by Ana Miller
Two weeks ago, I met a lovely trans woman by the name of Marie, outside the Central Library with another friend of mine. Marie is elderly and disabled, with only one leg. She asked if Trans Empowerment Alliance (T.E.A.) could help her get in some kind of safe shelter. She explained that when she went to the Samaritan House, she was turned away because she had no access to a razor, and had visible facial hair. Suffice to say her Clarity Card has her listed as Transgender and identifying as female. This is not the first time this has happened. After hearing about Marie’s story, I went back and looked at the responses we had to an ongoing survey T.E.A. has been doing with houseless queer people, and in the section about why people had issues with the shelters was another trans woman’s response about the exact same situation – they had visible facial hair. Many of our responses were equally as bad, if not worse. One person told us about being assaulted and staff turning a blind eye to them when they reported it. This list keeps going, and going.
Yesterday, I (Ana) was contacted by a trans woman about being kicked out of 48th Street Woman’s Shelter for threatening a staff member. This was blatantly false, and I told her to file an appeal immediately. I then wrote an email to the person in-charge of appeals, giving them a character reference. Fortunately for this particular person, they won their appeal and were allowed back into the shelter. Complaints like these though are a regular occurrence, especially from trans women trying to access or staying at one of the shelters run by Samaritan House. One trans woman we met outside of the 48th St Woman’s Shelter has become a very dear friend of mine, and the things she has told me about the harassment, and discrimination of trans women in the shelters is absolutely disgusting. Everything from ignoring reports of abuse, to staff being outright discriminating, to making up outright lies to justify kicking a trans person out of the shelter because they are speaking up for themselves, and our community.
This has to end now! Colorado, and Denver both require shelters to allow trangender people to stay at the shelter that aligns with the gender they identify with. Sadly, all of these shelters find work-arounds to keep us out. T.E.A. will continue to fight against this discrimination, and continue to work alongside our houseless queer community to end the rampant abuse and discrimination our queer people, especially our gender expansive community, face in our shelter system. We also will continue to call on the city to do the right thing and help fund the creation of a queer-based, queer-ran overnight shelter and resource center.
We also want to ask for your help in this matter!
- We are continuing to fundraise to keep Marie in a hotel room till we can find her more stable shelter. You can donate here at https://givebutter.com/HANDenver and click on T.E.A. when prompted. The room is $300 per week, and we would like to keep her there as long as we can.
- Also, please write to Samaritan House and let them know that they can’t continue to discriminate against our Transgender community. Below are the emails of the people in charge:
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