When Bobbi Waterman lived in Florida, she was “afraid all the time”. In rural western Victoria, she’s found something very different: a sense of belonging.
She and her spouse, Tam Waterman, moved to the little town of Rupanyup in February, after abruptly packing up their lives in response to the 2024 United States presidential election outcome.
“We made the decision that morning. When we got the results that Trump had won, we made a plan to sell our house,” Bobbi tells SBS News.
“We knew this time was going to be worse.”
In Rupanyup, which has around 545 residents according to the 2021 Census, the pair have found a home that feels much safer.
“We love this little town,” Bobbi says.
“We have a community here of some like-minded people. We’ve got members of the LGBT community in our town. We’ve got a nice little group here of us, and people have been very, very welcoming and really lovely.”
An international love story
While Trump was the catalyst for the move, the Watermans had an existing connection to Australia.
Bobbi, a 63-year-old American and former NASA engineer, lost her first wife to breast cancer when she was in her 50s. Still struggling through the grief, she booked a two-week cruise to get away during what would’ve been their anniversary month.
Standing on the ship’s deck at sunrise as it arrived in Fiji, she struck up a conversation with the only other person up there that morning: Tam.
“We started talking about grief and other things. And we kind of, you know, hit it off on the cruise, and we kept in contact afterwards.”
Tam — an Australian — returned home to Bendigo, and Waterman flew back to the US. But the following year, they met up in Amsterdam and travelled around Europe together. The year after that, Bobbi visited Australia.
By then, they were a couple, and in 2016, when Tam was visiting the US, Bobbi proposed.
The pair married the following year. Tam, who has two daughters and uses gender neutral pronouns, moved to Florida with their youngest.
They were “very supportive” when Bobbi decided to transition in 2023, as were other close family members.
“They all wanted to take me clothes shopping,” Bobbi recalls.
“There was a kind of an LGBT thrift store in Orlando, Florida. They took me for my birthday to go get some women’s clothes.”
It was a moment Bobbi had been building towards for a long time.
“I think the first time I was 100 per cent positive that I should be trans was probably in my early 40s, but that was before the internet, and I didn’t really know any trans people,” she says.
I convinced myself that I was too old, even though this felt like it was right for me.
A timely exit
The year Bobbi transitioned, campaigning began for the 2024 presidential election. In July the following year, Trump was formally nominated as the Republican Party’s candidate.
While the Watermans had lived in the US during Trump’s first presidency, the pair weren’t prepared to go through it again, in part due to his anti-trans rhetoric. Florida, led by Republican governor Ron DeSantis, had already introduced a series of laws eroding LGBTQI+ rights, as had many other red states.
They sold their cars and their home, gave away most of their belongings, and set sail in January 2025 – weeks before Trump’s inauguration – travelling to Australia by cruise “with no intentions of coming back”.
Their fears were not unfounded. In Trump’s first weeks in office, he issued a flurry of executive orders, including several that directly impacted LGBTQI+ individuals.
On his first day, he signed one that specifically targeted trans and nonbinary people, stating that it was federal policy to recognise only two sexes, which are “not changeable and grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality”.
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.
Gun violence also contributed to the climate of fear for people like Tam and Bobbi.
“We didn’t know many of our neighbours in Florida because you were afraid all the time,” she says.
Everyone has guns, so you didn’t want to just go up to a stranger’s house and knock on the door.
Settling in Rupanyup
Things are different in Rupanyup, where the pair “know most of the people in the town”, Bobbi says.
They first started sizing up options for their future home while on a nine-month cruise around the world in 2024.
Portugal, Uruguay, Mauritius and a couple of Caribbean islands made the shortlist.
But when it came to crunch time, they decided the easiest move was to return to Australia, and given one of Tam’s daughters was living in Rupanyup at the time, that’s where they decided to land.
A coffee shop in town, The Blacksmith Rupanyup, has become a beloved local community hub for the couple.
“It’s run by an LGBT couple, and we’ve made other LGBT friends in the area,” Bobbi says.
As of June, their dog Bandit has also joined them from Florida.
‘Touched’ by her online community
Along with Rupanyup locals, Bobbi has been buoyed by another community.
When she retired from NASA in 2019, after more than three decades with the space agency, Bobbi decided to start vlogging on YouTube about her travels.
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 says she’s built a really great community of followers, though she also fields a lot of hateful comments — which she chooses to ignore.
“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’,” she says.
“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.”
She’s even had followers show up to their favourite coffee shop to meet her.
[It’s] really, really cool that you can touch people’s lives that you don’t even know just by telling your own story.
“People have reached out and said, ‘Hey, my partner is trans’, or ‘my child is trans’. And, you know, thank you for showing that as a trans couple, you can travel and do normal things, and it is okay to be out there and be trans and be public and be visible.”
“And those are the moments that really touched me.”
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