Rule affects transgender rights, shelters

Chris Cameron

The Trump administration Friday published its rule allowing single-sex homeless shelters to exclude transgender people from facilities that correspond with their gender identity, pressing forward with limits on transgender rights despite a Supreme Court ruling that extended civil rights protection to transgender people.

The new rule on homeless shelters will go into effect after a 60-day comment period. Administration officials argue that it will make women’s shelters safer by preventing men from gaining access to abuse or attack women seeking protection.

Transgender rights groups say it is more likely to force some transgender women to go to men’s shelters where they could face assault.

The policy is just a small piece of a broader, governmentwide effort to diminish protections for transgender people. President Donald Trump’s 2017 ban on transgender people enlisting or serving in the military has now been in effect for more than a year. A Department of Health and Human Services rule erasing protections for transgender patients against discrimination by doctors, hospitals and health insurance companies was finalized in June.

The Education Department has rescinded Obamaera rules that allowed transgender students to use bathrooms of their choice or participate in sports corresponding with their gender identity. The Justice Department has moved to roll back protections for transgender people in federal prisons, and the Office of Personnel Management has suspended protections for transgender employees of federal contractors.

“Across the board, when you’re cut out of the federal protections you used to have, people are more likely to experience discrimination, and they’re less likely to talk about it,” said Robin Maril, an associate legal director at the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBT rights group. “It has a significant chilling effect.”

The Department of Housing and Urban Development did not respond to questions about the new shelter rule, but Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development, has previously expressed concern about “big, hairy men” entering women’s shelters.

“The current HUD rule permits any man, simply by asserting that his gender is female, to obtain access to women’s shelters and even precludes the shelter from asking for identification,” Carson said last week in a letter to Democratic lawmakers in the House obtained by The New York Times.

Transgender rights groups say transgender women are the ones at risk. In a report released in 2011 by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, more than half of the transgender people who had used a homeless shelter said they had been harassed.

The rule, first announced three weeks ago, was published in the Federal Register a month after the Supreme Court ruled that transgender people cannot be fired or otherwise discriminated against in the workforce, because federal protections against sex discrimination apply to gay, bisexual and transgender people. The ruling in the case, Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, was a landmark moment for gay and transgender rights.