The Trump administration’s push to exclude transgender Americans is moving to the nation’s homeless shelters. On Tuesday, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) introduced a proposed rule that requires federally funded shelters to house prospective tenants based on their birth sex alone.

Advocates say that if made official, the new rule will prevent scores of unhoused transgender people from accessing safe emergency sleeping arrangements. 

“It’s incredibly damaging,” Hannah Adams, a senior staff attorney at the National Housing Law Project told The 19th. “It’s a really, really cruel and violent rule that will cause unknown numbers of transgender individuals to be denied shelter when they need it, and to in many cases, probably choose not even to try to access shelter because of the fear of experiencing discrimination, harassment, of violence.” 

It is estimated that up to 40 percent of the nation’s homeless youth population identifies as LGBTQ+. In 2021, The Trevor Project reported that 38 percent of transgender girls and 39 percent of transgender boys experienced homelessness in their lifetimes. 

Under previous administrations, HUD had sought to expand support for LGBTQ+ people seeking shelter, advocates said. In 2012, the agency made a rule that barred discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. In 2016, HUD updated the rule to explicitly require shelters to take into account a person’s self-identified gender when deciding where to place them. 

But on his first day in office in January 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that narrowly defines two immutable sexes from birth, an order that has been used to gut transgender protections across areas of government. HUD said its proposed rule aims to bring the department into alignment with that executive order. 

LGBTQ+ rights advocates say it not only greenlights discrimination against transgender Americans but requires it. 

“They’re clearly picking and choosing who they want to be safe and the folks that they don’t want to be safe,” said Currey Cook, senior counsel with the LGBTQ+ rights organization Lambda Legal. The message, Cook said, was that “you either need to put yourself in an unsafe situation or you’re just out of luck.” 

The proposed rule now goes through a 60-day comment period, after which HUD will make its final ruling. Cook and Adams say that regardless of the feedback HUD gets, they strongly suspect the administration will move forward with the rule.