Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner announced a new proposed rule on Thursday that seeks to end the use of “gender identity” across all departmental programs, which is intended to “restore biological reality and protect women.”
“Under the proposed guidance, HUD would remove radical definitions of gender identity, sexual orientation, and gender, replacing them with sex across nearly 50 regulations,” HUD said in an April 23 statement.
The department’s Equal Access Rule will be modified to replace the ban on discrimination on the basis of “gender identity” across all Community Planning and Development programs.
HUD intends to define common terms such as mother, father, woman, man, girl, and boy, in a way that is consistent with a person’s sex across the department’s regulations.
“God created two sexes: male and female. The Left’s war on biological reality through radical gender ideology will no longer take precedence over the safety and security of America’s most vulnerable women,” Turner said.
The 2012 Equal Access Rule, titled Equal Access to Housing in HUD Programs Regardless of Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity, sought to ensure that HUD’s housing programs would be made available to all individuals and families regardless of their gender identity, sexual orientation, or marital status.
At the time, the rule did not address how transgender identifying and “gender non-conforming” individuals should be accommodated in certain temporary and emergency shelters, and other facilities used for this purpose. In 2016, another final rule was issued on this regulation addressing the matter.
The recent proposal builds on an order issued by the HUD Secretary in February last year that required a stoppage of any pending or future enforcement of the Equal Access Rule.
In a Feb. 13, 2025, statement, Turner said that the department’s actions were in line with an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on his first day in office.
The Jan. 20, 2025, executive order, Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, criticized what it described as denying the biological reality of sex and the increasing use of legal and socially coercive measures to allow men to self-identify as women.
This enabled such men to “gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers,” Trump wrote in the order.
“This is wrong. Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being,” the president wrote.
The order defined the sex of a person as the individual’s biological classification as either male or female, dismissing the interchanging of the word “sex” with “gender identity.” It asked agencies to remove all regulations and policies that “promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology.”
The National Alliance to End Homelessness has criticized HUD’s move to modify enforcement of the Equal Access Rule.
In a February 2025 post, the alliance said that communities cannot afford to create more barriers to shelter and housing programs at a time when “unsheltered homelessness is soaring and when gender-expansive people are experiencing shocking disparities in unsheltered homelessness.”
“The Alliance strongly opposes the directive from Secretary Turner to halt any pending or future enforcement actions of the Equal Access Rule and any future steps to weaken or repeal this lifesaving rule,” the post said.
In its February 2025 statement, HUD said that the 2016 rule allowed men to take advantage of department programs directed at women.