• dandelion
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      4 months ago

      Sorry, I still don’t understand where you are coming from. Do you mean a loophole to avoid discrimination against you, or a loophole that enables discrimination?

      EDIT: If it’s the latter, LGBTQ+ housing discrimination is legal because the Fair Housing Act does not mention sexual orientation or gender identity as protected classes, so housing discrimination based on those attributes are legal by default, and only outlawed in states that passed legislation to do so, see the map here.

      If you are asking about the mechanism of how discrimination works, and how to evade that discrimination as a person in a LGBTQ+ category, that is a big topic and the answers are highly contextual. The obvious strategy is to try to hide or make less obvious your sexual orientation or gender identity, which is easier for some and impossible for others.

      For example, if you are a married same-sex couple who both want to be on a lease together, it might to be harder to hide your sexual orientation from a potential landlord you are trying to get that lease with. Others might find a way to make it seem as though they are just roommates. Not every gay person is equally capable of passing as straight.

      Another example: if you have recently started transitioning and you are visibly trans (i.e. not cis-passing), you are much more likely to have your application to rent an apartment or house denied (HUD found in 2011 that 19% of trans people surveyed reported this happening to them). Whether you are cis-passing is based on a lot of factors out of your control, such as how much money and time you can sink into your transition (e.g. many trans people can’t afford expensive laser hair removal and gender affirming surgeries), how early you started your transition, how long you have been transitioning, whether you are taking hormones, and of course a lot of it is dependent on genetics.