By Monica F. Helms

On December 17, 2008, the police found the lifeless body of Jennifer Gale on the streets of Austin, TX. They speculate that she died sleeping on a bench in the cold Texas night. The only woman’s shelter in Austin, run by the Salvation Army, turned her away because they didn’t want a transsexual woman in their shelter. If she wanted to enter a shelter, she had to strip herself of her dignity by using her old male name and dress like a man so she could be allowed in a men’s shelter. Austin has a both housing and public accommodation laws that include “gender identity.”

On December 17, 2002, a passer-by discovered the body of Alice Johnston near the Chattahoochee River in Georgia with a self-inflected bullet wound to the head. The day before, she sent out a final E-mail on her Yahoo account that said, “I will soon be homeless. Since women’s shelters in Atlanta don’t take transsexuals, I’m a goner.”

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After fifteen months without a job, she found herself homeless because the people she stayed with lost their lease. Alice called all of the women’s shelters – all faith-based facilities – but they turned her down when she told them about being a transsexual. They told her that if she wanted shelter, she would have to use her no-longer-legal male name and dress as a man to gain entrance in a men’s shelter. This took place long after Atlanta passed a non-discrimination city ordinance that included housing and public accommodation.

These two deaths are similar in several ways, but when I saw the date, I cried. Yes, the harsh elements took Jennifer’s life and Alice took her own, but what got them there was the exactly the same reason, and the same form of discrimination by the same type of people. In life, Alice faced a segment of the transgender community who didn’t like her because she would not following their narrow guidelines on how to transition and how to be a woman. Even today, when I hear this kind of attitude being used, I have to scream, because Alice’s memory comes flooding back. Some of those people also blamed Alice for being homeless. Sadly, those people still do the same thing today, and my friend Alice is no longer in my life.

One of the good things that happened after Alice died came from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in the form of a manual written by Lisa Mottet called “Transitioning Our Shelters.” For any city that has the same problem that Atlanta and Austin has, this manual would be very helpful to the transgender community in convincing shelters to open their doors to transsexual women. All the excuses a shelter uses are debunked in this wonder manual. You can print a copy of the manual from a .pdf file on the NGLTF web site.

Jennifer led an interesting life, even running for Mayor of Austin at one time. She sang at city council meetings and could be heard singing Christmas carols on the nights just before her death. Alice served in the Army, had a degree in Library Science and could program and repair computers. They were our sisters and they faced discrimination that killed them. The homeless shelters and the City of Atlanta never took responsibility for Alice’s death, and to this day, a homeless transsexual woman will still be turned away. However, it appears that people in the Austin City Council want to take action to keep what happened to Jennifer from happening again in their city.

Some cities in the US have overcome the issue of where a transsexual can go if they become homeless. San Francisco took care of this problem in the middle 1990s. It would be nice to see this happen in cities all across the country, because there of the many homeless people in the transgender community. I’m hoping that Alice and Jennifer’s deaths will spark people in other cities to action. But, I’m afraid there will be many more joining them before something will happen.