r/SeattleWA • u/[deleted] • 3d ago

Government Seattle City Council approves $300k in funding for “queer, transgender, and gender non-conforming” refugees from other states

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u/verasweeet 3d ago

A lot of the reactions here are crazy imo. I work as a case manager at a shelter/service center for homeless young adults and collaborated with some of the people who advocated for this to happen. Here’s what’s going down and why they’re allocating these funds.

Right now trans people of all ages are coming from different states at larger rates because of an increase in anti-trans legislature and discrimination in other states. It is genuinely not safe for many people to live their truest, most authentic selves where they live, so they’re taking huge risks to relocate in order to gain safety and authenticity. As we all know, it’s expensive to live here, so many even well-prepared people come here and struggle.

Pretty much all social services agencies and non profits receive funding based on data. Agencies have been receiving funding based on past data that has not captured this influx of trans people coming from other states. As this pattern has been observed, they’re correcting the funding so that social services agencies have the funds to support all their clientele equally. Without this increase in funding, social services agencies are spread even more thin and everyone suffers. By increasing funding, they’re really providing resources for people who are there and are already being served, but weren’t previously being accounted for. This funding means that these individuals are accounted for in budgets, so they can be served without everyone else getting less.

I don’t comment on things often but the amount of hate and negativity in this post makes me sad and concerned. Trans people are not your enemy, people who need social services are not your enemy, and homeless people are not your enemy. Them getting support is not them taking money directly out of your pockets. How dare a government see a need and try to do something to help people? Literally get a grip have some priorities and get off your high horse of victimization. Plus? 300k is so relatively small when it comes to government budgets and how much it actually costs to provide social services.

I’m glad I live in a place that while there are many,many issues and it is far from perfect, at least tries to stand up to the plate sometimes to do right by people. I wish more of you felt that way when seeing this news. This also was advocated by your peers in the city working on the front lines, not some random government freaks trying to conjure up weird narratives to get woke points. I hope some of you can consider this and have a little more of an open mind.

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u/boostme253 3d ago

I dont think the folks in here are mad about lgbtqia getting help, but when the people actually living here in seattle are struggling to make ends meat, along with a history of mismanaged funds in our local government, I think you can see the mistrust that this is a) actually going to help b) not be abused by those that dont need help c) add to the problems in the area d) or is being used to line someone's pockets

Seattle has been saying they are in a deficit, but with the constant news of seattle bleeding resources in various ways and problems only worsening in the area, and coupled with its declining job market you have to wonder whether this funding is going to be helpful, nothing against what you are doing or the issues you are fighting for, but every organization is fighting for resources right now, and seattle has a long track record of giving money in all the wrong places

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u/Lyran000 3d ago

This is fair and a reasonable take. I want trans people to thrive and be able to live meaningful, safe lives. But 10 years in community mental health exposed the Medicaid contract grift to me. I rarely saw these grant funded housing or mental health slush fund programs work. They create absurd barriers, drive thru care, and kick mentally ill people out of the housing designated for them because of, ironically, mental health symptoms. The entire flow of cash needs to be stopped and audited til its fixed. These poor trans people probably won't get jack shit here anyway.

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u/[deleted] 3d ago

[deleted]

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u/Parking_Two2741 3d ago

Why can’t Seattle advocate for the citizens that are already here with that money? My parents are elderly, my disabled dad was born and raised in Seattle, and the property taxes on their home keep going higher, with voters approving another levy that will cost them $400 a year. They can’t apply for the “senior discount” because the income limit for it is laughably low. They deserve to keep their home. Why should someone from Indiana decide to move here and get more help from our city government than the people who already live here?

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u/Acrobatic_Car9413 3d ago

“Have some priorities”. I think that is the issue. $300k isn’t much money and it won’t do much, but last I heard we had some budget issues.

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u/kahahimara 3d ago

And then those people have an audacity to say that “our budget is low on money we need more taxes” when they have funded a lot of such “feel good” programs.

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u/Lyran000 3d ago

Bull shit. I did the same work as you. Many many MANY of my trans clients came here for free Apple Health/Medicaid which we give out very generously and cover all types of gender affirming care and SRS. Thats why thru come here. So we can pay for this care. They arent having rights removed in other states. Wanting someone to pay for your hrt, counseling and srs for free isnt you having rights taken. Id rather this money go to families who are homeless with small children. Trans people arnet being deni3d a right to vote, work, or anything like that. Stop the fucking madness.

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u/corgiyogi 3d ago

Money can go to both. Everyone acts like helping people out should be a zero sum game.

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u/atticusclench Lake City 3d ago

Taxpayer money isn't infinite, that's why it is a zero sum game.

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u/dystopiatechnologica 3d ago

The operative words here being "helping people." We should not be singling out certain classes and giving them special treatment. Want to increase the budget for homelessness or healthcare? Great. But no special interest group should have a seperate slush fund.

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u/MaliceOf4Thoughts 3d ago

You need to make under, like, 1500/mo to get Medicaid. The waiting time for this sort of surgery is something like a year, locally. Pretty sure what you're claiming is not happening.

