Seattle City Council Threw $300k At Trans Refugee Crisis — That’s Less Than Half Of The Ex-Police Chiefs Payout

Right wingers are losing what’s left of their lead-paint-infected minds over the Seattle City Council allocating a measly $300,000 to LGBTQ+ organizations grappling with an influx of trans and queer people who are fleeing their hostile hometowns for solace in Seattle. Some made an argument in public comment that dedicating dollars to the trans refugee surge amounts to a waste of taxpayer money. But their issue is not fiscal responsibility— if it were, they would be coming to City Hall every damn day to complain about different, not-trans-related, much more wasteful budgetary decisions. 

Ahead of Tuesday’s unanimous vote, a prominent detransitioner influencer known online as "Apostate Ari" said he found it “absolutely ridiculous” that the council would spend money on a “fictional genocide” when Seattle faces a housing crisis, a “serious drug” problem, among other pressing issues. 

A one-time infusion of $300,000 to trans people is not in legitimate competition with funding any of those huge, systemic issues for which the council pours hundreds of millions of dollars into every single year. To put this into perspective, $300,000 is just 0.015% of the City’s discretionary spending for this year and about .0033% of the total budget. 

And the City spends a great deal to address the issues that the anti-trans grifters suddenly cared about in Tuesday’s meeting. The City allocated $349.5 million to affordable housing in the 2026 budget. So the right wingers can rest assured that the budget already clearly communicates that the City bills the broader housing crisis as approximately 1,000 times more pressing than targeted assistance to trans migrants. 

To be fair, the $300,000 does come from the JumpStart Payroll tax. That funding is supposed to go mostly toward building affordable housing. While allocating money for trans refugees is certainly housing related, if right wingers are so worried about dedicating even a tiny fraction of the City’s housing budget, there’s certainly other places in the budget to draw from. 

That $300,000 is the equivalent of the salary of just 2.3 newly sworn police officers, less than half the severance the City signed away to the ex-Police Chief, and about half of one percent of the $55 million the City spent on police overtime last year. 

But the right-wingers couldn’t keep up the charade of a fiscal responsibility argument even for their 60 second public comment. 

“But [trans people] have moved because women — adult human females — have said they’re not comfortable with males in their bathrooms, in their prisons, and their rape shelters, okay?” Apostate Ari said at public comment. “So they’ve come here to hide so they can oppress women. That’s what it’s really about.” 

To be clear, there is no evidence that trans women of any statistical significance use gendered spaces that align with their identity to commit crimes that anyone could just commit without the hassle of transition. In fact, the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found in a 2018 study that there’s no link between trans-inclusionary policies and increased safety risks in bathrooms. 

Thankfully for the non-bigots of Seattle, the disingenuous fiscal argument and the blatant transphobia did not reflect the overall sentiment of the council chambers that day. For the most part, public commenters agreed that the $300,000 contribution was just not enough. A commenter by the name Purple Six thanked the council for doing the “barest minimum” by earmarking “peanut money” to help trans people fleeing to Seattle. 

Similarly, Council President Hollingsworth conceded “it’s a small drop in the bucket, but it’s a start.” The cause compelled the council so much, even budget hawk Council Member Maritza Rivera, who didn’t want to support any budget amendments, conceded to voting “yes.” 

As Traction Executive Director Michael Woodward said in a statement “...while $300,000 is not enough, It is a beginning and we celebrate it as such. It will provide real relief, real beds, real bus passes, real food, and real housing support.”

“We look forward to building on this foundation with you,” Woodward wrote. “We will keep showing up with the data, the stories, and the moral case, until the need is met.”