Welcome to Transmigration Vacation

In which we introduce our main characters and their journey.

Two professors walk out of their universities and begin telling stories about their pilgrimage into new life.

This is us: a trans non-binary archival educator and their bi female Chaucerian spouse; between us, we have 37 years’ experience as academics. We live in Alabama and work at separate state universities, and Alabama is where we’ve both spent the majority of our lives, though we travel extensively. We’re not at retirement age (one of us is less than a decade away, the other about a decade), but we’re done with these lives and ready for the challenge and adventure that will remake us.

Why would we leave stable, mostly rewarding work with so much time left until the promises of Social Security, state pensions, and leisure at last? We could starkly say it’s because those promises won’t be kept. We could rightfully tell you it’s the deteriorating state of higher education, where even the lowest-level administrator who makes enough in one paycheck to pay your mortgage for a year flourishes while arguing against $500/semester raises for the folks who teach most of the courses, who still shoves administrative tasks onto the plates of the overwhelmed teachers dealing with underprepared students who want AI to count as original writing and demand unlimited chances to get the A they just deserve for being there. We could frankly say it’s that our home state is in a breakneck race to return to 1901, where women and other marginalized folks “knew their places”—where white, male, “Christian,” cishetero supremacy is baked into everything. We could honestly tell you it’s because we don’t know how much longer our aging bodies will be able to survive the level of travel we enjoy. We could truthfully say we must leave this red state for a blue one—or even for a new blue country—that believes we’re fully human and whose laws uphold that humanity.

But, transparently (and if you can’t be transparent on the Internet, where can you be?), it’s because our bodies remember. They remember Southern Baptist Churches founded on upholding slavery led by men who expose themselves (and worse) to pre-teens without consequence. They burn from years at segregation academies so we didn’t have to be exposed to “controversial topics” and “inferior races.” Our bodies deeply hold every time the rod wasn’t spared; the Bible was used as a cudgel to keep us in line; the deacons who always wanted to give us full body hugs we didn’t have the right to refuse; our presentation was ridiculed as “not ___ enough;” the frat boys who locked us into rooms until we gave our bodies as sacrifice; every homophobic invective hurled at us by our mothers, fathers, sisters, and random assholes everywhere; the professors who argued whether we or our girlfriends were the ones they’d most want to “convert;” the conditions, intermittent in nature, put on love by family, decades-long friends, lovers, strangers; the deadnamings and intentional misgenderings; and, then and now, the gaggle of women who told us we were in the wrong bathroom but now, inexplicably and in service of patriarchy to their own doom, have the power to turn that fear and hate into legal consequence—all of whom face no consequence of their own. Our bodies remember, they hold, and they’re broken because of it; we must move away from the thousand daily cuts and heal. And travel is healing, if it’s done with an open heart; change is healing, if embraced.

So, we’re opting out. We’re packing up, donating, and selling off our stuff, retiring from academia, and embarking on a trip around the world. And we’re not returning to Alabama, these universities who speak about the coach as a god but the rank and file teachers (the raison d’etre) as a line-item to be micromanaged and culled, or the toxic swamp of hate and fear that has become our normalized daily life.

We want to take you along with us. Share in our crazy adventures, our missteps and triumphs, our amazing opportunity to learn and grow and deepen our relationships with each other, our fellow humans, and the planet. Each week, at least, one or both of us will post about what’s happening before we leave—what travel we’re booking (or have booked), how we’re planning our packing (both trip and house), organization, wrapping up academic careers, and selling our stuff—until we’re ready to step into the wide world, beginning in July. Once on the road, we’ll post primarily about the trip, with subscribers earning more photos, videos, and personal stories. When (if) we return to “normal life” in the US, we’ll post about that transition; if we end up elsewhere, we’ll share our journey through those processes.

We’d love to have you on the journey with us.

In closing—and because we both love poetry, water, and (particularly northwest) Ireland—we’ll leave you with Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Inishfree,” which we’re feeling right now in our own “deep heart’s core:”

The Lake Isle of Inishfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

“‘Now lat us ryde, and herkneth what [we] seye,’”
The Transmigrationists

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