What The Hell America!

This story was originally published in Uncloseted Media, an LGBTQ-focused investigative news outlet.

At 6 years old, Kelsey Granger was obsessed with Ariel’s character in “The Little Mermaid.” “[I think it] had something to do with the transform[ation] and the feeling of being trapped in a world that you don’t feel that you belong in,” she told Uncloseted Media.

Now 32 years old, Granger’s reality is surprisingly close to Ariel’s: She lives full-time on a boat, far away from her landlocked American town, often swimming in the Atlantic Ocean and enjoying sunsets from her boat’s deck.

“The middle of nowhere is a beautiful place,” she says. “It’s like being in a void. You look out your window, and you see the sky and the water being the same color. And it just feels like you’re looking into a surrealist painting.”

While Granger loves living on the water, her decision to do so comes from a place of self-preservation. As a trans woman, she didn’t feel safe living on America’s mainland. Witnessing lawmakers introduce hundreds of anti-trans bills in state legislatures, she remembers thinking, “Nobody’s safe. None of those people I feel represent me.”

Though leaving the U.S. to live on a boat may seem extreme, Granger is far from the only trans person who has considered a move for safety reasons. A 2023 poll found that 43 percent of transgender adults have considered moving since May of 2023 due to anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in their state. Meanwhile, 8 percent of adults have already left, with many opting for Canada and others fleeing to Europe.

Before leaving the mainland, Granger was working in the automotive industry in Carrollton, Texas. But as anti-trans legislation ramped up in Texas and across the U.S., Granger started to get worried.

“I was just like, ‘Y’all, we gotta get out. … I know enough to see the writing on the wall. I know enough of queer history to know what happened to my sisters and my brothers,’” she says.

Initially, Granger and her partners thought moving to a blue state was her best option. “Could I move to New York? Could we move to Maine? Could we move to Colorado? We explored all those options,” she says.

But as she researched, the financial toll of finding a new home coupled with fears about how long a Democratic state would remain safe caused her to reconsider. “What happens if there’s another election at a state level or federal level, and all of a sudden, now that state’s not so safe? We’re kind of gonna be fucked,” she remembers thinking.

Without any prior boating experience, Granger started taking sailing lessons and in 2022 moved onto a boat on Grapevine Lake, a reservoir in North Texas.

Shortly after this, Attorney General Ken Paxton requested a list of Texans who had changed their gender markers on identification documents. Though the list’s purpose is not publicly known, advocates suspect Paxton was planning to use the data to further limit trans people’s right to transition.

This had a compounding effect on Granger’s fears of being trans in America. After a year on the lake and five months in a Mississippi boat yard, Granger felt ready for the ocean.
So in December 2024, roughly a month after Trump’s reelection, Granger began sailing around the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands and the Dominican Republic.

She wishes her fears were baseless, but since Trump’s reelection, she says, “It sucks to be right. … Everything that I know about times of oppression, one of the underlying facts to it all is that you don’t know until it’s too late. You could never know when the last possible moment to get out is until it’s already passed.”

Granger’s decision to live on a boat “emanated from Trump and Trumpism and everything that he’s put in place.” Her distress about what could happen under a Trump presidency has been legitimized by his many anti-trans executive orders, including a ban on federal funding for youth gender-affirming care and the idea that—in the eyes of the federal government—there are only two biological sexes.

Granger, who is in a polyamorous relationship, lives aboard a 30-foot-long by 14.5-foot-wide catamaran sailboat with her two partners—who identify as cis and bigender—along with her dog, Turbo. An early riser, Granger has her morning coffee on the boat’s deck shortly after sunrise. She quickly checks the water for sea life before beginning her remote job selling yacht charters. In her spare time, she swims, pets stingrays and rides her onewheel through coastal towns.

As mainland America is an increasingly threatening place for trans people, Granger says the attitude of those living on the water is much more welcoming.

“They couldn’t care less if I’m trans. They couldn’t care less if my family is poly. We’re all taking this massive risk to be on a boat, and there’s a huge mutual respect for anybody that goes out in the ocean. Because the ocean is scary. That kind of binds everybody together,” she says.

