My children, now in kindergarten and third grade, are finally old enough to be good company in restaurants. There’s no tripping of waiters, very rarely a spilled lemonade. The restlessness they used to exhibit in public has been replaced by an almost scholarly interest in tic-tac-toe and, miraculously, the food itself.
When this change happened, we lived in Iowa, where we had plenty of affordable, kid-friendly restaurants to choose from. This was a hard-earned milestone for my wife and me. After so many failed outings when the kids were younger—a diaper blowout in a bathroom the size of a closet, $12 macaroni left untouched for being the “wrong” color cheese—dinner out had suddenly become a treat, a chance to feed hungry bellies without doing dishes. After the meal, we always stacked our plates and wiped the floor beneath the table to foster goodwill on behalf of all parents. We would ask for a box, and the bill.
Each time, we faced the same question: “Two checks?”
When people ask why we left Iowa, there’s no simple answer. No single event was the tipping point. Rather, we began to feel increasingly unwelcome, squeezed out. What had been a blue state in the presidential elections for more than two decades (save for 2004, by a razor-thin margin) went deep red in a relatively quick period of time.
From my family’s experience, one of the hallmarks of conservative lawmaking is its tendency to remove rights rather than expand them. During our six years in Iowa, funding was stripped from public schools and diverted to vouchers for private schools. Those same defunded public schools were banned from issuing mask mandates during the pandemic, and then from mentioning gay or transgender people in classrooms. Transgender kids were hit with a triple whammy: no sports, no bathrooms, no gender-affirming healthcare. In 2025, Iowa became the first state to remove gender identity as a protected classfrom the state’s Civil Rights Act. Not long after, an emboldened Iowa Senate resolution called upon the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn same-sex marriage, citing heterosexuality as “the basis of Anglo-American legal tradition.”
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Have I mentioned there were—despite the drawbacks—very lovely things about living in Iowa? How it was cheap, with housing aplenty? Sandstone cliffs, forest trails, and creeks all within driving distance? It was a wonderful refuge of convenience during a time when we had babies and chose to prioritize practicality over values. But as our children grew and life got easier—when we could go to a restaurant without a diaper bag in tow—convenience was no longer enough. We wanted to live in a place where our safety was assured, and our children saw their parents affirmed in the community. Where servers at restaurants would see two women leaning across one another to cut up their children’s pancakes and think, “That’s a family.”
Sometimes a waitress would smile at our children as they organized the sugar packets and ask, “Whose?”, her finger metronoming between my wife and me. When we said, “They’re both of ours,” she would be confused, for which we would be apologetic and unnecessarily cheerful. Food was delicious! Busy here tonight! Life in Iowa involved a lot of this—managing the temperature in the room when the issue of queerness arose. But our politeness never mattered. Even after such an exchange, the waitress would still bring two checks, our family structure too foreign to calculate.
Of course, there are plenty of Iowans who are dismayed by the conservative turn the state has taken in recent years. But when you live in a state that President Donald Trump won in 2024 by more than 13 percentage points, the reality is that everyday life for members of the LGBTQ community can feel unsafe. Every Lyft driver and dental hygienist and grocery store clerk became not a neighbor but a potential threat. I felt as if I was living somewhere I hadn’t been invited, and that is a feeling I did not want my children to inherit.
So we moved to Illinois. We traded our big, affordable house on a street with Trump signs for a smaller house with triple the mortgage, on a street with pride flags. Our property taxes doubled, and public school fees quadrupled. But not a single neighbor asked if we were sisters when we showed up with a moving truck. At school, all kids are welcome; there’s no fuss over the bathrooms kids use or the sports they play or what anyone is wearing.
These days, I don’t hesitate before using the word “wife,” and when I say it, discomfort never blooms on the other person’s face. And when our bill arrives at a restaurant, there is only one, tucked in its vinyl folder that looks to us like a tiny trophy.
We are lucky, my wife and I, in an age when many transgender people have to worry about their safety in public restrooms and when brown skin can be a target for government violence. We are lucky to have the ability to uproot our shared life and plant it elsewhere. A GLAAD report published in 2025 found that most LGBTQ adults in the United States expect violence, threats, and discrimination to increase in the next year. The Trevor Project reported last year that 39% of LGBTQ young people and their families have considered relocating to a friendlier state. Yet only about 5% have made the move. One potential reason for the lack of movement is affordability.
But shouldn’t luck be removed from the equation? Wasn’t this big and fractured country founded upon a moral entitlement that everyone is endowed, not by the government, but by the simple fact of their aliveness, with the right to live with dignity? What does it mean for a country when it’s not simply eggs or gas that’s unaffordable, but the pursuit of shared values, the ability to feel that your life means something, and is allowed to exist?
As of today, the ACLU is tracking 30 anti-LGBTQ bills in Iowa. When I read from my new home stories of Iowans facing book bans, drag show bans, and DEI program bans, I feel relieved to be gone.
But there’s sadness, too, for those who can’t leave, especially LGBTQ youth who deserve to grow up in a community that protects them.
The post Why My Family Left Iowa appeared first on TIME.
