Ten years ago, the Bethlehem Haven emergency women’s shelter was faced with a decision. Homeless transgender women were turning up at its doorstep and the shelter’s administrators had to decide whether to admit them.
For Marcia Snowden, who lived as a nun for 36 years, it was a no-brainer.
“I didn’t wrestle with it at all. All we saw was a person who was going to be out in the cold if we didn’t find a place for them,” Snowden says. “These are people. And to see the agony in their eyes — there is no place for them to go — was very, very difficult. I could not have turned them away.”
And thus began an off-the-books policy of admitting trans women to Bethlehem Haven.
Today, the shelter is listed on the Allegheny County website as the shelter for trans individuals. Its evolution over the years is a model for how shelters can adapt to meet the needs of transgender homeless populations.
Under city and county law, shelters can’t deny access to a homeless person because of that person’s gender identity. But despite local directives and federal regulations, experts say, shelters locally and around the country aren’t as welcoming as Bethlehem Haven.
“Transgender people across the country have regularly reported being turned away from shelters,” says Harper Jean Tobin, director of policy for The National Center for Transgender Equality. “They’ve been told, ‘We don’t serve transgender people here,’ or ‘You need to show legal documentation, medical documentation proving your gender.’ People are being housed according to the gender they were assigned at birth even if that’s not how they identify or live. And [there are] high rates of people saying they have been abused, harassed, thrown out or sexually assaulted in shelters.”
Despite the government mandates in effect, critics say trans individuals are still being discriminated against at local shelters. While the county maintains that all of its shelters can accommodate homeless trans men and women, today, out of the estimated 3,700 people receiving homeless services from the county, only two identify as trans.
While it’s possible that many of the county’s trans clients aren’t identifying themselves, it’s difficult to overlook the paucity of trans individuals in the county’s tally, especially when national statistics say 1 in 5 trans individuals will experience homelessness at some point in their lifetimes.
“We know that a lot of folks who are transgender who aren’t in our shelter are on the street,” says Caroline Woodward, of Bethlehem Haven. “[Many] will be evicted from their home because of their gender choice.”
Moving forward, Allegheny County’s Department of Human Services says it’s working to make its shelters more accommodating of the trans community. And a newly proposed rule by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development would create further protections for trans men and women while making their experiences in shelters more welcoming.
“I think across the country the transgender community is overrepresented in the homeless community, so we’ve tried to make sure our providers understand that this is a vulnerable population,” says Chuck Keenan, housing coordinator for Allegheny County. “We’re trying to get the impression out that we’re welcoming, and we want to serve them regardless of their gender identity or expression. But I just don’t know that that’s trickling down to the community yet.”
Grow, dream, courage, compassion, integrity. Words like these fill the walls of Bethlehem Haven. The emergency shelter, nestled in an Uptown alleyway, has garnered a glowing reputation for openness to transgender individuals.
It’s a welcome change for Snowden, who served as the director of residential programs at Bethlehem for three years, and says the shelter’s decision to welcome trans women 10 years ago wasn’t celebrated at the time.
“It was a little bit tricky because there was no real policy about transgender people. After I brought one person in, I had called around to the county and everybody just danced around it, and the message I got [was], ‘Just do what you need to do,’” says Snowden. “At that time, there was no discussion. But we were very clear that we would not leave people out on the street.”
Without any directive from the county, Snowden and her colleagues learned how to adapt the shelter to meet the needs of trans women. And they also worried whether their decision to take in such individuals would endanger the shelter’s funding.
“It was a little bit nerve-wracking because a lot of our funding for our shelter and other programs was federal funding, and I thought this was a major violation,” says Snowden. “So the staff would huddle together and say, ‘How are we going to do this?’ And we would just do it, keep it under the radar as much as we could.”
A lot has changed at Bethlehem Haven since then. Eight years ago, there was a separate room for trans women and a separate shower and toilet.
“We’ve grown a lot since then,” says Woodward, Bethlehem Haven’s chief officer of philanthropic engagement and strategic initiatives.
Today, none of the rooms on the emergency floor have doors. And Bethlehem Haven’s staff has received training to make sure the shelter is more welcoming in other ways.
