Fed to Remove Housing Protection for Trans Americans
The Department of Housing and Urban Development is rolling back Obama-era protections for trans people in federally funded housing.
by Aly Gibbs
In “transgender people have had it too good, for too long” news: The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced on Monday that they plan to remove anti-discrimination measures for LGBTQ+ Americans for applicants in federally funded housing. If you think this is bad news, think again! Trans people don’t actually require shelter for safety, and there’s no ongoing economic downturn as a result of a completely meaningless and illegal war in the Middle East inflating gas prices to record highs.
What is this, the 1970s?! Wait, I mean… what is this, the 2000s?! Oh man, this country sucks.
Not unlike Title IX protections, the use of anti-discrimination in housing for LGBTQ+ Americans as a political football goes right back to the Obama administration. In 2012, then President Barack Obama’s HUD published their Equal Access Rule, which disallowed HUD-assisted housing programs from asking applicants about their sex, sexual orientation or gender identity in most cases. In 2016, they bolstered that rule by requiring HUD housing programs to “establish, amend, or maintain program admissions, occupancy, and operating policies and procedures in a manner to ensure equal access to programs, benefits, services, and accommodation for individuals based on their gender identity without intrusive questioning or being asked to provide documentation.”
During Trump’s first term, HUD rolled back those protections, among many, many, many… many other blows to federal protections for LGBTQ+ Americans. Then, in 2021, Joe Biden’s HUD instituted new federal protections in housing after a 2020 Supreme Court ruling (Bostock v. Clayton County) that Title VII prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sex applied to gay and transgender Americans. Hey, do you remember when the Supreme Court had enough liberal Justices to function as anything other than a fascist president’s rubber stamp machine? What a time to be alive!
As I’m sure you know by now, as soon as he took office for a second term last year, Donald Trump issued a series of anti-LGBTQ+ Executive Orders, including a declaration that transgender Americans simply do not exist and will not be acknowledged by the federal government, which believes there are only two genders, don’t change my mind. In February, HUD Secretary Scott Turner declared that all enforcement of the Obama-era protections would be halted indefinitely.
On Monday, Turner issued another statement titled, “Secretary Scott Turner Moves to Restore Biological Truth and Sanity to HUD’s Policies,” proving that he’s as much of a brown nosing sycophantic little bitch as you might guess any remaining policymakers in the federal government must be.
“God created two sexes: male and female. The Left’s war on biological reality through radical gender ideology will no longer take precedence over the safety and security of America’s most vulnerable women,” he said, stupidly. “This proposed rule will bring biological truth and sanity back to HUD’s policies.”
The statement goes on to explain: “Under the proposed guidance, HUD would remove radical definitions of gender identity, sexual orientation, and gender, replacing them with sex across nearly 50 regulations.
HUD’s Equal Access Rule would be adjusted to protect women’s shelters and replace the prohibition on discrimination against “gender identity” in all Community Planning and Development programs. Common terms such as father, mother, man, woman, boy, and girl would be defined consistent with biological reality across HUD’s regulations.”
Cool.
You can read about these impending changes in slightly more detail on the Federal Register. The short of it is that HUD will now allow any HUD program to “require reasonable assurances or evidence to establish a person's sex,” but explains in a footnote that they will not define reasonable assurances, and leave that up to the programs entirely. Perhaps they’ll simply force you to expose your genitals to apply for Section 8 housing, a process that should be familiar to any trans person who’s spent a lot of time hanging out with the TSA.
Oh, and they intend to make it so that their rules preempt any local laws regarding anti-discrimination in housing, which means Attorneys General in basically every normal state in America are going to have to file yet another lawsuit against the federal government in this, the unending era of lawsuits against the federal government.
The cherry on top of this discrimination sundae is a little disclaimer that reads, “HUD acknowledges that this rulemaking would result in denying individuals who claim a different gender identity than their sex being denied access to their preferred single-sex shelters or their preferred accommodations in other shelters. These individuals would need to find other shelter options that are not limited to a single sex or seek admission to a single-sex shelter consistent with their sex.”
Yes, we know this is discriminatory and will require you, a trans woman, to go bunk with men at homeless shelters and other housing programs that receive funding from HUD. That’s simply not our problem! We advise you simply go find other accommodation, a thing that is both easy and fun to do, especially when you’re homeless.
The public comment phase of the proposed rule changes ends on June 29, so you can head over to that Federal Register page and tell them to eat shit, but I doubt it’s going to change much. I don’t have any advice or hopeful remarks for you guys on this one, unfortunately. This just fucking sucks, and it’s going to make unhoused trans people less safe, and all we can do to counter it is try to support people who need mutual aid and the organizations that provide it.
Aly Gibbs (She/They) is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
