For queer people escaping homelessness, climate change is raising the stakes and shelters aren’t always a safe refuge except in San Francisco.
On a Friday morning, at 7:30 AM, Tanya Stowes, 55 years old, was out of Jazzie’s Place in the Mission District, ready to start her day. Her to-do list for the day: following-up on jobs and getting a bus card. She moved from Cleveland, Ohio where she used to sleep in the streets. She said that the Ohian winters were hard without a blanket or even shoes, and the summers extremely hot but she would find shade under trees.
But she found a safe home in this queer shelter. “I like this place because it’s multi-racial,” she said. “Also, we have a lot of gay people here and I’m bisexual myself and I feel pretty comfortable around gay people.”
This week, a heat wave in the Bay Area broke records for daily high temperatures in four cities, including San Francisco, which reached 94°F (34°C).
What happened in San Francisco aligns with data showing the planet is consistently getting warmer due to climate change.
As summer grows hotter, climate change is driving high rates of homelessness, and exposing gaps in shelter safety for the queer community, researchers and community leaders say.
Summers are getting too hot to handle. Especially for the queer community.
Throughout August, the world experienced the hottest weather ever recorded. And for some transgender people, extreme heat can complicate the process of medical transition.
“When trans women take estrogen, it’s anyone that’s taking hormones is going through a second puberty,” said Dannie Ceseña, the Director of the California LGBTQ Health and Human Services Network.
“And unfortunately for trans women, they’re going to get hot flashes, they’re going to sweat more. Their body temperatures are rising.”
Ceseña said wildfires and smoke can cause unique issues for transgender people. “It could really trigger that feeling of like ‘I’m too hot. I’m sweating’, which can then trigger anxiety. It can trigger depression. It can trigger all kinds of emotions, including irritability.”
Liv, 28, moved to San Francisco from Seattle three years ago and now lives at Jazzie’s Place. During extreme heat events, she said, she feels lucky to have shelter rather than sleeping outside as she used to.
“If it gets too hot, people will start talking about it at the shelter. You can just feel you’re exhausted, but you’ve had access to water and slept,” she said.
Research on the experience of transgender women and extreme heat in Rio de Janeiro showed that gender-affirming hormone therapy is linked to a feeling of increased heat and that gender affirming clothing choices may not support thermal comfort.
Leo Goldsmith, scholar on the intersection of queer studies and climate change, said that padding, wigs and other extra clothing transgender women use to affirm their gender can also increase feelings of discomfort, especially during warmer than average temperatures.
“There’s the heat related illness aspect of it but then there’s also the thermal discomfort and the uncomfortableness and the mental health aspects of feeling so hot and feeling miserable,” he said.
The LGBTQ+ community experiences more housing insecurity
Housing insecurity leaves many queer people without air conditioning. LGBTQ+ people are less likely than non-LGBTQ+ people to own homes — and renters are less likely than homeowners to have AC — according to a 2020 Williams Institute report covering 35 states, which found that nearly half of LGBT adults own their homes, compared with 70.1% of non-LGBT adults, with homeownership even lower among LGBT racial minorities and transgender people.
“A lot of folks right now are living in housing that does not have air conditioning and they might have a ceiling fan only, but there’s many others that don’t even have a ceiling fan and they’re trying to find a fan they can purchase to cool off their home,” said Ceseña.
Emergency housing exists, but it’s even more complicated if you’re queer.
Ceseña said that he went with some close friends to shelters throughout California and saw his transgender friends getting denied access many times.
“People close to me have been turned away by shelters that are facilitated by religious institutions by the Salvation Army because of their personal beliefs,” Ceseña said. “Then there’s even shelters that have been county-run, where even though in those shelters the managers have undergone cultural competency training, they still replace transgender men with women or transgender women with men.”
Nearly one in three respondents to the 2022 U.S. Trans Survey have experienced homelessness in their lifetime — eight times the rate of the general population, according to a report from the National Alliance to End Homelessness published in May this year.
As climate disasters become more frequent, more people will be forced into emergency shelters.
In 2023, the US Census Bureau reported that 3.1 million people in the US were displaced from their homes due to climate disasters. In those cases, residents can be redirected to shelters. Those spaces, as Ceseña said, often aren’t safe or accessible for queer people.
The 2022 U.S. Trans Survey found that 60% of its 92,000 respondents were denied access to shelter due to gender.
One notable example took place during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, when a transwoman named Arpollo Vicks was arrested by the police for showering in the women’s bathroom in a hurricane shelter.
Shelters are also essential public services for homeless people, but family rejection remains one of the leading drivers of homelessness among queer people, researcher highlights.
In San Francisco, out of 1,073 homeless youth, 38% identify as LGBTQ+, according to the 2022 Homeless Youth Survey.
Even if a displaced or unhoused queer person does get physical access to a shelter, if they don’t feel that shelter is a safe place for them to change, this can also be dangerous for their health.
Trans women might want to wear binder to flatten or change the appearance of their chest. However, a binder can be worn only between eight to 10 hours – according to recommendations from the binder brand Untag.
Ceseña said that wearing the binder longer than that can cause harm to their health.
“I’ve known transgender folks throughout the state where they wear their binders nonstop, even to bed, which can cause cracked, bruised, or even broken ribs and can even cause body disfiguration as well,” he said.
“When you have folks that are unhoused in the heat, sweating all day long or even out in the streets during the cold winter time and you’re unable to take off your binder, not even you can’t even take it off to wash it. It is a major health issue.”
Ceseña advised that social workers could be educated on those issues, and find places for their clients to wash binders, or learn where to get binders for free.
San Francisco is a leader on queer shelters
In response to some of these issues, the city of San Francisco designed shelters, with specific spaces for the queer community to provide safe access.
Jazzie’s Place is a shelter in the Mission District, overseen by the non-profit Mission Action. It has a total of 72 beds, 13 of them dedicated to the queer community. The shelter is divided in three spaces : female-identified, male-identified and gender-nonconforming/nonbinary and opened in 2015. However, the shelter can not stay open during the day as the city of San Francisco considered it as an emergency shelter
Liv said that last time she got pneumonia and the flu at the same time and was able to stay at a shelter throughout the day and it was helpful to have a space for her to lay in bed. She said she wouldn’t know how to face the same situation in this night-only shelter.
“Last time I was at a shelter I got pneumonia and the flu at the same time and it was really nice to have the space to just lay in bed but here I’m not really sure what I would do in that situation,” she said.
Liv said that having this place will help to have the foundation to get a job. Stowers said that today she went to get her bus card and got some responses for some jobs, and she said she thinks that she will get a job next week.