Three Walls Closing In on Me

In one week, three policies told trans Americans where we cannot sleep, where we cannot pee, and where we cannot travel. The pattern is the design.

Photo by Gabriel Dalton on Unsplash

I am a 60-year-old trans woman in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I have a band rehearsal tonight, gymnastics class to coach Saturday, and a paper to finish for Tuesday. I want a quiet life. I am not getting one.

Last week, between April 23 and April 30, three things happened. They were reported as three separate news stories. They are not three separate stories. They are one story, and the story is being engineered.

The Three Things

On April 23, more than 120 civil rights organizations, including the ACLU, Amnesty International USA, and the Council for Global Equality, issued a travel advisory for the FIFA Men’s World Cup, warning international visitors that LGBTQ+ travelers face elevated risk in the United States this summer.

On April 28, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development published a proposed rule in the Federal Register that would let single-sex shelters demand “reasonable assurances and evidence” of a person’s sex before granting them a bed.

On April 30, six trans Idahoans filed a federal class action against Idaho House Bill 752, which makes it a crime, carrying up to a year in jail, for me to use a public restroom that matches who I am. A second offense within five years is a felony carrying a sentence of up to five years in prison.

That is one news cycle. Five days. Three different jurisdictions. Three different categories of public space. Federal, state, international.

Mainstream coverage has treated each story on its own terms. I want to tell you what they look like when you stand back and read them as one story.

Wall One: The Bed

The HUD rule is technical. The technical bit is this: it removes the words “gender” and “gender identity” from nearly fifty existing federal housing regulations and substitutes “sex,” defined under President Trump’s January 2025 executive order on “biological truth.”

The non-technical bit is this: a trans woman fleeing domestic violence in Sioux Falls who arrives at the only shelter within sixty miles can now be turned away by a stranger working the front desk who decides she does not look feminine enough.

HUD Secretary Scott Turner framed the rule as protecting women in shelters. Hannah Adams, senior staff attorney at the National Housing Law Project, told The 19th the rule is “a really, really cruel and violent rule that will cause unknown numbers of transgender individuals to be denied shelter when they need it”.

The data say Adams is right. The Williams Institute at UCLA found that 30% of trans adults have experienced homelessness, that 70% of those who sought shelter reported mistreatment, and that nearly 30% were openly denied. The 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey, with 92,329 respondents, confirmed and extended those findings.

What the data also say: 63% of unhoused trans people are unsheltered, compared with 49% of unhoused cis people. The HUD rule will raise that number. That is not a side effect. That is what the rule does.

The public comment period closes June 29. Write a comment. Tell HUD what the rule will actually do.

Wall Two: The Bathroom

Governor Brad Little signed Idaho HB 752 on March 30 and takes effect July 1. It makes it a misdemeanor for me to use a women’s restroom in any restaurant, gas station, hospital, library, mall, or airport in Idaho. A second offense within five years escalates to a felony.

Nine other states and Puerto Rico have passed bathroom laws. Three other states attach criminal penalties. Only Idaho extends the criminal restriction to private businesses. This is the strictest such law in the United States.

“HB 752 presents transgender individuals with an impossible choice: either use a restroom that does not align with your gender identity and risk physical and psychological harm, or continue using a restroom that aligns with your gender identity and risk a criminal record and imprisonment.”

That is Paul Carlos Southwick, legal director for the ACLU of Idaho, describing the impossible choice the law creates.

One of the six plaintiffs is Emilie Jackson-Edney, a 77-year-old trans woman who has lived in Idaho her entire life and is consistently perceived as female. Another is Diego Fable, a trans man who has used men’s restrooms without incident for years. Fable has decided to leave Idaho. “This is heartbreaking”, he said. “But living in fear every time I leave the house is not sustainable.”

The bill’s defenders say it is about protecting privacy. The Idaho Fraternal Order of Police itself opposed the bill. Their public statement noted that officers cannot determine a person’s biological sex without engaging in conduct “that could be viewed as invasive and inappropriate.” Cops do not want to be in the business of inspecting bodies in restrooms. The Idaho Republican Party platform calls for eliminating unnecessary government regulation. HB 752 conscripts every restaurant and gas station in Idaho into being a bathroom checkpoint.

Idaho is one state west of where I live. The state line is roughly an eight-hour drive. I cross it for gigs. I cross it for research. I cross it because South Dakota and Idaho are part of the same regional band circuit. As of July 1, when I cross it, I am committing a crime if I use the women’s room.

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Wall Three: The Border

The World Cup advisory was the one that punched me hardest, even though I am a U.S. citizen and it is not directed at me. It is directed at the international visitors who would be coming here this summer if they felt safe.

