At a certain point, I’ve come to accept that being trans during Donald Trump’s presidential administration means being prepared at any time for a headline that will simultaneously break my heart and crush my soul. I came out in 2016, celebrating the early milestones of my transition even as the country descended toward his election. To this day, I still have to look for joy not just for myself, but in spite of a president who embodies the ways so many are happy to view people like me as a headline-generating political football.
This week offered another chance to live out this paradox of both expecting the worst and still somehow being shocked when the bad news breaks. As reported by Katelyn Burns at Vox last week, a proposed new rule from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) seeks to again regulate gender by allowing federally funded homeless shelters to sex-segregate trans people as shelter operators see fit. This comes more than a year after HUD proposed a rule that would allow religious freedom to be a reason to deny trans people admission to shelters or house trans women with men.
According to a July 1 press release from HUD, the new proposed change to a 2016 Equal Access rule (aka, the “Gender Identity Rule”) would allow shelters to sort people based on criteria they set, like “biological sex” or the gender specified on legal documents (which can be difficult and expensive for trans people to update). Most cruelly, the document, which was leaked to Vox, appears to show that the rule offers guidance on how to actually spot a trans woman, seeking to turn the ability to clock Adam’s apples and beard shadows into an outgrowth of federal policy.
“This important update will empower shelter providers to set policies that align with their missions,” said HUD Secretary Ben Carson in the statement. “The Federal Government should empower [mission-focused shelters], not mandate a single approach that overrides local law and concerns.”
That’s remarkably appropriate language from Carson, the former Republican presidential candidate who has made excluding trans women from women’s shelters a signature issue of his tenure at HUD. As reported by the Washington Post last September, Carson shocked HUD staffers with remarks calling us “big, hairy men” in — of all places — San Francisco, a city with “the first legally recognized transgender district in the world.” (Speaking to the Post, an unnamed senior HUD official denied that Carson ever uses derogatory language to refer to “transgendered individuals.”) Just on the other side of Union Square from the San Francisco HUD office is that district in the Tenderloin, where the city has spent the last few months kicking out homeless folks.
This all underscores the underlying cruelty of the proposed rule change. Like the trans military ban, the real threat of this policy change is material. The military is a force for imperial evil, but it was also believed to be the largest employer of trans people in the country — a horror unto itself that is tied to broader employment discrimination, something no Supreme Court ruling can undo on its own — making a ban on trans enlistees both a symbol of trans exclusion from public institutions and a huge economic hit for thousands of people.
Now, as the entire nation faces a housing crisis spawned by irresponsible leadership during the pandemic, Carson wants HUD to make sure people running homeless shelters feel empowered to make life more difficult for trans women. It frankly doesn’t matter to me that whoever wrote the rule is smart enough to know they can’t legalize discrimination based on transness because, by the time this kind federal policy trickles down to the interactions it regulates, the letter of the law often matters less than the spirit of it.
And the spirit of this kind of rule is, to paraphrase Adam Serwer, just another point of cruelty in the Trump administration’s impressionist masterpiece of inhumanity. Even as a pandemic threatens the housing of millions of people across the country, potentially exploding the U.S. homeless population, the leaked document makes it look like the administration is more worried about making sure shelter operators know how to most effectively be transphobic than taking any steps to keep people in their homes or help those without them find permanent shelter during the double-barrel crisis of the pandemic and the recession.
There are girls like me who will be in dire situations, looking for a port in a storm. Instead, they may only find someone who’s sizing up their body, inspecting their chin for stubble, or assessing whether the fruit of the tree of knowledge is lodged in their throat. That’s not new, and it would be naive to assume that a proposed federal rule could create that out of thin air — just as it would be naive to assume that the Obama-era rule Trump’s HUD is undercutting entirely stopped these things from happening in the first place. In the 2015 National Center for Trans Equality survey, 70% of respondents who had stayed in a shelter in the past year said they had experienced mistreatment because they were trans; 26% of those who had experienced homelessness said they avoided shelters out of the fear of that kind of mistreatment.
The proposed HUD rule is just a continuation of the same sick games powerful people play with trans lives. Civil rights, legal protections, accommodating rules — all of these things can only attempt to create a world where trans people don’t have to worry about our gender being turned into other people’s problems. They can’t guarantee protection. Meanwhile, moves like the proposed HUD rule create more space for discrimination.
And it is in spite of this fact that trans people have the resilience we do. It is in spite of the ways transness intersects with other oppressions — based on race, based on immigration status, based on class — that Black and Brown, immigrant, and working-class trans women are still the leaders of the real movement for queer liberation. It is in spite of the historical failures to provide for so many that our foremothers like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera made housing a key plank of their organizing work in the years after Stonewall.
This grassroots work arises because of the ways official systems fail us, because of the ways decades of willful ignorance have transformed into efforts to re-erase us. Whether or not HUD’s new rule moves from proposal to reality, federally funded women’s shelters are just one of the places where the tensions will continue between our basic material needs and the official regulation of gender. The administration will likely continue to try and push us out of public life because that’s what they’ve tried to do, again and again.
Stay up-to-date on the 2020 election. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take!
Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: How Trump's Anti-Transgender Policies Could Hurt Young People
