Amid gender rights battle, Trump targets HUD policies

As a transgender man, the words “you're a girl” gutted Tazz Webster, a taunt hurled at him from the day he moved into his St Louis apartment.

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The government-subsidised building’s manager also insisted on calling Webster by the wrong name, the 38-year-old said, and ridiculed him with shouts of, “You're not a real man!”

“I just felt like I was being terrorized,” Webster told The Associated Press. “I felt that I was being judged and mistreated, like I was less of a human being.”

Then one day in March 2022, the manager shoved Webster so hard he stumbled backward. After regaining his balance, Webster said he pushed the manager back. Four months later he was homeless.

Webster filed a complaint with US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity office, the agency tasked with investigating housing discrimination and enforcing the landmark Fair Housing Act that guarantees equal access to housing for all Americans.

Webster’s harassment allegation was serious enough that it was investigated for more than two years, until the office suddenly notified him in February it was dropping his case without a finding, citing lack of jurisdiction.

The timing of the closure was not a coincidence. In the months since President Donald Trump took back the White House and installed a loyalist to lead the federal housing department, HUD Secretary Scott Turner and his team have moved swiftly and strategically to undo, uproot and remake the agency’s decades of work and priorities.

In the crosshairs is an intense focus on transgender people, as HUD retreats from long-established fair-housing protections by closing their discrimination complaints and, more broadly, moving to undo the Obama-era Equal Access Rule that cemented transgender people’s rights to discrimination protection in housing.