The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) wants to repeal the HUD Equal Access Rule protecting LGBTQ people from discrimination in seeking housing and housing resources.

Submit a public comment by June 29, 2026.

The Proposal

The Equal Access Rule has protected LGBTQ people from discrimination in seeking housing resources for more than a decade. The first Trump administration tried to amend the rule in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, to exclude protections for transgender people. The proposal was withdrawn in 2021 by the Biden administration.

The current proposal would again require all HUD/CPD (Community Planning and Development) programs to “place, serve, and accommodate” based on “sex” as defined per inaccurate “two sexes” Trump executive order that attempts to censor the existence of transgender people, and ignores intersex people altogether.

It would also permit facilities to “require reasonable assurances or evidence to establish sex,” a vague direction that opens the door to invasive questions, dangerous exams, and unacceptable demands. These enforcement measures endanger every woman and girl, who are seeking services at an already difficult and vulnerable time. Any woman who does not conform with a shelter’s view of her gender could be refused service.

The Harms in Adding Barriers to Safe Housing

Newly released data from the 2022 U.S. Trans Survey reveals that nearly one in three respondents has experienced homelessness in their lifetime – eight times the rate of the general population.

LGBTQ youth are also at extreme risk, comprising about 40% of the homeless youth population despite making up just 10% of the youth population overall. The rule change offers no recognition and protection for highly vulnerable LGBTQ youth.

Threats to funding could lead to preemptive cuts in services, harming all who need them. The proposed rule change would circumvent established state laws and local ordinances that have enshrined protections against discrimination based on gender identity. All in the LGBTQ community would be impacted, as the rule change removes sexual orientation and gender identity nondiscrimination provisions across all HUD programs.

Submit a public comment by June 29, 2026.

No Evidence to Support Rolling Back Protections

The federal government has produced no research to show a reason to roll back protections for vulnerable people. Any claims of risk in allowing transgender people to access shelters that align with their gender identity are also not supported by evidence. In 2020, the Center for American Progress reported that the protections have applied to Violence Against Women Act programs funded in the previous seven years, requiring transgender women to be housed according to their gender identity, to zero reported incidents.

“Despite the intense media scrutiny that transgender women using women’s facilities face,” the report stated, “no evidence demonstrates that they are a threat to cisgender women’s safety in shelters. In fact, transgender people themselves face a disproportionate amount of violence in shelters: 70 percent of transgender people who stayed in a shelter in 2015 reported some form of mistreatment, including harassment, forced removal, or physical violence,” the report found.

Send a comment to HUD

Additional Risks

In addition to being at a staggering risk of homelessness and housing instability, and four times more likely to be victims of violent crime than non-transgender people, transgender people face high levels of violence, discrimination, and poverty.

The GLAAD ALERT Desk (Anti-LGBTQ Extremism Reporting Tracker) has documented anti-LGBTQ incidents across the country over recent years, with 52% of incidents specifically targeting transgender people in 2025, incidents that include physical violence and harassment.

Removing access to housing for vulnerable members of the community also puts them at risk of health conditions and access to care that threatens their personal health and impacts public health, including mental health care, and access to HIV treatment and prevention.

The Proposal is Inaccurate, and Broadly Harmful

The HUD proposal, like the Trump executive order it is based on, is inaccurate, and flawed. It ignores the reality of the diversity of human beings and of our local communities. Science, medicine, world cultures, and history recognize that gender expression and identity exist across a spectrum, not in a rigid binary. The HUD proposal and executive order also ignore the existence of intersex people, who were not considered at all by HUD, nor were the harms and consequences they would face from the proposed rule change.

The proposal allows local providers to ignore state laws and local ordinances designed to protect people from discrimination. Laws designed and passed to protect people should apply to everyone. Allowing some to ignore local law to legalize discrimination does not keep anyone safe.

The proposal allows providers to “confirm” sex assigned at birth. This can include dangerous invasions of privacy, including anatomy and genital inspections. These measures threaten the safety of all, including women and girls who are not transgender, deterring people in need from seeking out emergency services and resources. This is not “protecting women.”

The Trump administration has proposed or issued more than 500 policies and statements to attack LGBTQ Americans, weaponizing and censoring federal agencies to target the recognition, health, and safety of transgender Americans. While efforts have been blocked in multiple courts, these attempts come at a great cost for transgender and nonbinary people as well as gender nonconforming and cisgender people. The focus on targeting a small percentage of the population with disinformation and fearmongering is dehumanizing, and a distraction from efforts to solve actual problems like the high cost of housing,  food, health care, gas, utilities, child care, and insurance.

Elected officials and governments that carry out this targeting are spending taxpayer resources that could be focused on proven solutions to improve opportunity and strengthen communities that benefit all.

The Proposal Conflicts with Established Law and Legal Authority

Executive orders are not law, and do not change federal or state law or the Constitution.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Bostock decision ruled that discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act and its protections based on sex. Congress voted to expand the 1964 protections with the passage of the Fair Housing Act as part of the larger Civil Rights Act of 1968. The Bostock decision is unequivocal that “sex” is a protected characteristic under the Fair Housing Act that encompasses both gender identity and sexual orientation.

Congress did not delegate authority to HUD to define “sex.” There is nothing in the Fair Housing Act, or any other law, giving HUD power to define “sex,” or overrule what has already been decided by Congress and the judiciary.

More than a decade of progress and protections is on the line.

Take action now to defend the Equal Access Rule by submitting a public comment here.