Do men who identify as women really threaten women fleeing male violence?

That's the raging debate in a regulatory proceeding on "equal access to housing," prompted by President Trump's Day One executive order against "gender ideology extremism," which has quietly amassed over 600 public comments in its first three weeks without any apparent input as of Tuesday from large national groups.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed removing references to "gender" and "gender identity" throughout its regulations, and possibly replacing them with "sex," to ensure HUD-funded housing programs and emergency shelters treat individuals by their "immutable biological classification as either male or female."

By rolling back the Obama administration's expansion of the Equal Access Rule, the Trump administration would let funding recipients again "require reasonable assurances and evidence to confirm the sex of an individual seeking service in order to protect the safety of other individuals in the facility," the April 29 proposal says.

The 2016 revision removed an explicit allowance in the 2012 revision for "inquiries related to an applicant's or occupant's sex for the limited purpose of determining placement in temporary, emergency shelters with shared bedrooms or bathrooms."

This "impermissibly restricted single-sex facilities without proper congressional authorization," ignoring the Fair Housing Act's allowance for single-sex shelters while creating "a new class of individuals" to be protected by federal nondiscrimination law," and violated the "privacy and safety of homeless women" and faith-based providers' religious liberty, the new HUD proposal says. 

It would use the agency's funding levers to enforce compliance and preempt state or local laws that require providers to treat individuals by their gender identity.

HUD Secretary Scott Turner, a former NFL player, suspended enforcement of the 2016 rule two days after his confirmation, saying he was "getting government out of the way of what the Lord established from the beginning when he created man in His own image." The regulatory proposal doesn't say why it took another 14 months to propose the rule's elimination.

The gender-critical Women's Liberation Front urged its supporters on Monday and Tuesday to file comments on their experiences with women-only spaces in "federally funded housing, rape crisis, or domestic violence services," but confirmed to Just the News it hasn't filed its own comment yet. Someone used WoLF's name to file a comment Monday. 

High-profile groups that advocate for either sex-based or gender identity-based treatment, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom and ACLU respectively, have yet to file comments. A substantial number of commenters filed anonymously.

"Many individuals wouldn't comment on any matter touching on gender identity if they had to leave their names," though "I was surprised to see how many comments there are already," WoLF treasurer Nancy Stade told Just the News. 

Organizations that "know the drill and want to wait to see what other comments come in and include responses" are more likely to wait to speak under their own names until closer to the June 29 deadline, she said.

Keeping men out of women's shelters hurts churches?

Just the News could find only a smattering of comments by groups, all opposing the Trump administration's proposed changes, as opposed to individuals. None mentions the female sex or grapples with why females might not seek coed emergency shelter.

Some individual comments are clearly based on form letters, however. Several refer verbatim to "data from the National Alliance to End Homelessness" on transgender people's greater likelihood to be "unsheltered" and have "considerably more health and safety challenges."

One of the more novel comments, left anonymously but full of legal citations, argues HUD violated the Administrative Procedure Act because it "has not identified a statute to authorize" the rule and based the proposal solely on President Trump's executive order. It's also arbitrary and capricious by not grappling with the rationale for and benefits of the 2016 rule.

The proposed rule "places the doctrines of particular belief systems above the often messy reality made visible by current scientific research," the National Organization for Women's Missouri chapter claimed. (WoLF has argued the opposite, that government imposition of gender identity is an "unconstitutional establishment of religion.")

"Forcing people to out themselves as trans/nonbinary/intersex puts them at risk for harassment and possibly even physical assault that may result in death," NOW Missouri said.

The Chicago-based Center for Disability & Elder Law said the proposed rule "replaces clear working rules and introduces vague standards," such as requiring evidence of sex, "creating legal risk, operational confusion, and staff-resident conflict." 

It would subject people who already "experience disproportionate rates of housing discrimination, homelessness, harassment, and violence" to "humiliation, invasive scrutiny, and arbitrary exclusion" and discourage them from seeking help, the center said. 

Ayuda Legal Puerto Rico blasted the proposal for "restricting the definition of sex and establishing a burdensome identity validation process," which "violates intimacy and harms all residents of public housing, regardless of their identity." 

It notes HUD's acknowledgment that some people would need to seek "alternative shelter arrangements" under the proposal. "For many people experiencing homelessness, those alternatives simply do not exist. […] Individuals may face an impossible decision: between undignified shelter conditions and homelessness."

Alaska Christian Conference President Michael Burke, an Episcopal priest, said the proposal will "increase the cost of the impacts for individuals, churches, and businesses" beyond the "terrible" outcomes for the person denied sharing a shelter with the opposite sex.

"I have seen many examples of persons denied entry to homeless shelters and services because of either marital status or sexual orientation or gender identity," he said.

"The proposed redefinition of 'sex' is not grounded in medical or scientific consensus," according to Evan Lempke, a "future public health professional" who is a prominent transgender activist and touted as such by Lempke's employer, Lehigh University. 

Loitering in women's bathroom hoping for oral sex

The quickest way to find comments supporting the rule appears to be searching for the term "women," as opponents of the rule tend to avoid sex-based language altogether.

"Because homeless women are often traumatized from living on the streets, and are often victims of male violence in one form or another, sleeping arrangements and bathing facilities in homeless shelters should be based on biological sex," a lengthy anonymous comment with purported anecdotes from women's shelters says.

"One man leered at women and trailed them through the shelter, his shorts manifesting the tangible proof of his interest, such that women stopped wearing pajamas outside the bed area," a women's shelter worker said, according to the comment. 

Retired Ohio University faculty Alden Waitt said she taught English and women's studies in four state "penal facilities for men," and "violence was an everyday occurrence" at two of them, with students "targeted and later assaulted merely for taking classes." 

While not all inmates "displayed violent tendencies, enough did so and went after smaller, meeker, even disabled, inmates," Waitt wrote. "Put these men in prison with vulnerable women, and these trapped women will have no recourse once assaulted."

"Politically women have lost civil rights, politicians have abandoned us. It’s time to take action," supporter Karina Abou wrote. 

"As a Democrat, I support single sex housing and shelters as a way to protect women and their underage children," Michelle Krueger wrote. "Women and children make up 80% of victims of sexual violence while males commit 98-99% of sexual violence and 90% of all violent crimes. It's not bigotry or a phobia" to maintain female-only shelters.

Some opponents argue men who identify as women aren't a threat to women and that the proposal would hurt females, similar to arguments made against female-only girls' sports. 

"Transgender women are statistically less likely to assault women than men. Transgender women are not transitioning to assault women," Donald Chaze wrote. "Would women have their genitalia checked just to make sure other women can’t use the women’s bathroom?"

"It is not ethical or scientifically logical to require women to have to provide 'evidence' proving their sex," and the proposal "will actually put women at greater risk of harm," Kate Holton wrote.

"Transgender, nonbinary and intersex women are safer in women’s shelters and in women’s spaces. There is no history of violence on the part of trans women in women’s shelters and programs," an anonymous commenter wrote, claiming "most women are ok with trans women in female spaces" and the latter's presence actually reduces "all violence toward women."