“If someone came in, we’d have a very thoughtful conversation about how far along they were in their transition, and we would ask that very personal question: ‘Have you had a physical change?’” Woodward says. “It was probably six years ago that that all ended, and we just started saying, ‘Come as you are.’ You identify as a woman, you’re accepted as a woman. We don’t have a separate bedroom, we don’t have a separate bathroom or a separate floor to take your shower.”
Bethlehem Haven still makes accommodations for trans women looking for a little more privacy, and in the future, the shelter is planning to move to an all-private-room layout. But for the most part, the shelter is pleased with its facility and how the staff and clients relate to trans tenants.
“When I first came in, it was obvious that the culture was very open and accepting of everyone,” says Sarah Dittoe, Bethlehem’s residential manager. “People who are homeless are already stigmatized, and if you have an identity that isn’t accepted socially, then you’re even more stigmatized.”
Woodward and Dittoe aren’t so complimentary about how other shelters interact with the transgender homeless community.
“There are other shelters that don’t want certain people in their shelter population. The county knows that if another shelter calls and says, ‘I can’t take this person because they don’t fit what we want here’, the county would call us and say, ‘Can you take her?’” says Woodward. “We know it happens. I’m not going to name names, but I know there are shelters around here that [discriminate].”
But a new county intake system for homeless clients seeking shelter promises to make the process of admitting transgender individuals more transparent and equitable.
“The centralized intake process will hopefully help to eliminate some of that discrimination, just by having all shelters not being able to cherry-pick who comes into their programs,” says Dittoe. “I think that process — combined with the education that is necessary so that people understand how to care for this population that is incredibly stigmatized — is the direction we need to go in.”
That’s exactly the direction the county says it’s moving in.
“We’ve done some trainings, probably not enough yet to let people know this is a civil-rights issue,” says Keenan, the county’s housing director. “It’s been a slow process. We’ve made a more conscious effort to train in the past two years, making sure people are aware of these responsibilities.”
But Keenan admits that there have been incidents where a homeless person was denied admittance to a shelter because of that person’s gender identity.
“We’ve had instances, and we’ve sent them back and said, ‘You’re not allowed to deny based on this,’” says Keenan. “I know we’ve had some pushback, more so two years ago from people saying, ‘I can’t guarantee this person’s safety. They’re not going to be safe here because the other consumers are going to bully them, or harass them or make their life difficult there.’ And we basically say, ‘You have to ensure that doesn’t happen.’ I don’t want to say that it’s perfect, but that’s what our position has been to make sure they can accommodate when they can.”
In the coming months, the county’s Department of Human Services will be launching an environmental scan of Allegheny County shelters to look at the conditions of shelters and the treatment of homeless clients. Keenan hopes it will shed light on any differences in the county’s treatment of transgender homeless individuals.
“If we don’t hear that there are complaints, or if we don’t know that somebody’s being discriminated against, we assume people are complying,” says Keenan. “So we’ve been making sure that people know this is their right, and if they think their rights are being violated, they should let us know.”
A new rule proposed by HUD could ensure that trans men and women aren’t denied admittance to any federally funded homeless shelter. But Keenan says the county’s policy already meets the newly defined criteria.
“We allow clients who are homeless to choose their preferred place to be referred, so if they identify as a man and want to be referred to a men’s shelter, we let them go there and the shelter is expected to accommodate them,” says Keenan. “We review every referral that goes out, and if it’s denied, we review that as well. So that’s helped us take a better hold of what’s going on in the community.”
But despite HUD’s new rule and policies at the local level, Tobin, from The National Center for Transgender Equality, worries that changes aren’t trickling down to the staff level at all shelters.
“It’s because these shelters are overcrowded, underfunded, understaffed and often have not had the resources to do adequate staff training that this is still happening,” says Tobin. “Sometimes it’s because of real malice and prejudice on the part of frontline staff, [and] sometimes it’s really just ignorance — not understanding who trans people are and what they need to be safe.”
Ultimately, beyond eradicating homelessness, Tobin says it’s necessary to do more at the individual shelter level to ensure trans men and women are being accepted.
“Because it doesn’t look like we’re going to be able to move away from relying on these communal shelters anytime soon, despite the obvious problem that this is a Band-Aid for the problem of homelessness,” Tobin says. “There’s clearly a lot of work to do to make sure trans people have equal and safe access.”
