If you think it’s a nightmare to hunt for apartments *in this economy*, it becomes doubly harder to do so as a transgender person. The marginalisation is amplified by caste, class and social locations, as well as age. With inclusive welfare policies (like this one) being a distant dream, problems with housing are impossible to ignore — now more than ever. But for the transgender community in India, the lack of safe housing is only one aspect of the access gap.

Trans lives are constantly shaped by the spatial anxieties of accessing gate-kept spaces like hospitals, schools, workplaces and safe housing, made worse by anxieties of belonging, once you’ve got a foot in the door. Global north data shows that nearly half of the world’s unhoused population are queer/trans youth. 1 in 5 transgender people in the U.S. have experienced homelessness at some point in their lives; more than 1 in 10 trans women have been evicted because of their gender identity. In India, data further shows us that over 95% transgender individuals are denied jobs across the board and are often forced into informal, unregulated, and systemically stigmatised labour such as begging and sex work. Trans people are also more likely to face barriers while accessing safe and stable housing, due to lack of financial stability or rental history.

While problems of homelessness and poverty are urgent, seeking help is often stigmatised and always tedious. So when the Garima Grehs, envisaged as a safe temporary housing solution for transgender folks in India, were provisioned for in the Transgender Persons Act 2020 and piloted in 2021, the community reacted with a lot of hope. Despite initial misgivings, they were generally regarded as a policy step in the right direction. Why? Because safe housing is more than just a matter of shelter.

Housing: A pivotal determinant of trans health

For Kaveri (name changed), having a Garima Greh to turn to meant that she had a place to recover and rehabilitate in. Situated right above the healthcare center run by Mitr Trust in Delhi where she was undergoing HRT therapy/gender affirming care, the Delhi Garima Greh is one of 12, instituted across 9 states under the SMILE (Support for Marginalised Individuals for Livelihood & Enterprise) scheme in 2020.

For Bella Sharma, former project manager at the Delhi Garima Greh, the home was a celebration of queer resourcefulness and the community’s commitment to the cause. She herself had been a Resident at the Greh, and is grateful for the safe haven it provided her after a brutal altercation with the police. It was also a place where she re-discovered herself.

But after months of not drawing a salary alongside growing family responsibilities, Bella had to step down from her role last December. And she was not the only one.

A 2022 report on the Delhi Greh by The Quint put things in perspective: due to an indefinite funding pause, the home’s mental health counselor was compelled to also take charge of cooking everyone’s meals. For Bella and many of her former colleagues, working overtime was the only option for the longest time. “Lots of residents were dependent on us so we were all trying to do our best to make ends meet, mostly banking on private donations and mutual aid, while waiting for the funds to arrive,” Bella adds, as she recalls watching the Delhi Greh get stripped of resources. “The community was trying its best not to let all this hard work go to waste,” she said referring, of course, to the decades of activism and advocacy that led up to the Transgender Persons Act, 2019, which with all its flaws, did result in the first tranche of shelter homes, albeit few and far between. But the irregular funding disbursal is an affront even to that progress.

Earlier this year, the funds meant for 2023 eventually arrived. But this untimely and unplanned disbursal without any explanation or clarity regarding the same, has led to unnecessary crises and avoidable drop-outs at all the Garima Grehs. This has disastrous consequences for residents who are preparing to transition into permanent housing while working towards financial autonomy, with disruptions in high school classes, vocational training and career counselling services, and life-threatening situations for those who may need timely suicide intervention, case management and mental health services, HIV treatment, gender-affirming care and other critical health services.

During her time at the Delhi Greh, Bella herself observed the critical conditions under which some of her friends wound up there: trans women who were outed to their family by “marriage proposals from impatient lovers and family friends”, folks who found themselves pulling the chord and packing their bags after being called a “unspeakable slur” by their mother. “Most people who come here are drained, burned out, some even suicidal, and it takes 3 months for them to stabilise”, Bella claims.

Course-correction no longer enough, we need a fresh vision

Even when they were up and running, the Garima Grehs were not without their flaws. Reports of lapse in security, with families of trans people and sometimes even the police storming the Garima Grehs and physically assaulting residents were making news. A few of the homes also don’t accept transgender couples who have fled together, stipulating that the space is only aimed at catering to trans individuals.