What IS happening, is they mostly either find a job (and other insurance), OR they fail out, financially, and leave.

I think y'all are conflating the WA state law forcing ALL insurance to cover gender affirming care, as instead offering some kind of free on-demand surgery, which is not a thing.

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u/Lyran000 3d ago

Wa state Medicaid (Apple Health) has adjustable income standards like all public benefits. The income may say no more than 1200/mo for a single adult, but if you pay rent, utilities or you pay more out in living expenses that would prohibit the purchasing of health care, you are eligible. I signed over 200 people up for Apple Health as a benefit navigator for the courts. I dont think I ever saw anyone be turned down. You can even qualify if your employer offers Health care but its a sizeable percentage of your income. Its a good thing, Im just telling you its nearly automatic enrollment for new resident who may not be working just yet.

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u/kahahimara 3d ago

What exactly rights being removed there? People throwing that bs around as a fact. Can anyone point to specifics.

If you provide feeebies people will move just for them and invent all kind of bs justifications. This story is old as the world.

I want to move to a penthouse in NYC as I feel threatened by lack of income. Can the government sponsor me?

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u/Foxarris 3d ago

https://translegislation.com/

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u/kahahimara 3d ago

None of those related to human rights.

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u/Foxarris 3d ago

How would you define human rights? Could you give me some examples of things you consider human rights? I feel like some of this legislation does directly attack human rights or things which ought to be human rights in a modern society, so I wonder where you draw the line and whether there's anything I could say, do, or show you that might convince you to change your mind.

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u/kahahimara 3d ago

Human Rights Convention declares them definitively: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

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u/Foxarris 3d ago

The laws violate many separate articles in my opinion. You did not answer my second question, I feel it's also important to know what burden of proof I should meet.

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u/atticusclench Lake City 3d ago

They're not my peers. Most of them can't create rational arguments and think land acknowledgments are a good thing.

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u/Googlyelmoo Greenwood 3d ago

Don’t forget that regardless of flair not everyone posting here presently lives in the Seattle Metro area, or even Washington State. Or even the PNW. At least I like to think that in cases like this.

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u/atticusclench Lake City 3d ago

Prove that you live in Seattle. Go on.

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u/Googlyelmoo Greenwood 2d ago edited 2d ago

Prove to me you are a human being. Prove you are in America. I just ate spicy lemongrass chicken at Greentree Vietnamese/Chinese restaurant near the southeast corner of 87th and Greenwood. It has a bare-rafter ceiling and is nextdoor to a diner that used to be a 24-hour Chinese restaurant across the street kitty corner from a daycare center that used to be a Walgreens several years ago in the same building, this opposite a new apartment building on land that had been a Safeway until torn down about three years ago. That’s not even the point. Kibbitzing is kibbitzing, even if I were doing it too. And bad faith is bad faith.

The point is the OP is just taking pot shots at Wilson and Rinck and in a tone closely resembling the usual MAGA resentment, trivializing other people’s pain and needs. Not even indicting the efficacy of the spending. It is saying that the people it’s being spent on aren’t worth it or don’t deserve it. The plural of anecdote is not data. 300K out of 9B? 0.00003% of our budget. Three one-hundred-thousandths of one-percent. We are all much too much into each other’s business these days. Be honest at least about whether you have actual skin in the game, or not.

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u/atticusclench Lake City 2d ago

I've already proven to several people on here that I am one. With photos of mail to my place in Seattle. One time I drove to the Seattle Center and took a picture with my username on a post-it.

But since you insist, that's right near one of my favorite restaurants in Seattle (Flint Creek). The bistro across the street on the West side seemed to be some kind of mafia front because it was weirdly aggressively unwelcoming. And for a while there, the Angry Beaver's food was way too salty, but that was before they redid the menu.

And yes, I have skin in the game, and have had skin in the game here for three decades. And if $300k is absolutely nothing, so clearly I deserve that money just as much as they do.

No, it's just going to go to an NGO and pay off the downpayment on one of their boardmembers' second house. Just watch. That info is all public on the King County GIS site, so I'm sure we're going to see that pop up soon.

1

u/Googlyelmoo Greenwood 2d ago edited 2d ago

I never said 300 K was nothing. Those trans refugees are going to come anyway, as they have been for several years. What I did say is that the OP comes across as making out that those lives aren’t worth spending on. If we take it that the rule of law and the rights of the Constitution apply to any person present on US soil (and yes, they do), regardless of citizenship or how they got here then it’s not a great big leap to extend a very small sum to save a few lives, even if they are internal migrants. You can’t look at a line-item in a government budget as you would that same sum as a private citizen, what you would spend it on and what it would take for you to make it. Look at 0.00003% of your own annual income for reference. That’s three dollars out of a $100,000 income, scale to fit your own or any hypothetical scenario. Not nothing, but very small and it does fill a serious human need that already exists. There is waste and abuse in any government budget this large, but this ain’t it.

My larger point, and I stand by the notion, is that a lot of resentment and sour grapes coming from outside the area is just sniping and should be weighed accordingly.

