[By Jen Kirk, Executive Director, Reclaim, expressed are those of the author, not the Living Snoqualmie website. You may submit letters to [email protected].]
I’ve been sitting with a decision that weighs on me. Not because I’m unsure we made the right call, but because of what making the right call actually costs.
In the past several weeks, Reclaim has declined to apply for two federal funding opportunities that would’ve allowed us to expand our services to people experiencing gender-based violence. I think about the additional calls we could have answered. The motel beds we could have funded. The advocate we could have hired to sit with someone on the worst night of their life. I think about the people in this valley who are right now in danger, trying to find the courage to reach out, and what it would mean to have more capacity to receive them when they do.
And then I think about what accepting that money would have required us to do and I know, with everything in me, that we made the right choice.
Let me tell you who comes to us for help.
Reclaim serves survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault across the Snoqualmie Valley, as well as individuals and families experiencing homelessness. Our clients are cisgender and gender-nonconforming (i.e. transgender and non-binary). Straight and queer. Indigenous, immigrant, and everything in between. They arrive carrying not just their immediate crisis but years of experiences that shaped how safe, or unsafe, the world has felt to them. For many of our most vulnerable clients, walking through our door is an act of extraordinary courage. What happens in those first moments inside our building matters more than I can fully express. It can determine whether someone stays, whether they feel they might be able to trust us, whether they ever try again.
The Trump Administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development has rescinded the 2016 Equal Access Rule, which prohibited federally funded shelters from requiring people to prove their biological sex to access services. In its place, HUD now proposes that shelters receiving federal funds separate clients by biological sex. It is now also permissible to demand “reasonable assurances and evidence” of a person’s biological sex.
That means gender-nonconforming women fleeing abuse could be turned away from women’s shelters or placed in facilities with men. That alone should stop us in our tracks. But it doesn’t end there. A woman who presents more masculine could be questioned at intake, asked to prove her biological sex to a stranger while she is in crisis. An intersex human could be turned away because her physical body doesn’t map to either male or female. A woman who has crossed enormous barriers to finally ask for help could arrive at our door and be asked to prove she is woman enough to enter.
The rule does not limit this scrutiny to gender-nonconforming people alone. It invites it for anyone whose appearance prompts a staff member’s “good faith belief” that they might not belong. In practice, this standard will fall hardest on people who are already most vulnerable to discrimination: those who are visibly queer, visibly gender-nonconforming, visibly different.
The federal funding we did not pursue came with conditions that would have required us to sort people at the door…to scrutinize bodies, to require proof, to make determinations about who belongs in which space based on their private physical characteristics. Think about what that moment would feel like for someone who has spent years being told their body is wrong, or dangerous, or not enough. Think about what it would feel like for a gender-nonconforming human to be stopped and questioned while they are already in crisis. Think about asking any survivor, any human being who has finally, terrifyingly decided to ask for help, to prove themselves before we let them in.
We will not do it.
The research is clear about who is actually at risk in shelter settings. When HUD proposed similar rules in 2020, the department acknowledged in its own documents that there was no evidence “suggesting that transgender individuals pose an inherent risk to biological women” in shelters. None. What the data does show clearly and consistently is that gender-nonconforming people are among the most endangered people in these systems.
They are IN danger; they are not THE danger. About 22% of transgender individuals in homeless shelters have been sexually assaulted by residents or staff. Seventy percent have experienced mistreatment during their stay. Nearly 85% avoid shelters entirely out of fear. This policy does not protect survivors; it abandons them.
The grants would have also required us to certify that we would not frame domestic violence as a “systemic issue”, only a “criminal offense”. Anyone who has ever sat with a survivor knows that you cannot separate their experience from the world that shaped it. To agree to that condition would have been to agree to see our clients as less than whole and to minimize the deep-rooted systemic violence against vulnerable populations in this country.
We can’t agree to that. Our staff can’t practice that. It would negate the very approach that makes our work effective. We would be forced to abandon our values and our mission.
Our staff shows up every day to do some of the hardest emotional labor there is. They carry our clients’ stories with them. They have watched a federal administration dismantle the framework that protects the people we serve. That takes a toll. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from having to fight for the basic dignity of the people you care for, and our team carries it with grace and with determination. I am in awe of them.
Reclaim’s doors are open and will remain open. Our commitment to this community has not wavered and our community partnerships remain strong.
The people who depend on us most cannot afford to have us look away. They need us all to remain firmly grounded in our humanity and resolve.
Reclaim is a nonprofit organization providing shelter and supportive services to individuals and families experiencing homelessness, survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking, and those struggling to remain housed across the Snoqualmie Valley. To support our work, visit: www.reclaimstability.org
Sources
- 22% sexual assault statistic: 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, National Center for Transgender Equality — transequality.org
- 70% mistreatment statistic: 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, via National Institutes of Health — pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8726680
- 85% avoidance / 44% mistreatment statistic: Williams Institute at UCLA, via Texas Homeless Network — https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-homeless-shelter-access/https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-homeless-shelter-access/
- No evidence of increased safety risk: Williams Institute at UCLA, “Safety and Privacy in Public Restrooms and Other Gendered Facilities,” February 2025 — williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu
- HUD’s own admission of no evidence of inherent risk: NBC News reporting on HUD proposed rule documents, July 2020 — Trump administration moves to repeal transgender protections in homeless shelters
Comments
Those conditions to obtain federal funding are just disgusting. So glad you stuck to your guns!
Thank you for being the face of safety and compassion in the valley and not letting your mission be compromised by federal efforts to dehumanize the folk who turn to you for help.
Thank you for supporting your community the right way; the way that is needed and required by those you support!
It is more than sad that our nation has been captured by a vile administration that seeks harm against our beloved siblings in the trans and queer communities.
And I can understand that the temptation of money is hard to resist, but doing so would compel you to buckle under and administer the hate that the federal government expresses towards our most treasured and beloved people.
I believe we are so made as humans that there is a natural propensity to help one another, an urge that is sometimes smashed by people who desire power and not connection.
We must do all we can to nurture that inherent way of seeing others as siblings and do all we can to resist and reject that dysfunctional way of living that sees other people as threats when they don’t “conform” to our demands.
Two questions guide two of the more well-known religions of our country: Am I my brother’s keeper and Who then in my neighbor? Both questions have hard answers that have the uncomfortable direction of It’s on _us_ to take care of the least, the last, the lost, and the lonely. And I’d add a third statement from the third great religion (among the many) that plainly says Compelled belief is no belief. We cannot _make_ people believe things about themselves that are not true, and we should therefore not presume that others should be compelled by those beliefs that compel us.