A transgender man who was living in San Francisco but feared for his life because, you know, Donald Trump, is back in America after finding out that notoriously tolerant Holland didn’t put out a trans-flag-colored carpet upon his arrival.
In fact, it was a great deal worse than he experienced back in the United States. How ’bout that.
Meet Jane-Michelle Arc, a 48-year-old San Francisco-based software engineer. He said that he was facing transphobia on the streets of the notoriously intolerant Bay Area when he tried to use women’s bathrooms. He also blamed what he called “a harrowing incident in which [he] feared being run over by a truck” in a profile by the Daily Mail. It was so bad, he told The Guardian, he couldn’t leave the house “unless there was an Uber waiting outside.”
So, he flew to Amsterdam and started begging immigration officials how he could get asylum in the Netherlands, all while crying.
“And they laughed because: what’s this big dumb American doing here asking about asylum? And then they realized I was serious,” he told The Guardian.
The problem? Well, it turns out that even in the ultra-tolerant Netherlands, tolerance is occasionally tempered by sanity.
They have actual asylum camps, including a notorious one called Ter Apel, where refugees from actual crises (including a fair amount of undesirables) are kept. From The Guardian earlier this month, note that they use female pronouns to refer to Arc:
Would you consider changing U.S. citizenship such that it has to be earned through military service or something similar, instead of being automatically granted by birth?
The customs officer gave her a train ticket to Ter Apel and told to report to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND). The first few days were hard, holed up in a 2 metre-square room covered with graffiti and what she feared were body fluids on the walls. In some ways she was lucky to be indoors: at least once in recent years the camp has been so overcrowded that new arrivals have had to sleep in tents outside.
Ter Apel is not a prison, but it looks a little bit like one, surrounded by fences, with guards on every gate. Residents are free to come and go but must be in their rooms each morning for a bed check. After their first few days in the central reception area, asylum seekers are dispersed to different low-rise blocks, where they are given a small food allowance so they can cook their own meals.
“I hear a lot of people saying: ‘You are an idiot. You came here from America.’ People will tell me: ‘Did you think about moving to California?’ And then I say: ‘Well, I lived in San Francisco’ and then they go: ‘Oh, that’s a heaven for gay people,’” he told the publication.
“But it’s different for trans people, particularly for trans women, to the extent that my experience in San Francisco, robot taxis aside, was indistinguishable from [that of] the people that I knew from Libya and Iran and Morocco and Algeria.”
Well, it turns out that even the Netherlands wasn’t heaven for him, either.
“It is too dangerous to walk to the grocery store because of the people that live in the camp, and I’m one of them, I live here,” he told a local Dutch outlet about his plight.
In fact, he came to the belated realization that maybe — maybe! — America ain’t so bad for trans-identifying people after all.
“The situation I have in the U.S. as a trans person, not good right, but here, I will be hurt or killed,” he told Dutch media.
“Between here and there, there’s a bunch of Moroccans or Bulgarians or whatever that think queer people should be beaten,” he added. “I think this system where you have people just living out here that are unhappy is not good… It’s scary, it’s legitimately scary, I decided that my mental health is degrading so substantially being here, that I just need to get out.”
BS BRIEF: Jane-Michelle Arc, a 48-year-old software engineer from California who sought asylum in the Netherlands after leaving the United States, says he now fears for his safety inside and around the country’s largest asylum reception center, Ter Apel. Dutch authorities have…
— Common Sense with Chad Law (@chadparkerlaw) July 27, 2026
It’s even worse if you read his grammatically challenged Substack. From a June 6 post:
i grew something here in the netherlands. my friend lucid back home would say i performed alchemy: i transmuted the fear and the anger and the grief into a vision of a new life. when i got here my urine was the color of coca cola. i immediately lost what seemed to be three pants sizes. i was having seizures. i was having headaches so severe all i could think about was smashing my head against a wall.
i’d lost everyone, right? i got on that f***ing plane. i was afraid before, during, and after the flight. the truth is there is comfort in motion. when that person said she’d kill me back in san francisco, i had already been afraid. i was not sure whether i’d be able to guarantee my own safety, and the world seemed scarier by the day. that moment when our eyes met on mission, the fear didn’t matter anymore because i knew what i had to do and i had direction. where there was ambiguity, there was only, does this come with me to the netherlands or does it get left behind and thrown away? that narrowing of focus let me think less about now, and think more about the future. …
i began to tend wounds, and applied ointment to grief, and my body began to heal a bit, slowly, and my heart kind of did not. i kept going through the motions, and i would learn more of this silly-sounding language, and i would meet new people and make new friends. i made plans. i started to grow a life here.
i think i did a good job on taking care of grief in myself, and for knowing what it was, and to let it completely take over when i needed it to. in fact, i drank for two straight weeks in march because the enormity of what hung over my head became too overwhelming to even be conscious. …
i do have some choice words for the dutch government, in particular the ind; but i think they would not listen or even care what i have to say. i suppose that’s very dutch. but what i will say is that when i spoke to people here who are from here, who live here, every single person among them was shocked that the ind has deported any of us. and truthfully, i made an appointment at the consulate before i ever spoke to ind. i have been leaving for a few months now, my body here in the netherlands, still carrying on like a marionette. my heart, indeed my soul, is and has been in san francisco. … leaving california showed me how i cannot leave california. not because you can’t put me on an airplane or a boat or whatever and take me from california, but something more essential than my body just cannot be.
I’ve read both “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “Ulysses” a few times and even that didn’t prepare me for this guy’s prose. What I can safely take away from it is this:
- This isn’t a rational individual.
- If you’re going to leave “Trump’s America,” you’d better have a backup plan, which means following other countries’ immigration laws.
- Other countries (surprise!) have actual immigration laws. You can’t just show up at the airport and claim asylum because, you know, Trump doesn’t like trans people (or whatever).
- Maybe the United States ought to try asylum camps, too — and not just the silly, hasty “children in cages” stuff, nor something that’s as dangerous as Ter Apel, but certainly something that doesn’t allow for catch-and-release in the future.
So, he decided to return to Trump’s America, where he was hit with something resembling reality. From a July 20 Substack post:
i was recently in the netherlands, and upon my return to the united states an unexpected thing happened: the government decided that after a very long time of being comfortably, legally, physically, socially a woman, that i am now a man.
i’ve had enough therapy to know about radical acceptance and i don’t like this and i think it’s stupid, but i know that i can’t fight it. certainly not all by myself, and you can’t get on an airplane if the government doesn’t think you ought to.
Yes, being called by your actual gender apparently beats being beaten in the Netherlands by other asylum seekers who might not be as tolerant as us intolerant Americans.
Welcome back, though! Sorry you missed the 250th. Also sorry about that very, very expensive lesson you learned.
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