Asylum.

We usually have no idea what it is like to be transgender in other countries and in the worst places in the US for a trans-person doesn’t even come close to what it is like being trans in other countries. I Kuwait trans-people are routinely arrested if they go out in public and in other countries it could mean their life is they are discovered.

I know of two cases where trans-people who have fled their country came here and were granted political asylum. Here is the story of a third trans-person who fled her country for refugee here,

Transgender Latinas Find a Refuge in Queens
New York Times
By JULIE TURKEWITZ and JULIET LINDERMAN
December 2, 2012

Two years ago, smugglers buried a woman named Joselyn in Matamoros, a Mexican border city that attracts immigrants waiting to cross into the United States. Several men encased her body in dirt, covered her face with leaves and told her to wait until Border Patrol agents had disappeared to dig herself out.

For Joselyn, who is transgender, the process of being buried alive was nothing new. Growing up in Guatemala, she had suffocated beneath a barrage of insults and physical attacks from her family, her neighbors and her peers, she said. And with Mexican gangs moving south, violence against gays and transgender people was becoming more frequent. So at 19, Joselyn set off on an 18-day journey to the United States and eventually made it to New York City.

She spent 10 months alone. “I isolated myself from everyone,” Joselyn, who asked that her last name not be used because she is here illegally, said in Spanish. “I said, ‘What’s the point? If my mama didn’t even love me, why should I seek help?’”
[…]
In many ways, her life is just as dangerous as it was in Guatemala. But if asylum is granted, all that could change. Armed with papers, she can find a job, learn English, maybe open the bar she often dreams about. In Guatemala, “the people in your family begin to cut you out, like you have a contagious disease,” she said. “They don’t love you or even see you.”

I hope she is granted asylum. I once got a phone call from a lawyer of a trans-woman, it seems that his client was married to a man and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement people were saying it was a same-sex marriage. The lawyer was looking for a way to have his client declared a woman, I suggested going to Probate Court because another trans-woman that I know need to get her birth certificate changed. California where she was born needed a court order in order to change her birth certificate so she went to Probate Court and got the declaration. However, when I told the lawyer about my friend the lawyer dismissed the idea and hung-up.