By Aldo Toledo, City Hall Reporter June 11, 2024 (SFChronicle.com)
The San Francisco Pride Parade marches down Market Street in June 2023. San Francisco leaders on Tuesday declared the city a sanctuary for transgender people.Adam Pardee/Special to The Chronicle
San Francisco leaders declared the city a sanctuary for transgender people Tuesday, becoming one of the first in the nation to do so amid a push by some conservative states to limit trans rights.
The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday voted unanimously to declare San Francisco a sanctuary city for transgender, gender nonconforming, nonbinary and Two-Spirit people — a Pan-Indian term that describes those who are neither male nor female — to provide a place of safety for that community and providers of gender-affirming care.
Sacramento and West Hollywood have also declared themselves a sanctuary to transgender people, but San Francisco is the first major city in the country to call itself a safe place for transgender and gender nonconforming people.
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The resolution takes its name from San Francisco’s sanctuary policy for immigrants, which bars city authorities from assisting federal immigration officials in most circumstances. The transgender sanctuary resolution is largely symbolic but will be a guiding document for law enforcement in San Francisco in dealing with outside agencies on transgender issues.
San Francisco is also home to the world’s first Transgender Cultural District, which commemorates the area around Compton’s Cafeteria, when a group of trans women led a riot in response to transphobic harassment from police in 1966. That’s three years before the famous Stonewall Riots, an important moment of civil disobedience and protest by members of the LGBTQ community in New York.
The move comes amid a push in recent years by some conservative states to limit the rights of transgender and gender nonconforming people across the United States. In 2024 alone, the resolution says, more than 500 pieces of legislation targeting the LGBTQ+ community have been introduced across 40 states.
“A majority of these laws specifically target transgender people, including youth,” said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who represents the Castro. “As other cities and states turn up the hate, places like San Francisco need to turn up the love.”
Some of these bills aim to criminalize gender-affirming healthcare, restrict trans people’s access to public bathrooms, force teachers to out their students and prevent trans youth from participating in school activities.
The resolution says nearly half of the bills introduced this year specifically target transgender youth and their families, resulting in reports from attorneys general in Tennessee, Missouri, Indiana, and Texas that demand access to medical records to conduct investigations and threaten patients.
California is among only a handful of states where gender-affirming care is not restricted, and where there is a ban on excluding gender-affirming care from insurance policies.
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State lawmakers also recently passed a bill protecting individuals seeking sanctuary from out-of-state prosecution and explicitly prohibits law enforcement agencies in the state from knowingly making or participating in the arrest or extradition of a person based on another state’s law against receiving gender-affirming health care.
A study from Yale University published in 2020 shows that compared with the general population, individuals with a “gender incongruence diagnosis” were about six times as likely to have had a mood and anxiety disorder health care visit. But hormone treatment and/or gender-affirming surgery were shown to reduce mental health care treatment among those people.
Transgender people not only must contend with gender dysphoria and discrimination, but they also are more likely than other groups to suffer violence based on their identity. The resolution declares that anti-transgender legislation in other states is contributing to violence against the trans community. In 2023, 32 members of the community were murdered in the United States, and so far this year 15 have been murdered.
“With this resolution, we are reaffirming that our City has been and will continue to be a sanctuary and a beacon for our transgender and gender non-conforming siblings,” Mandelman said.
Reach Aldo Toledo: Aldo.Toledo@sfchronicle.com
June 11, 2024
CITY HALL REPORTER
Adalberto “Aldo” Toledo is a city hall reporter with The San Francisco Chronicle covering the mayor and Board of Supervisors. He is a Venezuelan American from a family of longtime journalists.Before joining the Chronicle in 2023, he reported on Peninsula governments and breaking news for the San Jose Mercury News. He also has bylines in the Dallas Morning News, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Champaign, Illinois News-Gazette.Raised in Texas, he studied journalism with a print news focus at the University of North Texas Mayborn School of Journalism, where he worked as News Editor for the North Texas Daily student newspaper.
