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Uprooting your life is never easy, but after a year of watching US President Donald Trump’s administration crack down on the rights of 2SLGBTQ+ people, especially for transgender Americans, Grace Mahoney and her partner Kayden Burns decided it was time to leave the United States.
“I’m queer, my spouse is queer and non-binary, and this has become a very unsafe place for us, as it has for a lot of queer people living in the United States,” she said in an interview from her new home in Dartmouth, North Carolina, earlier this month.
Moving from Worcester, Massachusetts to Nova Scotia in February of this year was something the couple had been mulling over for more than a year, after Trump signed an executive order and rolled back a number of policies aimed at protecting the rights of 2SLGBTQ+ people just hours after his inauguration.
WATCH | Why this strange couple moved from the USA to Canada:
How a small town gay pride parade was a ‘powerful experience’ for this American
Grace Mahoney and her husband moved from the United States to Nova Scotia to distance themselves from growing anti-queer rhetoric. She explains to CBC’s Andrew Sampson the challenges of such a big transition and the joy of participating in her first Pride Parade in Windsor, North Carolina.
Since moving to Canada, Mahoney said she feels like she can finally exhale.
“I told Kayden… I think my favorite part of Nova Scotia right now is the fact that we can go out and I can hold your hand and I can hug you and touch you and just be normal with you and I don’t feel afraid and you don’t feel afraid and we can just be together,” she said.
Mahoney said she never felt safe holding hands with Burns (a simple act of affection that many heterosexual couples take for granted) when they lived in Worcester.
“You could just feel how unwelcoming and unsafe it was,” she said. “We got dirty looks, sometimes people said things… it’s hard to say, but you know, it’s not kind, and the feeling that there could be something worse on the edge (of it) is scary.”
The couple arrived in Nova Scotia in the middle of winter. “It was really important to have a province that was very welcoming to us gay people,” Mahoney says. (Submitted by Grace Mahoney)
Canada quickly rose to the top of their list as they explored living options outside of the United States. When Burns, a licensed social worker, was offered a job in Dartmouth, the couple decided to sell their homes in Worcester and move about 1,100 kilometers to Nova Scotia.
As the mother of a six-year-old, Mahoney said she thought about the type of environment in which she wanted to raise her child. Worcester was no longer suitable for her.
“They’re not banging on our door trying to arrest us for being gay, but it gets to the point where what kind of energy do you actually want… to spend your life living inside, and that question becomes even more aggravated when you have a small child,” she said.
Mahoney attended her first Pride march in June in Windsor, North Carolina. “Canada is not perfect—no country is perfect—(but) it is head and shoulders above what we experienced in the U.S.,” she says. “If you want to live somewhere else where you feel at home, then you should do it.” (Submitted by Grace Mahoney)
Last month, when Mahoney’s partner took her on a surprise trip to the small town of Windsor, North Carolina, she found further evidence that she had made the right choice.
As they sat down to lunch at a restaurant just off Main Street, she realized they were surrounded by rainbow flags. They had front-row seats to the city’s annual Pride parade—”a powerful experience,” Mahoney recalled.
That her first Pride took place in a small town in her new adopted country felt like kismet.
At 37, she’s grateful for the opportunity to start over, but the reality that she had to leave home to find him makes her bittersweet.
“Even though somehow this place feels much more home to me than the U.S. has ever felt… there is still grief for what we had to leave and grief for the reasons why we had to leave,” she said.
“And it’s like living through it all, feeling the joy and excitement of being here in Canada and in this wonderful country with all these really wonderful people.”
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