Transgender adults worry about finding housing and community as they age, in these unfriendly times.
Thirty-three out of fifty states have introduced anti-trans legislation in the past year, from laws concerning who can access gender-affirming care to who can use which restroom. In nineteen states, there’s no protection of housing rights for transgender people, and federal law only prohibits housing discrimination based on sexuality. Only a few states have laws ensuring that transgender adults have equal access to programs for aging populations.
Transgender adults already face medical discrimination, ranging from doctors who refuse to help them access gender-affirming care to denying them emergency care (illegal, but common). States like Florida have now made many kinds of gender-affirming care illegal. And transgender adults are looking at aging with concern – what will their care be like, in nursing homes and hospice?
“Every now and then I have like this thought, like, oh my God, if I end up in a nursing home, how are they going to treat me?” said Rajee Narinesingh, a transgender woman in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. She is 56, and when she was a young woman, the black market gender-care she had available to her left her with permanent scars.
“If you see older transgender people, it shows the younger community that it’s possible I can have a life. I can live to an older age,” she said. “So I think that’s a very important thing.”
“I have friends that have retired and they’ve decided to move to retirement communities. And then, little by little, they’ve found that they’re not welcome there,” said Morgan Mayfaire, a transgender man and the executive director of TransSOCIAL, a Florida support and advocacy group.
The discrimination they’ve faced has included misgendering, being denied gender-specific housing, and having visitors denied access.
There are an estimated 171,000 transgender adults over 65 years old, according to the UCLA.