Filmmaker Jaishree Kumar, whose upcoming documentary on the Delhi Garima Greh, Basera, offers an even-handed glimpse into the state of these shelter homes, confirms this, saying, “The security guards at the Delhi home have quit, and the place is rife with hygiene and molding issues, poor quality of food (and even that was courtesy private benefactors). Now due to funding cuts, the trans women and trans men’s dormitories have also been merged.”

In order for these shelter homes to become autonomous and sustainable one-stop wellness centers, there is a serious need to re-engage with the vision and reimagine it at a policy level, so that residents and employees continue to have access to safe housing and ancillary services at their most vulnerable.

To begin with, a total of 12 homes for a country-wide trans population of 4.88lakh (as per the 2011 Census) is not suggestive of an inclusive and representative policy as it completely dismisses and decenters the needs of unhoused trans people in smaller cities and peri-urban areas. Many trans youth who run away from their natal homes are compelled to cross state lines in order to reach the Grehs, like Diya (name changed) who left her home in Assam and arrived at the Delhi Greh.

Ari Roy Chowdhuri who co-leads Nadia-Ranaghat Sompriti, a trans-kothi-hijra rights collective in West Bengal, does not hold back when asked about the lack of Garima Grehs outside prominent cities like Kolkata, citing that the unique needs of trans people in semi-urban areas are often removed from mainstream funding circles. “There is no acknowledgement of the resource-starved environments we operate in,” she adds.

Similarly, Jasmine (name changed), a trans priestess from Bilaspur exiled by her community, discovered a safe space only in Himachal Queer Foundation’s Self-Care and Catharsis workshop in Palampur (HP). At the time, she was dealing with the compounded trauma of being ostracised by her faith-based community and family. “She stayed with us for a few days while we helped her retrieve her belongings which had been confiscated,” Don Hasar, who co-founded Himachal Queer Foundation, tells Gaysi, adding that this was a completely self-funded effort and that HQF receives no grant or resources to set up and systematically offer safe shelter. “Keeping her safe was our priority, as was making sure that she safely reached a new space, where she could resume her work as priestess, which gave her a sense of identity,” they add, citing the interventions they made with the Police and Village Panchayat officials to ensure this.

Beyond housing, Centering access

That’s perhaps why the concept of safe housing needs a broader definition, to especially account for the diverse needs and experiences of trans people across the country. After all, safe temporary housing solution is only as good as its ability to provide holistic and comprehensive care.

For Don, therefore, it is not enough to build Garima Grehs which one cannot access without a transgender identity card. HQF, which works on sensitizing municipal and local law enforcement authorities, routinely impresses upon them the need to hasten the ID registration processes and remove harassment and prejudices from these spaces, heavily underscoring the importance of engaging and involving institutional actors and structures in effective implementation of such policies.

Like Ari, Don also complains of the lack of recognition for organizations who work in semi-rural settings and “work against templates generalizing trans experiences”, like making community interventions, working to create safe spaces in natal family spaces for queer youth, and offering legal and career counseling that centers the individual’s interests, among others. “Rural realities cannot be ignored, and local challenges (related to harsh climate, terrain and mobility) in the pahari regions must be factored in,” they tell Gaysi, also advocating strongly for “one-stop community centers for trans people at risk, modeled after the Telangana crisis centers for cis-women who fall victim to domestic violence.”

Even those of us who have had challenging experiences with coming out while still being financially dependent on our natal caregivers, know the utter loss of security that comes with housing instability at some point in life. The crisis in safe temporary housing, especially for those at a high risk for displacement from their neighborhoods and homes, then poses larger questions: How can we direct some of our privilege and efforts to protecting marginalized LGBTQ folx from housing discrimination? How can we ensure that the rights of transgender students at Indian campuses are not violated or threatened with eviction? Do we need to think about community building specifically for trans elders? Are we able to think of shelter homes as all-encompassing spaces with 12-step programs, behavioral and sexual health services and the works?

When we look back at queer history, especially that of ballroom dance houses or hijra kothi communities closer home, we may remember how these spaces also offered trans artists and performers (a large segment of whom were unhoused) a refuge from the streets at night. In Aravani Art project’s ethos, we see something to that effect, with many of the graffiti artists in the community discovering a sense of belonging at a moment in their lives when they’re experiencing some form of an access gap, where an unexpected foray into queer art gradually transforms into a project of reclamation – of space, security, and identity, a coming into one’s own. And what is a home, if not that?