How Providers Can Address Homelessness Among Gender-Expansive People

Harmful policy shifts and potential cuts to funding for homeless programs threaten the homelessness response system’s ability to serve everyone in need. Many of these threats target vulnerable groups, like gender-expansive people Gender-Expansive People
People who have changed their identity since birth, and/or do not exclusively and uniformly identify as “female” or “male.” ¹. In addition to specific threats to homeless services, a host of harmful changes to policy and regulations on a national scale are making this group even more vulnerable.

Recent polling suggests that the majority of Americans are concerned about important economic issues like housing affordability and homelessness. Nevertheless, some elected and appointed leaders are reconsidering evidence-based policies and regulations that help all people experiencing housing insecurity and homelessness.

Significantly, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) indicated a desire to reverse years of progress and systematically exclude gender-expansive people from its programs by eliminating the Equal Access Rule, which helps ensure access to safe housing for everyone. In this environment, it is even more important for service providers, organizations, and programs to support the gender-expansive community through inclusive internal policies, procedures, and practices.

This report is broken into two parts: in the first, it explains what recent national data reveals about housing insecurity and homelessness among gender-expansive people. In the second, it provides a detailed list of recommendations that can help service providers and their organizations create more inclusive, welcoming, and effective programs for people experiencing housing insecurity and homelessness.

Why This Data Is Significant

For the first time in its 50-year history, the American Housing Survey (AHS) reported housing data separated by gender in 2024. Sponsored by HUD and conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, the AHS is the most comprehensive national housing survey in the United States. It provides important information about the quality and cost of housing in the United States.

This new data emphasizes that households led by gender-expansive people face greater obstacles to affording safe housing, and suggests the need for policies that protect and uplift this group.

The AHS does not provide intersectional data on gender-expansive households. However, reliable evidence demonstrates that households led by people who are disabled, people of color, youth, or older adults are more likely to face challenges associated with higher cost burdens. Individuals are also more likely to be cost burdened than households led by multiple adults.

Recent efforts to eliminate the collection of gender identity and sexual orientation data will reduce the United States’ ability to understand the LGBTQ+ community’s access to housing. Some local and state governments, as well as private organizations like universities and nonprofits, may choose to continue collecting data about the gender-expansive community. If they do so, they should consider evolving risks to this community’s safety and well-being. At a minimum, this means being clear with respondents about the risks of sharing personal information, especially related to transgender identity and gender-expansive identity. Whenever possible, organizations and individuals collecting data should anonymize it. They should also be able to quickly delete data at the request of the respondent or to preserve the respondent’s safety. While this information is important, personal safety must always be the primary concern.

What the Data Shows: Barriers to Accessing Affordable Housing

Numerous researchers and people with lived experience of homelessness have pointed out that gender-expansive households face some of the greatest challenges securing safe, stable housing. Recent data confirms these observations. In 2023, households led by transgender people were more likely to pay 50 percent or more of their income on housing costs² than the overall population, but especially compared to households led by cisgender men.

Gender-expansive households are also far more likely to rent their home. This is an indication of larger barriers that gender-expansive people face building wealth. Buying a home generally requires job security, a high income, and even social capital. Meanwhile, owning a home can offer protection against rising housing costs, access to tax benefits like mortgage interest and property tax deductions as well as a critical instrument for building wealth.

How Discrimination Impacts Gender-Expansive Housing Access

Gender-expansive households face numerous barriers to housing stability. They are more likely to experience employment and housing discrimination as well as violence from the public. Discrimination creates barriers to education, employment, public assistance, and healthcare, making it challenging to afford housing. For example, gender-expansive people are more likely to be evicted or rejected by landlords. These experiences are traumatizing and make it harder to find, afford, and keep a safe home.

Cost burden and rental trends are important indicators of larger challenges. Cisgender people have access to more robust social networks, services, and income than gender-expansive households. Public and private safety nets often exclude gender-expansive people by imposing requirements that are challenging to meet due to social or structural barriers: many have strict identity document requirements and require that all of these documents align by the sex an individual was assigned at birth. Previous experiences of discrimination may also discourage gender-expansive people from seeking income, housing, or health supports.

Disproportionate Racial and Ethnic Impacts

Many groups of color are also more likely to rent their homes and experience severe housing cost burdens. Policies, practices, and discrimination systematically exclude Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) from building wealth and owning a home. This context continues to impact housing outcomes for gender-expansive people of color.

High Rates of Housing Instability Are Connected with High Rates of Homelessness

Unaffordable housing, coupled with low incomes, also increases homelessness; with these two factors, gender-expansive people — and especially gender-expansive people of color — are significantly more likely to experience homelessness than the overall population.

While research indicates that 4.2 percent of the overall U.S. population will experience homelessness in their lifetime, 30 percent of the gender-expansive population will.³

Once homeless, people in the gender-expansive community also face barriers in accessing supports and have difficulty in finding services that respond adequately to their needs. Given the high rates of violence and harassment that gender-expansive people experience, they may feel unsafe in congregate shelters.

While the Equal Access Rule protects gender-expansive people from discrimination when accessing HUD-funded housing and shelter, it is not equally enforced, and gender-expansive people may not always feel safe reporting discrimination. Case workers may not be trained to respect pronouns, and health workers may not be familiar with gender-expansive people’s specific care needs. These factors create barriers that prevent gender-expansive people from accessing programs that can help resolve homelessness and lead to a disproportionate share of gender-expansive people living unsheltered.

The evidence is clear: housing cost burdens are too high for gender-expansive people and this leads to higher rates of homelessness. No one should be excluded from safe housing and life-saving services. It is especially true that a person’s gender and race should not prevent them from accessing basic necessities.

