upon arrival, participants describe new freedoms: moving through space without fear, expressing their identities openly, accessing gender-affirming healthcare. But these gains are uneven. BIPOC migrants confront racialized exclusion and cultural loss; disabled and low-income migrants face inaccessible housing and long care waitlists. A final section centers those who fought to remain in the small-town places they loved, revealing displacement at its most invisibilized: no single event forced them out; each made the decision to leave, yet their choices were produced by structural forces beyond their control. This paper argues for recognizing LGBTQ+ internal migration as displacement, with implications for migration studies, queer theory, and disability justice.

Authors

• Rachel J Springer, Portland State University

• Miriam J. Abelson, Portland State University

• Amy Lubitow, Portland State University