When Bobbi Waterman packed up her Florida life early this year, she left behind more than a house and a dog. She left behind a country where, as a transgender woman, she had stopped feeling safe. Her destination: Rupanyup, a quiet wheat-belt town in Victoria's Wimmera region, roughly 40 kilometres north-east of Horsham, with a population of around 500 people.
It is an unlikely landing spot for a woman who spent more than three decades working for NASA, including on the Space Shuttle programme. A former NASA engineer, Waterman spent decades working on the Space Shuttle programme, combining her lifelong fascination with rockets and exploration with a drive to contribute to humanity's reach beyond Earth. When she retired from NASA in 2019, after more than three decades with the space agency, Waterman decided to start vlogging on YouTube about her travels. She has since built a substantial online following: she now has nearly 34,000 followers on TikTok, where she posts about her life and travels, her experiences as a trans person and memories from her days at NASA, among other musings.
She and her spouse, Tam Waterman, moved to Rupanyup in February, after abruptly packing up their lives in response to the 2024 United States presidential election outcome. The decision was not impulsive. They first started sizing up options for their future home while on a nine-month cruise around the world in 2024, with Portugal, Uruguay, Mauritius and a couple of Caribbean islands making the shortlist. Australia eventually won out, in large part because one of Tam's daughters was living in Rupanyup at the time, providing an immediate anchor in a new country.
The contrast between their old life and their new one is stark. "We didn't know many of our neighbours in Florida because you were afraid all the time," Waterman says. "Everyone has guns, so you didn't want to just go up to a stranger's house and knock on the door." Things shifted sharply once they settled in Rupanyup. In Rupanyup, the pair "know most of the people in the town", Waterman says. That kind of easy social fabric, rare even in Australia's bigger cities, turns out to be exactly what they needed.
Waterman's story sits within a broader and rapidly accelerating trend. Research from the Williams Institute at UCLA Law found that, almost half of transgender respondents surveyed after the 2024 election had already moved or were considering moving to a location they viewed as more trans-affirming within the United States, with nearly one in four having already made such a move, and 45% indicating a desire to move out of the country entirely. The pace of requests to leave the US has been remarkable: within the first 24 hours of Trump's re-election, the charity Rainbow Railroad received 1,177 requests for help from the United States, compared to 700 for the entire preceding year, with 51 per cent of those new requests coming from trans people.
Multiple trans and LGBTQI+ organisations reported enormous surges in calls to support lines after the election, amid fears of rollbacks to rights and increased hostility. Those fears have not been abstract. Since taking office, Trump has aggressively targeted transgender rights through executive orders and federal policy changes, revoking federal recognition of nonbinary and transgender identities, reinstating a military ban, and signing directives restricting discussions of LGBTQ+ topics in education, as well as an anti-trans sports ban.
A Personal Journey, Years in the Making
Waterman's path to Rupanyup did not begin with the 2024 election. Her relationship with Tam, an Australian who uses gender-neutral pronouns, stretches back to a chance encounter on a cruise ship in 2013. By the time they were a couple, Tam proposed accepting Bobbi's proposal in 2016, and the pair married the following year. Tam, who has two daughters, moved to Florida with their youngest.
Waterman's transition came later. It wasn't until summer 2023, four years after she retired from NASA, that Waterman came out as a trans woman to her wider circle. Tam was "very supportive" when Waterman decided to transition, as were other close family members. She embraced her true self and transitioned at the age of sixty, proving that it is never too late to live authentically.
Online, Waterman has chosen to meet hostility with equanimity rather than retreat. She says she has built a really great community of followers, though she also fields a lot of hateful comments, which she chooses to ignore. Her philosophy is direct: "I'm happy with who I am. And if people have a problem with me, then that's a 'them problem', not a 'me problem'."
Australia's Legal Framework and the Limits of Comfort
Australia is not without its own debates on gender recognition. Transgender rights in Australia have legal protection under federal and state and territory laws, but the requirements for gender recognition vary depending on the jurisdiction. Victoria has moved progressively on the issue: Victoria abolished the surgery requirement for gender recognition in May 2020. For Waterman, the contrast with Florida has been palpable. She is currently awaiting her permanent resident status in Australia, and has described the country as "a very welcoming and inclusive place for transgender people, at least in Victoria."
Critics of that assessment, including some conservative commentators, would point out that Australia's debates around gender recognition in sport, single-sex spaces, and healthcare for minors remain genuinely contested. The Australian Human Rights Commission has acknowledged that existing state-level requirements have drawn criticism from LGBTQ+ advocates as inconsistent and sometimes burdensome. These are real policy debates, not culture-war inventions, and Australians across the spectrum hold considered views on how competing rights should be balanced.
What Waterman's story highlights is that those debates, however sharp at times, take place within a legal and social framework that still guarantees meaningful protections. The lived experience she describes, knowing her neighbours, feeling free to walk to a stranger's door, is less a political verdict on any country than a reminder of how profoundly a sense of personal safety shapes the choices people make about where to build their lives.
For a former NASA engineer who has spent her retirement years travelling the world and building an online community, Rupanyup may seem an improbable final chapter. But Rupanyup is a town in rural Victoria that has been drawing attention beyond its size for years, thanks in part to its place on Victoria's Silo Art Trail. Along with Rupanyup locals, Waterman has been buoyed by another community entirely: the tens of thousands of online followers who have followed her journey from the Space Shuttle programme to the Victorian wheat belt, and who tune in to see what, for Waterman, amounts to a very simple idea. "Happiness comes from inside, right? You can't really look to other people for your happiness, and if you're happy with yourself, then that's a big step on your journey to happiness."
Whether one frames Waterman's move as a refugee story, a lifestyle choice, or something in between depends largely on the values one brings to it. What is harder to dispute is that the forces driving it, fear, community, and the basic human desire to be known by one's neighbours, are as old as migration itself.