Rejecting the HUDdled masses - if they're trans

My apologies for not posting this earlier. It was submitted within the time frame (which ended early July) for public comments on a proposed rule change for HUD enforcing stereotypical, transphobic definitions of male and female on applicants for housing aid.

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In February 2012, a Final rule about HUD’s programs was issued, one which “aimed to ensure that HUD’s housing programs would be open to all eligible individuals and families regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, or marital status.”

However, it did not address how to deal with transgender and gender non-conforming individuals in temporary, emergency shelters and other facilities with shared sleeping quarters or bathing facilities.

On September 21, 2016, an updated final rule was issued, clarifying the issue and noting that people must be treated according to their gender identity “and not on another person’s stereotype-based complaints.”

I note that history to emphasize that the current standard is one which has existed since the fall of 2016 through to the present, which means it was in place across the whole of President Trump’s first term - and its one attempt to undo it, in 2020, was washed away under a flood of public opposition from providers, faith-based partners, domestic violence shelter operators, and more, along with the general public. (It was withdrawn by the Biden administration in April 2021.)

Despite that history, on February 7, 2025 HUD Secretary Scott Turner said the agency simply would stop enforcing the 2016 Equal Access Rule - overruling federal regulations by executive fiat - followed by, on April 28 of this year, an announcement of a proposed formal rule change, formalizing and institutionalizing the anti-trans bigotry the administration had been practicing so far.

This rule would apply to all HUD programs and would allow providers of services, including housing and temporary and emergency shelters, to demand “assurances or evidence” to confirm the claimed sex of the person matches their birth certificate, embracing “immutable biological classification as either male or female” - the right-wing approved way of saying “biology is destiny” - while stripping away any references to “gender,” marking it as “ever-shifting concept” with, it appears to say, no real meaning.

This, bluntly, is pseudo-scientific claptrap. It is ignorance pretending to erudition, bigotry wrapped in bureaucracy, animus cloaked as administration. It takes the documented reality that gender-nonconforming people are significantly more likely to be homeless, significantly more likely to be a victim of violence, significantly more likely to be a target of abuse - and says “We don’t care.”

It takes the documented accounts of gender-nonconforming people that “given the choice between a shelter designated for assigned birth sex or sleeping on the streets, many transgender shelter-seekers would choose the streets” because it’s that much safer - and says “Lalala, we can’t hear you!”

Perhaps most importantly, it ignores - I hope through ignorance because doing it deliberately is much worse - the scientifically-documented hard reality that sex (which is about reproduction) and gender (personality, sense of self) are not the same thing, either functionally or neurologically, as they are mediated by partially-overlapping but different parts of the brain.

One of my all time favorite quotes about living an ethical life says “Always try to be good - but never fail to be kind.” The proposed rule change is neither. It should be withdrawn.