But even with this newfound safety and happiness, there are still complications. Like many other trans women, Granger relies on Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). While she currently has a 10-month stockpile, she will eventually have to depend on her partners bringing back HRT from the mainland U.S. or picking it up from pharmacies in Puerto Rico or other Caribbean countries. “I’m not willing to fly and put my passport at risk,” she says.

Granger acknowledges that the countries she’s sailing around aren’t entirely trans-friendly. While gender-affirming care is legal in the Bahamas, it is not possible to change your gender assigned at birth, and there are no protections against LGBTQ+ employment discrimination. Despite this, Granger says there’s safety in being a tourist. “I’m only seeing all of these people for maybe three days at a time. So, it’s not important to be loud, out and proud to people that I’m only interacting with for 10 minutes at a time.”

Though she is able to bypass a certain amount of transphobia through her nomadic lifestyle, knowing that it’s out there still impacts her. “It doesn’t really matter where you are at this point,” she says. “You’re going to experience some form of transphobia and that fucking sucks.”

For now, the Trump administration and state legislatures have focused on banning trans healthcare for minors. But Granger isn’t naive to the possibility of American politicians broadening these bans to include trans adults.

She says continuing HRT is not only important for limiting her gender dysphoria, but also for avoiding physical health complications: Stopping HRT can be dangerous, increasing the risk of cognitive decline and cardiovascular issues.

“It’s not necessarily, ‘Do I fear that I’ll be able to get it?’ It’s more like ‘I have to,’” she says.

Granger says that traveling by boat allows her to avoid complications around her passport. With the Trump administration stating that gender identity “does not provide a meaningful basis for identification” and Secretary of State Marco Rubio suspending passport applications for those who select X as a gender marker, getting accurate ID is becoming increasingly difficult for trans and nonbinary Americans.

Traveling by plane or car requires interactions with customs officers, which Granger often finds stressful. “You have to go face-to-face … and they’re looking at you with the meanest expression,” she says. But on the water, Granger is able to move around without constantly having her ID scrutinized for gender marker inconsistencies.

Granger is far from being the only trans person feeling stressed about traveling right now. In February, seven trans and nonbinary people filed a federal lawsuit against the Department of State and Trump, after his administration suspended passport applications for trans folks applying with their name and accurate gender marker.

She says living on the water allows her to avoid the chaos. “The ocean’s huge, it’s massive, there’s no enforcement. You know, the second night we were in the Bahamas, we anchored next to an uninhabited island,” she says.

Still, she still worries about others in the trans community. Keeping up with the news and learning of anti-trans laws “breaks [her] heart,” she says. “Because a lot of our community isn’t either privileged enough or fortunate enough to have the money to flee, to have the money to transition, to have the support that they need. And this only makes it harder.” She hopes her story can be a source of inspiration and often chats with other trans women on subreddits like r/MtF.

When Granger started living on her boat, she didn’t plan on making her trans identity public. But with the onslaught of attacks against her community since the 2024 election, she decided it was important she speak out.

“The reason that I’m okay with outing myself in this way is because I want the trans community to be okay,” she says. “And it can’t be okay if every story we read is about somebody getting attacked, is about kids getting their health care ripped away from them, is about adult trans people living paycheck to paycheck. It’s really important that we survive.”

Granger, or @tanukiprincess on TikTok, documents her sailboat travels as a trans person. Her videos often display turquoise ocean water teeming with stingrays and turtles, accompanied by upbeat pop music.

Granger envisions a future where more trans people share her lifestyle. She is currently saving up money to buy and refurbish a second boat, which she plans to give to another trans person. “I’m going to replicate that process again and then hopefully create a trans flotilla. There could be a community on the water. It would be nice to have a sister or a brother that also is sailing around the same areas.”

More than anything, Granger hopes her story gives trans people hope. “I want to have people say, ‘Look, it can get better,’” she says. “There are things we can do as a community, and there are things we can do for self-preservation, which I think is so important for the trans community to hear.”

For the remainder of Trump’s second term—and beyond—Granger is looking forward to living her best life on the water. “If Trump went to jail tomorrow, Elon went to jail tomorrow and Democrats took the White House—or whatever imaginary situation you have to come up with — I still wouldn’t stop living on a boat. I love it,” she says.