Daniel Norña, the Americas advocacy director at Amnesty International USA, told reporters that fans and journalists “risk encountering a deeply troubling human rights landscape, shaped by the Trump administration’s racist immigration policies, mass detention and deportation, and attacks on freedom of expression and peaceful protest.”

The trans-specific risks the advisory names: a State Department April 20 internal memo restricting trans staff from using restrooms aligned with their gender identity; the passport policy in effect since January 2025 issuing only M or F sex markers matching sex assigned at birth, which the Supreme Court permitted to remain in force in November 2025; and the cumulative effect of state laws like Idaho HB 752 producing dramatically different legal exposure depending on which host city you fly into.

Read that paragraph again. International human rights organizations are now treating the United States the way they once treated Russia ahead of the 2018 World Cup or Qatar ahead of the 2022 World Cup. The signatory list includes the same groups that have spent decades issuing travel advisories about other countries. They are now issuing one about us.

The Pattern

Three measures. Three jurisdictions. Three categories of public space. The federal government tells me where I can sleep. The state of Idaho tells me where I can pee. The international community tells the world we are no longer a safe place to be queer.

The measures appear unrelated at the policy domain level. They share four design features that you do not get by coincidence.

First, each introduces a verification regime where none existed before. HUD asks shelter staff to demand “reasonable assurance” of sex. Idaho asks every gas station clerk to assess the biological sex of every restroom user. The State Department asks Customs and Border Protection officers to evaluate the bona fides of every arriving visitor. The trans person is on the wrong side of the checkpoint by design.

Second, each measure relies on the deliberate vagueness of its terms. HUD does not define “reasonable assurance.” Idaho does not define “biological sex.” The vagueness is not a drafting flaw. The vagueness is the mechanism. It transfers enforcement discretion to individual gatekeepers, each of whom can apply a personal standard with limited accountability.

Third, each measure is justified by an appeal to safety that the data do not support. The Williams Institute reviewed the empirical record and found no evidence of increased harm to cisgender people when trans people are permitted to use facilities aligned with their gender identity. The Idaho Fraternal Order of Police itself opposed the bill on enforcement grounds. The safety argument is the cover story. The data are not on its side.

Fourth, each measure operates in a different jurisdictional layer, and the layers reinforce one another. If you sue HUD and win, Idaho is still in force. If you sue Idaho and win, the State Department passport policy is still in force. The architecture is designed to outlast any one of its walls. That is how you can tell it is architecture and not a coincidence.

The Honest Justification

When the data do not support the stated rationale, you have to ask what the actual rationale is. The good news is that the actual rationale is on the record. You do not have to guess.

Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts has stated publicly that the goal is to outlaw all gender-affirming care for trans adults. HUD Secretary Scott Turner has framed his rule as a restoration of “biological truth.” Idaho legislators have characterized HB 752 in similar terms. The honest justification is that the architects of these policies want trans people to disappear from public life. They have said so. They have said so in writing.

When you stop pretending the safety justification is real, the three walls make sense. When you keep pretending, they look like three unconnected news stories with three corresponding press releases and three corresponding lawsuits.

What This Means for the Quiet Life

I keep thinking about the public space my generation grew up taking for granted. Trans people of my age remember when there was no public space. We remember the closet. We remember the years of hiding. The expansion of public space we lived in for the past twenty years was won inch by inch by people who fought for the right to sleep in a shelter, to use a bathroom, and to cross a border without being interrogated about our bodies.

Three walls in five days. The HUD comment period closes June 29. The Idaho law takes effect July 1. The World Cup begins June 11. The window for response is now.

I am not going to stop crossing the Idaho state line. I am going to use the women’s room. I am going to coach my gymnastics class. I am going to keep writing. The architecture is real, but it is not finished. The least the rest of us can do is name the architecture before it does.

If You Want to Help

File a public comment on the HUD rule before June 29. The proposed rule is open for comment in the Federal Register. Comments are entered into the administrative record and become evidence in the litigation that will follow.

Donate to the ACLU of Idaho or to Lambda Legal, which is litigating the Idaho case on behalf of the six plaintiffs. They are good at this work. They have been doing it for decades.

If you have international friends or colleagues who were planning to attend a World Cup match, send them the advisory text and let them make their own informed decision. Do not pretend the country is safer than the data show.

And if you are a cis person who has read this far, the most useful thing you can do is talk about the pattern with the people in your life who are not paying attention. Three news stories last week. One story underneath them. Tell them the story.

Author Note: Grace Ann Hansen is an independent researcher and writer, and an MBA & PhD graduate student in health informatics and artificial intelligence. She is also a published author, a professional musician, a gymnastics coach, and a queer transgender woman living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Grace Ann Hansen at grace@graceannhansen.com.