Fair Housing Series Part 8: The Fair Housing Act and the LGBTQ+ Community. – Footnotes

This Is America. The Melting Pot Belongs to Everyone.

1. Pew Research Center, “American Views on Same-Sex Marriage,” November 2023. Support for same-sex marriage among Americans aged 18-29 stands at 79 percent, compared to 61 percent overall — a generational shift that represents the most rapid change in public opinion on any social issue in the modern polling era.
2. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, “HUD’s Equal Access Rule,” 77 Fed. Reg. 5662 (February 3, 2012); rescinded in part, February 2025. The Obama-era Equal Access Rule required HUD-funded programs to provide equal access regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. The Trump administration halted enforcement of the Equal Access Rule on February 10, 2025.
3. Movement Advancement Project, “Fair Housing Laws and Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity,” April 2026. As of 2026, twenty-seven states have no explicit state-level fair housing protections for LGBTQ+ individuals. In those states, absent federal protection, a landlord or seller may legally refuse to transact with a person on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
4. Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644 (2020). The Supreme Court held 6-3 that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, reasoning that discrimination against a person for being gay or transgender necessarily involves discrimination based on sex. The ruling does not directly apply to housing, but fair housing advocates have argued that its logic extends to the Fair Housing Act’s sex discrimination prohibition.
5. Executive Order No. 14168: Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, January 20, 2025. The order directs federal agencies to recognize only two sexes for purposes of federal law and policy, and has been used as the basis for withdrawing federal fair housing and equal access protections that had been extended to transgender individuals.
6. National Fair Housing Alliance, 2024 Fair Housing Trends Report, Washington D.C.: NFHA, 2024. The report documents a 25 percent increase in fair housing complaints citing sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination between 2018 and 2023, concentrated in states without explicit state-level protections.