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  • You're limited by whether you're willing to learn a new language probably.

  • What skills do you have? That makes a huge difference in which countries you could emigrate to.

  • I think the answer is going to be China, regardless. That is, as long as you can figure out the visa situation.

    • Hong Kong first. Stay there long enough and you'll get mainland.

      HK sucks to be poor in but OP should be alright with their experience.

      Now, whether or not OP is ok with the language issues is another question.

  • I live in Ireland and have done okay as a neurodivergent queer person. It helps massively that you work in tech, since that's the main source of Ireland's wealth and a lot of big American and British companies hire here. Housing is very expensive, one of the most expensive in relation to income in the world, so that won't be easy.

  • Most states take immigrants based on economic criteria. Are you likely to be a net positive for the national economy? You have to be able to give his answers to questions such as: Do you have a good job lined up? Do you have any skills they have a shortage of? Are you independently wealthy?

    Your answers to these questions is going to determine whether they'll let you in or not.

    I think the Nordic countries, or the Netherlands, are probably not the worst places in the world to be queer. Learning the languages there should also be easier for an English-speaker than many other languages as they are all Germanic languages. People there also tend to speak English fairly well.

    Living here is expensive but salaries tend to match living costs better than in America.

    If you want I can help you look into whether you would be allowed to emigrate to Denmark. It might be possible, even if you're not a highly paid specialist, depending on what skills and education you have.

    • I think the Nordic countries, or the Netherlands, are probably not the worst places in the world to be queer.

      That really depends on what queer means in that case and which needs have to be met by the legal and healthcare systems. Iceland and Denmark are the only Nordic countries that legally recognize nonbinary genders (the Netherlands do, too). If that's a relevant issue here, which it very much might be, the list of eligible countries gets really short really quick.

      Another thing that may or may not be relevant is when and how gender affirming healthcare becomes necessary. Denmark has the same system of bottlenecking gender affirming care through gender clinics as the UK, and their wait lists are almost as long as a result of that. Same goes for the Netherlands. Any time i've talked to a Danish trans person on HRT, they were doing DIY because it's either that or rotting on the wait list forever, and any time i've talked to a Dutch trans person, it's because they were looking for German clinics for bottom surgery because the domestic options didn't convince them. IDK about Iceland, i know they tend to rank as the legally most trans-inclusive country in the world, but ... it's an island in the middle of the Atlantic with a population of somewhere around 300k people. That both means an absolutely tiny pool of other queer people around you and that it's extremely unlikely you'll find good specialists for gender affirming care domestically.

      I mean, as far as societal attitudes go, Netherlands and the Nordics tend to be among the most accepting places for queer people according to surveys. But what that means in practice for a gender non conforming kid is hard to say, as such metrics tend to focus on how prevalent homophobia is and people can be mostly fine with cis gays and at the same time incredibly weird towards trans people, especially nonbinary ones. I'm not expecting these places to be outstandingly bad in that regard, but Sweden and Finland in particular have seen a lot of successful anti-trans campaigning in recent years, especially when it comes to restriction of healthcare for trans minors, and the Netherlands have just elected a right wing government.

      That's not to say any of these places is the worst choice you could make, the situation for us rn isn't exactly great anywhere outside of our own communities. Just saying that their image of being outstandingly progressive places doesn't always hold up in reality.

  • Ireland is quite nice and the people here are especially wonderful. I’d say people here are generally very kind and community oriented, which would be important in your situation I’d think. There’s a housing shortage so it’s a little expensive at the moment, but it’s no worse than a lot of places in the states right now. The process of emigrating here is not difficult if you have the right kind of job lined up. Feel free to DM me if you’re curious about it.

  • I moved to Germany three years ago from Romania, for the future of my daughter. I wanted her to start school here.

    I too am in the mobile app business. I started a freelance account here with the Finanzamt. Everything is pretty straight forward, and taxes are transparent af so you know exactly what your finances will look like.

    As per politics, we’re not sure it’s the country we want to grow old in, but at the moment, I personally feel it’s the best place for us to be in.

    I feel for us Germany was the least culture shock move. From what I know, it might be for you as well.

    The language is hard, but interesting and fun to learn. The people are very polite, even if they don’t like you.

    Let me know if I can help with anything.

    • See I'm in Germany but I'm looking into getting out of here, I don't know what will happen to Germany when the empire collapses but looking at Ukraine I wouldn't be surprised if they blitzkrieg'd europe after Kanadas Anschluss. And their largest bases are here...

    • I lived in Germany for a couple years, not a bad idea.

      • Quick rundown of being a gender diverse person in Germany:

        • transphobia is an issue, but i wouldn't say it seems worse than in other places. How difficult day to day life is depends a lot on how well one passes and fits into the gender binary, but younger people are a lot more accepting if they aren't chuds, especially in urban areas.
        • large and thriving trans and nonbinary communities exist in Berlin and the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan area. This includes a decent coverage of support groups for queer minors. Both are good places to live if you care about things like culture, nightlife and leftist organizing (for the latter, stick to Anti-Imps, keep a healthy distance from Antideutsche). Other major population centers like Hamburg are also ok, more conservative places like Bavaria can be sketchy outside of cities like Munich. Rural areas especially in the eastern states can have a serious nazi problem, but that's not where the jobs for mobile software engineering typically are.
        • Immigration will almost certainly hinge on a job visa, and you should get fluent in the language if you want to get naturalized, which both will take a lot of time. You'll get by with English fairly easily in places like Berlin, especially in your field, but there's generally a strong pressure towards immigrants to learn our grammatic clusterfuck of a language.
        • getting nonbinary gender recognized legally is possible even for minors if the parents are on board, and is atm rather uncomplicated if you have to change documents. If that has already been done, existing papers will be accepted. There can still be complications in day to day life, but in theory all government offices and corporations have to offer gender-neutral means of adressing your child (German is a very strongly gendered language, and the attempts to make it more gender inclusive are unfortunately key culture war issues).
        • if gender affirming care ever becomes relevant for your kid, they should connect to local trans communities by all means before talking to a doctor. It's not too hard to get by when you know how, but it will require experienced support to go smoothly. This especially holds true for nonbinary people. Also if you ever get German health insurance by all means reject the ePA (electronic patient files), that's just one big leak of sensitive data waiting to happen.

  • Been looking at Portugal for a while. Big American immigrant community, low bar entry that gets you EU citizenship. Most cities in the EU are very easy to get around in with just English.

  • What does "a decent shot at the future" mean? My entire life is oriented around building things like "lifehouses" where people can thrive amidst the crumbling empire.

    If I wanted to, I have a good sized list of places that I could go live, have a decent community around, and be utterly invisible to anyone who would pose a threat to me. But I want to expand until the carrying capacity of these places goes, from thousands currently, all the way up to hundreds of thousands.

  • Taiwan. Getting permanent residency/citizenship there is relatively easy with your career/skills and then gives you some flexibility to move over to Mainland

    They don't have many mobile SWE jobs though, may have to look into more hardware/embedded/silicon jobs

34 comments