Anti-Trans Housing on Religious Grounds

In May, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) proposed that federally-funded homeless shelters should have the right to turn transgender people away on religious grounds, and/or to force trans women to be housed based on their biological sex, rather than gender identity. Some backlash around this new proposal comes from those who are in support of the Equal Access Rule (2012), which prohibits federal housing discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. This proposal also comes off an incident in 2017 in which the HUD removed information on its website that pertained to instructions for emergency shelters on how to effectively serve homeless transgender people and it also removed policy proposals that would require shelters to inform LGBTQ residents of their rights within HUD-funded housing. According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, 1 out of 8 transgender people have experienced homelessness within the last year -- "putting them at risk of physical and sexual violence and being forced into sex work", the probability of which would most likely increase if this policy proposition is approved. However, this is not the first time federally-funded housing has been at odds with LGBTQ rights and protections.

In the early 2000’s, the Salvation Army, a Christian nonprofit homeless shelter/soup kitchen/thrift store (which, coincidentally, receives federal funding), had numerous scandals in which it adhered by anti-LGBTQ housing and general help practices. The most notable of which were: in 1998 the Salvation Army of San Francisco turned down $3.5 million in aid because they would be required to give spousal benefits to same-sex partners, in 2001 the United States Salvation Army wanted to make a deal with the Bush Administration that would make it exempt from local policies banning anti-gay discrimination, and in 2012 a worker at a Salvation Army in Vermont was fired after it was found out she was bisexual. The Salvation Army has since established, via its website, that anti-LGBTQ policy and action is no longer tolerated within the organization.

It seems to me that the HUD proposition not only contradicts the Equal Access Rule of 2012 (also an HUD policy – I wish I had the time and space to get into the hypocrisy of this new proposal in relation to the information presented on their website, but I don’t), but it also allows for an establishment of religion within shelters funded by taxpayers, and this would allow for the return of early-2000s-Salvation-Army-style homeless shelters, which, in turn would lead to a much more dangerous life for transgender homeless people.

Federally-funded homeless shelters receive money from the government, and this money from the government actually comes from the public – in the form of taxes. This violates the Establishment clause of the First Amendment because it is establishing religion (though not a specific one) within the government via publically-funded housing programs. The HUD proposal violates this clause because, by being federally funded, these homeless shelters are a representation of the government, and allowing them to discriminate against the transgender community based on religious grounds is essentially a government-endorsement of those religious grounds. In terms of the Salvation Army, however, though they do receive federal funding, they also receive private funding and funding via sales at their thrift shops. This makes their religious establishment a bit more of a grey area; because, while federal funding of a Christian organization promotes establishment of religion within the government, much of the private funding for the Salvation Army comes from churches and other religious organizations, as well as the thrift stores, and privately-funded organizations are free to establish and adhere to religion as they please. 

Though the Salvation Army has since denounced many of its anti-LGBTQ statements and actions in the early 2000’s, it seems as though the public housing sector, as well as other sectors of the government (such as the military and the health and human services department) are becoming increasingly anti-LGBTQ, specifically anti-trans, since Trump took office. Mara Keisling, Executive Director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, recently said in an interview with the Washington Post, “The Trump administration is, once again, targeting the most vulnerable trans people by empowering shelters to turn people away and deny them equal access to services.” And, while not all of laws that have been proposed or passed have allowed anti-trans practices based on religious grounds, many of them, including the HUD proposal and the Department of Health and Human Services proposal, have – and in my opinion, they promote an establishment of religion within the government.