When trans women and romantic partners Rusty Mae Moore, PhD, and Chelsea Goodwin bought a house in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood in 1994, they never imagined it would become something extraordinary.
Moore, a former professor of international business at Hofstra University, who passed away in 2022 at age 80, had only come out as trans and started dating Goodwin a few years before they bought the house. But it was love at first sight for the couple — Goodwin said she swore she “could hear the corny music” after their eyes first locked.
They began living together, and decided to move from Long Island to Brooklyn, which had a larger trans community and was closer to Moore’s children, who lived with their other parent in Park Slope. In their 2017 interview with the New York City Trans Oral History Project, Goodwin and Moore explained that they bought the house intending to share it with a few other trans friends. Instead, “[trans] people started to come out of the woodwork… because they needed a place to live.”
The couple accidentally started what came to be called Transy House, which served as an informal shelter for trans youth and a center for trans political activism from 1995 to 2008, sometimes housing up to 13 people at a time.
The defunding of public housing and increasing rent prices due to gentrification in the 1990s had rapidly transformed the housing landscape in New York City. The city was quickly becoming unaffordable for trans people, who tend to have much lower income and employment levels than the general population. Additionally, trans New Yorkers didn’t have any codified protections from gender-based discrimination and couldn’t depend on mainstream gay rights organizations to advocate for them.
In fact, New York State’s largest gay rights organization at the time, Empire State Pride Agenda, intentionally blocked efforts to include gender identity while lobbying for the state’s Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA), which passed in late 2002. New York State didn’t add gender identity/expression as a protected category to its human rights law until 2019, over a decade and a half later.
Although New York City passed an anti-discrimination bill that did include trans people in 2002, Goodwin pointed out, it originally exempted homeless shelters. This “meant that every time a social worker got a transgender person and didn’t know where to place them, they’d call us or just, without even notifying us, send them to our door,” she told the Trans Oral History Project.
But Transy House was more than an informal collective, and Moore and Goodwin were particularly concerned about the well-being of trans youth. As Moore recalled for the Trans Oral History Project, “people [would] just load their [trans] kid in a car in Texas, drive them to New York City, dump them out in the street and say, ‘Have a good life!’”
One nationwide study that analyzed data from 2017-2019 found that 22% of trans and nonbinary high schoolers had reported experiencing homelessness over the last month — more than seven times the rate of their cisgender peers (3%).
Many young people at Transy House had also dropped out of high school because of the harassment they faced there. Along with other stressors faced by minorities, hostile school climates still contribute to poorer educational outcomes for trans youth.
As discussed in the documentary Changing House by Zavé Martohardjono, Transy House was modeled after Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) House, a trans political collective and shelter for homeless queer and trans youth of color in New York’s East Village during the early 1970s. STAR House was run by “mothers” Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, who were already key figures in the movements for queer and trans justice at 25- and 19-years-old, respectively, when they opened the house in 1970. Although STAR was short-lived, Johnson and Rivera had big dreams for the collective, even hoping to establish a school for young trans people whose education had been disrupted by harassment.
Rivera spent her last years living at Transy House, where access to housing stability enabled her to get back into trans activism, until she passed in 2002. Along with Goodwin and Moore, Rivera’s presence supported young people like Mariah Lopez, whose social worker in the New York foster care system sent her to Transy House in 2001.
After leaving Transy House, Lopez went on to advocate for trans youth in New York by challenging discriminatory city and state policies related to gender expression and health care in the foster system. Lopez is now continuing Rivera’s work as the leader of the Strategic Transgender Alliance for Radical Reform, or STARR.
In 2008, Goodwin and Moore decided to close Transy House. Moore was nearing retirement as a professor, and Goodwin was feeling burn out caring for the House and its residents on top of her day job. The couple had also become increasingly skeptical about whether Transy House was the best model for addressing the trans housing crisis. As Goodwin explained, “Having a nice, middle-class college professor and her hippy girlfriend trying to deal with these tremendous social problems in one little brownstone — you might as well try to sweep the tide back with a broom.”
Trans people today continue to face economic and housing precarity. In a landmark 2015 survey of trans people in the US, 29% were living in poverty — more than twice that of the general US population at the time (12%). And an early report from the 2022 United States Transgender Survey suggested that poverty rates and housing precarity among trans people have actually worsened since 2015.
This is largely because trans people face high levels of employment discrimination and rejection from their families of origin, which our society typically expects to provide for family members in need. These economic factors make it more difficult to qualify to own a home, and trans people have been nearly four times less likely to own a home than the general US population (16% vs. 63%). Trans renters are frequently evicted or denied housing because of their gender identity.
In 2020, the US Supreme Court decision in Bostock vs. Clayton County found that sexual orientation and gender identity should be recognized as protected categories under existing sex discrimination employment laws. Under the Biden administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) determined that the Bostock decision also applied to the Fair Housing Act. This meant that, for the first time in US history, LGBTQ+ people were explicitly protected against housing discrimination on a federal level.
The second Trump administration makes the future of this protection uncertain. HUD Secretary Scott Turner has already begun eroding gender identity protections for HUD-funded shelters and programs in what Democratic lawmakers have called a violation of the Fair Housing Act. Among the thousands of pages scrubbed from government web pages was HUD’s page on LGBTQ+ housing discrimination, which disappeared during the first week of February. The Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership” report, also known as Project 2025, specifically calls to limit the Bostock decision to hiring and firing and suggests “devolving” many of the functions of HUD to states and other agencies before eliminating the department altogether.
In Moore’s obituary in the New York Times, Mariah Lopez remarked on the influence of trans elders at Transy House in her decision to continue advocating for trans rights through STARR: “Rusty made me understand that we have been around for a long time, and she gave me a pride deeper than a fight.” As states continue to try passing anti-trans laws targeting youth and the current federal administration erases queer and trans history, community archives like the New York City Trans Oral History Project work to preserve and share the histories of how we cared for trans youth before we even had access to legal rights.
