Hi Marilyn, thanks for your question. First of all, that is great that you are considering becoming a historian. I'm a cis woman but it the world needs more trans historians! And more women too - there can never be enough of us! :)

It would be easier to answer your question if you told us more about what type of history you're interested in specializing in. Of course, you don't have to have a specialty decided yet - and even if you did, it might change as you went along! I also don't know what country you're based in, and of course, the safety of trans women can fluctuate even with a certain country, as I'm sure you know. However, I'll try to give an overview of reasons you may or may not need to travel internationally as a historian.

The main reason to travel would be if you are interested in studying the history of another country. For example, if you are based in the US and would like to study the history of France, at some point you would want to go to France itself. This is because historians often make use of primary sources that are only available in the country they are studying. These could be medieval manuscripts, oral history archives, newspaper archives, government records, archaeological sites, etc. Increasingly, these sorts of materials are becoming available online, but there are some things which are not. Oftentimes you can only get the full context of the digitized material by visiting the place in person. However, there is a growing awareness in the field of how the expectation of visiting the country you're studying unfairly favours people who can more easily afford to travel internationally, so the impetus to digitize more resources continues.

Sometimes you may also want to gather new ethnographic data to complement your historical research if you are researching more recent modern history. For example, I study the history of women's work song in the Scottish herring industry from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. Most of my research is in historical archives like newspaper and oral history repositories, but I also interview elderly women who did that work about their experiences. Now for me, this doesn't require international travel since I study the country I live in, but if you were interested in recent historical phenomena in another country, you may really want to travel to interview people in person.

The other main reason historians travel is to attend conferences. Most sub-fields of history will have a few big international conferences that draw scholars from all over the world. In medieval history, for example, the two biggies are the International Congress of Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo in the US and the International Medieval Congress in Leeds in the UK. Scholars from all over North America and Europe, and sometimes further afield, will congregate at these major events. They're great opportunities for networking and absorbing a lot of new research in a short amount of time. You get to meet people who are just as enthusiastic about your field as you are, and you get to present your research to an audience of your peers who will (hopefully) stimulate your research in new directions. And of course, some people treat it as an annual vacation since they get to see something new.

In-person conferences have the same drawbacks as the expectation that historians travel internationally for research, however. While many universities provide funding for you to go to a conference you are speaking at, sometimes they do not, which makes it a very expensive undertaking. They can also be very difficult for disabled academics to attend since they require long days of constant stimulation in addition to the exhaustions and obstacles of international travel. And of course, increasingly there are criticisms of the climate cost of these conferences. During the pandemic, many conferences have moved online or to hybrid models. This has made them way more accessible to many disabled academics (like myself!) and often significantly lowers the cost. On the other hand, some people find online conferences less accessible (e.g. Deaf academics when captioning options are poor), so some mixture of in-person and online will probably continue.

If you study the history of the country you live in, you are much less likely to have to travel internationally for conferences. I also would hope that there are many countries you can study where you would feel safe travelling for conferences or research. International conferences are rarely hosted in places that have nothing to do with the topic -- so for example, you're unlikely to have a conference on Peruvian archaeology in Scotland. There are exceptions, especially when it comes to the histories of places that were colonized by European powers -- these conferences might be hosted in Europe or the US rather than the country itself. Occasionally a field will just have a weird quirk, like the fact that so much medieval Nubian history is studied in Poland, of all places. But overall, if you leave out places you don't feel comfortable travelling to when trying to decide what countries to specialize in, it's unlikely you'd be compelled to travel to those unsafe places for your work.

Hope that helps!