Taylor Brown: Legacy of discrimination and contemporary disparities
Brown traces how longstanding legal and social discrimination against LGBTQIA people resulted in disparate rates of poverty, unemployment, health care barriers, and criminalization that compound housing insecurity.
Their testimony demonstrates that housing insecurity and homelessness among LGBTQI New Yorkers is not the result of a single factor, but the culmination of a myriad intersecting and entrenched inequities.
These inequities have been further exacerbated by current economic, market, and political challenges facing us all.
While every person's circumstances are unique, it is well established that educational opportunities, employment opportunities, and access to health care are equalizers and key determinants in a person's overall quality of life and ability to lead a stable, meaningful, fulfilled, and independent life.
But for most of our history, discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender, sex, gender identity, gender expression, and LGBTQIA status was permissible both socially and legally.
This discrimination was perpetrated and condoned explicitly and implicitly by individuals, the private sector, and the public sector, including federal, state, and local governments.
The consequences of longstanding discrimination are borne out in the multitude of disparities facing LGBTQI New Yorkers today.
Longstanding discrimination has resulted in LGBTQI people experiencing disparate rates of poverty, unemployment, and lack of employment opportunities, income inequality, educational limitations, barriers to medically necessary health care, social and economic immobility,
political and social exclusion, hostility and violence, and criminalization.
These issues have compounding and collateral consequences, including direct implication and impacts in the context of housing insecurity and homelessness.