Eight years ago, I woke up early in my King’s Cross student halls ready to fly out to California for a family visit. After nearly a year away, I was finally going back home. Bleary eyed and already late for Heathrow, I checked the New York Times website from my phone, expecting to see the news confirming Hillary Clinton as the new president. The headline I saw filled me with shock, dread and an unnerving panic: “Trump wins.”

Two presidential elections ago, I feel like I sleepwalked into a Trump presidency – dazed, in disbelief and caught completely off guard. This time around, though, I’m wide awake. As an expat living in London, I’m absolutely terrified of what another four years of Trump in power will mean for women – not just in my home country, but everywhere.

Josseli Barnica, a 28-year-old mother in Texas, was already 17 weeks pregnant when her pregnancy was no longer viable, and her miscarriage was putting her at risk of an infection. Her doctors said they couldn’t deliver the baby until there was no heartbeat because “it would be a crime to give her an abortion”. For nearly two days, Barnica suffered in pain as her uterus was exposed to bacteria. Not long after, she died of an infection. It was completely preventable, according to medical experts.

Barnica isn’t the only woman who has needlessly lost her life due to ill-conceived abortion bans in recent years. And if Trump triumphs today, she won’t be last.

Growing up in the conservative suburbs of Houston, Texas, politics became part of my life the moment I was heckled on the playground for my brown skin on the day after 9/11. My identity as a child of immigrant parents became a weapon for others to use against me when I was just 10 years old. During Trump’s previous presidency, I witnessed and experienced even more overt acts of racism, both in the US and in the UK. At the borders, on public transport and even at work. And if Trump, a presidential candidate with a long history of sexual misconduct, wins again, my identity as a woman will be weaponised too – whether I like it or not.

In the decade that I’ve lived in London, I’ve watched my country become more polarised, more intolerant and ever more unrecognisable. I worry that I’ll feel even more like a stranger if a presidential candidate who considers immigrants “animals” and “not human” is empowered to sow even more division. I worry more for my countrywomen, who will have to fight even harder for agency over their own bodies. I worry that if I never left Texas, it could have been me in Josseli Barnica’s place.

I worry about what the future holds under another Trump regime: more restrictions on women’s rights, more men radicalised to hate and hurt women, more teen pregnancies, more disinformation, more violence, more attacks on democracy itself. And my biggest fear of all is that this open war on women makes its way to the UK.

The last time Trump was elected, I heard his anti-immigration rhetoric mirrored in the Brexit campaign. While he was in power, racists became more emboldened on this side of the pond. Violence against women and girls has become a “national emergency” in the UK, according to Maggie Blyth, the police national lead for VAWG. Abortion still hasn’t been decriminalised in this country. And the new leader of the Tory party is a politician who doesn’t consider misogyny a hate crime.

So if Trump succeeds and uses his executive power to control and disenfranchise American women further, will it have ripple effects here in the UK? I’m terrified that it could.

I feel anxious knowing that the outcome of the election is so far out of my own control but will impact everyone I love at home. I have a sinking feeling of dread that first thing tomorrow morning (or however long it takes for the final call to be made), I might see the same headline I did in November 2016. That the next four years will feel like a daily battle between staying informed and handling my outrage. Eight years ago, I couldn’t even conceive of the idea of a Trump victory as realistic. Today, I know it’s not only possible but very close to becoming a reality. 

At a critical time when economic recessions and housing and labour market crises have made merely existing much more difficult, it’s not completely absurd when young men turn to the likes of Andrew Tate and women aspire to become tradwives. For some, it’s easier living in a fantasy world than existing in real life right now, even if that fantasy is fake – even if it hurts others or themselves.

I’ve been familiar with the name Kamala Harris since my first magazine internship in San Francisco, more than 10 years ago. At the time, she was the attorney general of California. And true to the Bay Area spirit, our newsroom had a healthy scepticism regarding her leadership, and we held her accountable in our reporting. But even then, she was already forging an untrodden path. According to her own White House biography, she was “the first woman, the first Black American, and the first South Asian American to be elected” to the position of US vice president.

Harris is by no means a perfect candidate. Despite calling for a ceasefire and an end to the suffering in Palestine, she has been criticised for saying she will “always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself” with regard to its actions in Gaza, but I agree with US senator Bernie Sanders: Trump would be much worse.

There are precious few politicians who look or sound even a little bit like me. As a young girl, anytime someone would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would always say, without a hint of hesitation, that I wanted to become the first woman president of the United States. And although that wasn’t the dream I ultimately followed, nearly 30 years later it feels like we could finally see a woman take up her rightful place at the highest level of leadership. A smart woman, an ambitious woman, a competent woman of colour. Someone a little more like me.

In the midst of my fear, there is hope. There is so much left to fight for, and those of us with something to lose have the burden and the responsibility to keep advocating for our basic human rights: our right to representation, to medical treatment, to safety, to love. Our right to exist. 

Images: Getty