Policymakers should take seriously the barriers that gender-expansive people, and especially gender-expansive people of color, face to maintain stable housing. Until policymakers follow the evidence and work to remedy these barriers, organizations and service providers play a critical role in supporting the gender-expansive community. They can take important steps to ensure that people of all genders maintain a safe, stable, and affordable place to live.

Recommendations for Programs and Organizations

Housing and service providers must consider their population’s specific needs. This list is not exhaustive; communities should consider ways that they can do as much as they can to support gender-expansive people in their programs. Some communities may find these recommendations challenging to implement and will need to consider which recommendations to prioritize. Regardless, service providers should be aware that each of these recommendations are informed by data, input from gender-expansive people with lived experience of housing insecurity, and professional expertise.

These recommendations can help to ensure that safety nets for people experiencing housing insecurity and homelessness are safer and more accessible. This will contribute to more prosperous and productive communities by ensuring that everyone has the stability and resources they need to thrive.

---

1. Train staff to combat discrimination in shelter and housing environments.

• While HUD’s Equal Access Rule ensures that HUD-funded housing programs are accessible to everyone and remains in effect, communities should continue to ensure that gender-expansive people can access shelter and housing that aligns with their gender identity, regardless of the rule’s status. This makes it easier for everyone to access and maintain stable housing.
• Educate staff and clients about discrimination and how to report it. Evidence suggests that discrimination based on gender is severely underreported. While only sex, not gender, is explicitly protected under the Fair Housing Act, different states and localities do prohibit gender discrimination in all housing — regardless of whether it receives funding from HUD. Building community awareness of legal and illegal treatment can help ensure that gender-expansive people do not face barriers accessing support.
• Post anti-discrimination laws and policies in public places, including methods to report discrimination.

---

2. Work to create and facilitate safe shelter and housing environments. While these recommendations can help all clients feel safe, they are especially impactful for gender-expansive people.

• Organizations should make every effort to only refer clients to safe and welcoming housing and service environments. Whenever possible, housing navigators and other staff should partner with gender-expansive clients and staff to ensure that housing options meet their needs.
• Create a plan to help clients acquire official records and documents. To the greatest extent possible, ensure that these reflect the person’s gender identity. This helps to facilitate access to public benefits and other programs that can improve housing stability.
• Ensure that staff understand why correct pronoun usage is important. Make sure that staff at all levels know to ask for people’s pronouns and use them correctly.
• Empower gender-expansive clients to contribute to developing/maintaining an anti-harassment policy in all shelters and housing units. Ensure that people know where to go if they feel unsafe.
• Provide clothing and hygiene items that are inclusive of gender-expansive people’s needs.

---

3. Identify and embrace new partnerships and approaches to ensure that gender-expansive community members can access support.

• Providers should consider partnering with housing-focused mutual aid groups or other organizations that are led by and for gender-expansive people. These groups may help to identify impactful alternatives to formal systems and programs.
• Establish and utilize flexible funding pools. Some public programs at all levels of government have rules that make it difficult to support non-traditional household structures. In these situations, flexible funding pools can be helpful in providing housing support.

---

4. Be trauma-informed: When asking questions about an individual’s past, ensure that they have resources to go to if questions are triggering.

• Only ask for the information that is strictly necessary for providing services.
• Ensure that staff explain why they are requesting specific information, what that information will and won’t be used for, who will have access to it and the risks involved in providing it.
• Empower clients to opt out of sharing information about themselves if they do not feel comfortable doing so. Make every effort to ensure that this does not impact their access to services but be clear if it will.
• To the greatest extent practical, guarantee privacy and anonymity when requesting information related to gender identity.

---

5. Do not exclusively segregate gender-expansive households to gender-expansive-specific services, especially when it is likely that fewer of these services exist. Ask for your client’s preferences, but inform them when these preferences cannot be met and ask if they would like to consider other options.

• Services that support cisgender people also support gender-expansive people and should be allocated to them equitably.
• To the greatest extent possible, provide support no matter what a household or family looks like. Unmarried partnerships, chosen families that may include roommates, and other arrangements among gender-expansive people are valid and should not present barriers to accessing shelter, housing or services.

---

6. Ensure that your coordinated entry system adequately reflects the risk of homelessness in your community, especially for gender-expansive people.

• Gender-expansive people are often underrepresented and misreported in community data due to fears of exclusion and discrimination, poor data quality, and bias. It is important to consider how this may impact estimates of the gender-expansive population’s size in a community. At a minimum, providers should never assume that there are zero gender-expansive people in their service area when analyzing and building a prioritization approach.
• Despite evidence showing the need for targeted social and medical supports for gender-expansive households, they are less likely to receive Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) and Rapid Re-Housing (RRH) than their cisgender counterparts. Providers should work to identify and rectify the sources of these inequities.

---

7. Hire and train gender-expansive people with lived expertise of homelessness to contribute to the leadership and direct services offered by organizations.

• This can help to address the gender-expansive community’s specific needs and build trust in your programs.

---

Many organizations are understandably worried about how changes in federal policy, regulations, and funding may impact their work and their clients. These threats may reduce available resources and create a chilling effect among providers doing their best to offer life-saving services to people in need. Service providers should be sure to regularly reevaluate their approach to serving their community and, whenever possible, make changes to meet gender-expansive people’s specific needs. Often, doing so can help improve housing outcomes for everyone. Providers can also advocate for structural changes in federal, state, and local policies that will make it easier for gender-expansive people to maintain housing stability.

Ultimately, communities cannot prosper if they leave certain groups behind. This list of recommendations can help providers continue to address disparities in housing stability, create more equitable communities, and ensure that everyone has a place to call home.