Thomas Breen photo
The state courthouse at 121 Elm St.: home to New Haven’s housing court.
(Opinion)—Because of its proven effectiveness in reducing evictions and protecting the rights of tenants, the Right to Counsel for Evictions bill currently under consideration by the Connecticut legislature is vitally important to trans and other LGBTQ people.
Contrary to the narrative currently being painted by anti-transgender activists in state legislatures across the country, social pressure is heavily weighted against the survival and flourishing of trans people. Our susceptibility to violence and discrimination has a well-documented history in this country.
Despite this, many often fail to make the connection between LGBTQ rights, wellbeing, and housing. Housing is both a basic human need and the prerequisite for every other need: survival, safety, physical health, mental health, education, employment, the ability to self-express and have fulfilling relationships, the ability to contribute meaningfully to a larger community.
Despite the basic human need for safe, decent housing, the statistics on LGBTQ people and housing speak for themselves:
• Nearly two in 10 trans and gender non-conforming people have experienced homelessness.
• Nearly two in 10 trans and gender non-conforming people have been denied housing because of their gender identity.
• More than one in 10 have been evicted due to being transgender or gender non-conforming.
• Even in states with anti-discrimination laws such as Connecticut, straight couples are 16 percent more likely than gay and lesbian couples to be treated favorably while seeking housing.
• In 2018, 73 percent of all LGBTQ Americans said they were strongly concerned about discrimination from real estate agents, landlords, and neighbors.
These statistics communicate the facts with numbers. They cannot adequately communicate the experience of waiting for a court date when you know the judge will use a name and gendered prefix (always “Mr.” or “Ms.”) completely at odds with your identity and self-presentation, not knowing how that discrepancy will affect your chances in court.
They cannot describe the feeling of mounting anxiety while you try to find an apartment that you can afford, that is close enough to your workplace — if you are fortunate enough to have a job where you don’t face frequent, or even daily, harassment — never knowing how the neighbors will react to you, constantly fearing discrimination from landlords, and without family members to call for advice.
These numbers certainly cannot describe the stress that trans people of color feel when followed by police, eyed with suspicion by strangers, targeted by verbal or physical abuse, or victimized by intimate partner violence without the money to move out and without faith in the legal system to render any kind of justice. These and a host of other social and economic injustices contribute to the high rate of eviction and homelessness for LGBTQ people, especially those of us who are trans or gender non-conforming.
For trans people and the people who love us, the first four months of 2021 have been particularly exhausting and fear-inducing.
Inspired by the anti-transgender movement in the UK, Republican lawmakers have introduced a record-breaking number of anti-transgender bills in 33 U.S. states since January alone, creating the next battleground in a decades-long effort by conservative activists to win a “culture war” against rights and protections for LGBTQ people.
The impact of this onslaught of organized attacks against the safety and autonomy of transgender people reaches far beyond the congressional halls where legislators debate.
To put transgender lives “up for debate” in this manner threatens the ability of all trans people, and anyone else perceived to exist outside the narrow boundaries of heteronormativity, to safely live our lives free from violence and discrimination.
Other communities who have seen their lives and bodies “debated” by politicians — represented in fights for access to healthcare, for freedom from state-sanctioned violence, or for a livable income — will understand how unsettling it feels to experience your inherent vulnerability before the whims and opinions of people in power, and the groups they represent.
The Right to Counsel bill would guarantee legal representation to all residential tenants facing evictions. Passing this bill would address one small but significant part of the much larger reality that trans, gender non-conforming, and other LGBTQ people face in trying to access safe, affordable, equitable housing.
The systems determining who owns the housing, who has the economic resources to fight legal battles, who is likely to be discriminated against, and who is likely to be favored by judges are already stacked against us.
To know that our lives are debated by politicians and our value as members of society is a matter of public opinion is to live with precarity. Eviction and homelessness only further entrench these patterns of injustice.
For LGBTQ people, and for all other tenants facing housing insecurity, a minimum guarantee of legal counsel when our housing is on the line is a concrete way to address that precarity with something more closely resembling dignity, justice, and the opportunity to thrive.
Luke Melonakos-Harrison is a tenant in New Haven and an organizer with the Right to Counsel Coalition and the Central Connecticut chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
Don't we already have right to counsel for those who can't afford it? It's called legal aid or the Jerome N. Frank Law Clinic. Those who can afford legal representation should pay for it like the rest of us.