Access to safe and secure housing is sometimes all that stands between transgender people and deadly violence.

The Trump administration is once again attacking LGBTQ people, this time by attempting to undermine the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s protections for transgender people seeking safe shelter.

Their latest proposal out of the Department of Housing and Urban Development attempts to gut protections for transgender people by removing critical equal access protections to regulations meant to ensure the safety of anyone in need of HUD-funded programs.

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You can make a difference.

File a comment below before September 22 to tell HUD that #HousingSavesLives.

Here are a few points to consider while writing your comment (You can copy/paste and personalize for your comment submission):

The Equal Access Rule’s protections against discrimination are critical to ensure safe access to shelter for transgender people experiencing homelessness, survivors of violence, and fleeing disasters.

According to the 2015 US Transgender Survey, nearly one-third of transgender and gender non-binary people experience homelessness at some point in their life; about one-half of transgender and non-binary people who identify as Black, Middle Eastern, Multiracial, or undocumented experienced homelessness at some point in their life.
Before these nondiscrimination protections were put in place, a study by the Center for American Progress and the Equal Rights Center found that only 30% of shelters across 4 states would appropriately house trans women with other women, and one in five shelters would turn them away outright.

Protecting transgender people’s access to gender specific facilities does not endanger the safety or privacy of others.

In 2016, over 300 domestic violence and sexual violence organizations across the country signed a National Consensus Statement. These leaders agree: transgender women victims being served alongside other women is appropriate and not a safety issue.
On July 9, 2019, National Task Force to End Sexual and Domestic Violence wrote to HUD to “strongly oppose” rolling back the Equal Access Rule’s protections for transgender shelter-seekers.
Similar nondiscrimination protections have been in place for years in over 20 states and over 300 localities and have helped increase fairness and opportunity for vulnerable people, and research shows these protections have not produced any increase in public safety issues.

Preserving and enforcing the Equal Access Rule is critical to ensure the safety of transgender people in need of shelter.

While housing transgender people according to their gender identity does not pose a safety issue to others, failing to do so puts transgender people in danger.
According to the 2015 US Transgender Survey, over half of transgender survey respondents who stayed in a shelter in the past year were verbally harassed, physical attacked, and/or sexually assaulted because of their gender identity.

Discrimination is never okay, but this proposal is particulary dangerous as our nation continues to struggle to suppress the coronavirus pandemic.

Shelters are often a person’s best access-point to programs that provide safe, individual housing, a critical need during a global pandemic that endangers anyone who is forced to share living spaces with others, whether outdoors or in a shelter.
During recoveries from economic downturns like the one currently caused by the COVID-19 crisis, homelessness continues to rise even while other economic health indicators—like employment rates and consumer trends—rebound.
- Many transgender people are doing everything they can to stay housed right now but face homelessness when eviction and foreclosure moratoriums are lifted. We will see an increase in homelessness in all communities over the next year.
- HUD should be doing everything they can to scale up housing and homelessness services so they can be available to everyone who needs them, NOT pushing forward with policies that will make it harder to access housing.