The Great Sorting is a real thing, happening due to the actions of real people, some with real concerns, hopes, and fears, some with imagined ones. Productive people - people with businesses, jobs, skills, assets - are increasingly leaving high-tax, high-cost, high-regulation Democrat-controlled jurisdictions for low-tax, low-cost, low-regulation Republican ones. And, the converse is true as well. Members of the dependency class and the far left are increasingly moving to blue jurisdictions. That's fine; this is an aspect of federalism, a founding principle of the republic, in which each state is its own laboratory in government.
Leave it to the legacy media, though, to blow it all out of proportion. Every move, every wave of migration, is blamed somehow on President Trump and his administration, even when it just isn't so.
In the latest such dust-up, the Washington Post recently ran a piece about the city of Seattle, and how it is receiving a mass migration of transgender people, which is overwhelming city services. The Post claims 400,000 transgender people have fled red states for blue ones since Trump's re-election. Now, there are a couple of things to extract from this piece, but the first one is this: The math is crap.
Crow Harmony never felt at ease living in Florida as a transgender guy. The state has some of the most restrictive anti-LGBTQ+ laws in the country, and Harmony said he struggled to find employers willing to hire trans people. Last fall, after Harmony’s boyfriend transitioned, the couple lost their housing.
They were just 21 and 20 with no money or job prospects, so Harmony reached out to a Seattle nonprofit for help getting out of Florida. The nonprofit, a trans-led organization called Traction, welcomed the couple with a place to sleep and money for moving.
Now, I'm not going to try to sort out the names and pronouns in this piece. As for the non-profit, Traction, fine; as long as they are privately funded, they are free to do as they please, even to help "transgender" people to flee from largely imaginary threats. And they have been doing just that:
Since the 2024 election, Traction has helped 1,500 trans people flee red states — more than 20 times the 70 people it aided in the 18 months before the election. And it’s just one of several Seattle nonprofits whose leaders say they don’t have the resources to help the number of trans people who’ve left their homes for the safety of the Pacific Northwest.
The safety of the Pacific Northwest? For Seattle, with its massive homeless enclaves and open-air drug use? Or maybe Portland, which seems to be ground zero for violent Antifa goblins?
The simple fact is this: There is nowhere in the United States where a "transgender" person is under any more threat than anywhere else. They retain all the rights recognized and affirmed in the Constitution. They live under the same laws and regulations as the rest of us. What they perceive as "threats" are nothing more than trying to keep men off women's sports teams, and preventing children, who cannot give fully informed consent, from being subjected to permanent, life-altering gender-affirming treatments and procedures.
That's all.
Read More: Watch: Radical Dem Calls for 'Trans Jihad' Against GOP
No Policy Shift: NCAA Boss Reacts to New SCOTUS Ruling on Transgender Athletes
Here's the onion:
Though no one tracks the migration of LGBTQ+ people from one place to another, a poll conducted by NORC suggests that roughly 400,000 trans adults fled red states in the six months after the 2024 election, a time when President Donald Trump issued a slew of executive orders aimed at restricting nearly every facet of trans life. Another 1.2 million trans people were estimated to be considering such moves.
Now, independent journalist and writer Benjamin Ryan has done a takedown of that 400,000 figure, and he makes a strong case that it is the purest form of horse squeeze.
This Washington Post article claims that an NORC survey found 400,000 trans people have recently fled to another state.
— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) July 7, 2026
As @kittypurrzog pointed out on @TheBARPod, the 400K figure was, with some faulty math, extrapolated by Erin Reed based on the NORC survey, which included just… pic.twitter.com/jKdSqr7Neb
Mr. Ryan writes:
This Washington Post article claims that an NORC survey found 400,000 trans people have recently fled to another state.
As @kittypurrzog pointed out on @TheBARPod, the 400K figure was, with some faulty math, extrapolated by Erin Reed based on the NORC survey, which included just 10 trans people who said they’d fled a state. The survey did not provide a representative sample either. So this figure has been all but plucked out of the air and was not actually reached by NORC themselves. It is a figment of Erin Reed’s work with a calculator.
This is not to say that trans people are not fleeing red states. But it is extremely unlikely that 400,000 of them have.
Check out Mr. Ryan's entire thread on this issue at the link.
Here's the thing: There may well be 400,000 paranoid lefties, identifying as transgender, non-binary, or as a dust-based alien from the Crab Nebula, who have fled red jurisdictions for blue ones. The Great Sorting is a real thing, it's really happening, and for many, many more reasons than this one. But the Washington Post, in purporting a 400,000 number that is supported by the shoddiest of fake analysis, is panic-mongering. They are making assertions they cannot back up by any rigorous means, and they seem to have done so with a remarkable lack of curiosity about the source of Erin Reed's numbers.
That's not reporting. That's propagandizing. And here's the thing: There are indications, in recent polling, that the American people trust President Trump more than the media. Perhaps the Washington Post should run that through their analyzer.