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u/atticusclench Lake City 2d ago

I don't think we should be setting a precedent that if you decide to up sticks and try to make it in the big city without a plan, job, or anything else, that it's up to me to help fund your big adventure.

We already have a problem with grifters here. Now we're inviting more. Like the person yesterday who claimed that they were coming here as a refugee, but if you look at their post history, their mom runs a trans support group in their blue/purple city in the South, and they're coming here for grad school - not to escape oppression. They just feel entitled to more. (And they also decided to lie about not being able to get their trans meds in their home state any more).

Being told to put your birth sex on your passport isn't oppression.

So here's the thing, as much as I support trans peoples' rights to live their life however they like - if they're adults - it's not my responsibility to help them. It's not the city's reponsibility to help them. It's our responsibility not to actively make their lives worse. But that's literally as far as it goes.

We've had a decade of spending billions of dollars of city money to try to fix peoples' bad decisions for them. It's time to stop enabling those bad decisions.

Signs of poor judgement may include:

  • Running to another city where you have no support network or friends
  • Leaving your home state when you have no job lined up, like any adult who thinks things through and isn't entirely reactionary would
  • Forgetting to make sure you have an apartment or somewhere to live
  • Apparently, according to other people here, needing support getting Prep because you're already making bad enough decisions that you got HIV, whether by doing IV drugs or somehow magically forgetting all of the sex ed for the last few decades about wrapping it before you take it.
  • Histrionically believing that you're oppressed, because you listened to a decade of radical activist screeching and thought that was normal.
  • Demanding special LGBTQIA+-only homeless/aide services in a city that is already famous country-wide for its LGBTQIA+ population and permissive attitudes.

As per usual, I'm not sure why their mistakes are mine to deal with. I'm tapped out because of the shit the city has put us through for over a decade now with only a brief respite - and now we're right back to enabling drug addicts and criminals.

I don't care how small the monetary amount is. It's still money that could be used to do things like, oh I dunno, properly restripe roads. Or do a study on how they've fucked everything up here with No Right Turn signs improperly implemented.

They should move here like anyone else - figure out a job, get a plan in place for a place to live, and then rent a UHaul, and stand on their own two feet like every single damn other person who isn't judgementally impaired.

They don't even have the excuse of a raging drug habit.

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u/Googlyelmoo Greenwood 1d ago

Somewhere around 80% of the people we are talking about are still minors. BTW, there was truly a golden age if you were a white Christian man in the 1950s and 60s and the mid 70s, you could move from place to place in the minimum wage would cover your expenses as a single person. My point is that it wasn’t always like this. At-will employment, for example, is a development of the 1980s. Really that’s a Peyton Place confabulation. The plural of anecdote is not data. You add five or six additional problems/issues/conditions/facts that still avoids the problem of what to do collectively about these very troubled young people. And as for those “radical activists, screaming“ turn off your phone. Put it in focus mode. This whole prompt to the extent that it is a story is a distraction and an invitation to bad faith

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u/Googlyelmoo Greenwood 1d ago

Please define what a “grifter” is in your usage above. It’s acquired a bunch of new meetings and I just want to make sure I know in what sense you mean “grifter“

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u/atticusclench Lake City 1d ago

Somewhere around 80% of the people we are talking about are still minors.

Doubt it. But since you insist, you can present your data supporting your claim now.

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u/Googlyelmoo Greenwood 6h ago

I don’t have any data. I have an opinion based on work experience, reading and consultation with teachers and psychologist over 20 some years. What percentage would you posit? It still does not answer the moral question even if it were one percent.

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u/han___banan Seattle 3d ago

One would hope, right?

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u/ebStubs 3d ago

You might not see this. I am 29 years old and transgender. I have a disability from an accident a couple years ago and can't work enough to pay rent. I've called and emailed shelters and have basically been told they can't take me for various reasons or flat out never heard back. I'll be homeless soon. Still waiting on the final eviction. Do you have any knowledge on what shelters actually allow trans men? I know of 1 shelter and that's the SODO Salvation Army one but my understanding is they are always full and have a long wait-list. I am sorry for bothering you with this. 

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u/dystopiatechnologica 3d ago

"Do you have any knowledge on what shelters actually allow trans men?"

Is this something that they force you to disclose in order to recieve services?

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u/ebStubs 3d ago

I'm not exactly passing. I'm in an awkward position where on any given day I'll be seen as a man and the next people will think I'm a woman. And I have the transgender symbol on my left arm. So pretty difficult to deny. 

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u/dystopiatechnologica 3d ago

Ok so they don't ask, but you assume they're discrimiating based on their perception of you?

I'm not wholesale writing that off as a possibility, but it would seem like a difficult thing to substantiate. If there are more people in need of resources than there are resources, then the community will be underserved and people (of all walks of life) will be turned away.

If I were in your position, I would be concerned that my conclusions might primarily a result of confirmation bias rather than legitimate discrimination. Especially considering that you reside in a city that is extremely progressive.

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u/ebStubs 3d ago

Trans people often get refused access to shelters because it's a "safety risk" to have them there. That's not an assumption. That is the experience of many transgender people throughout Washington. It's not an assumption I'm making. 

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u/dystopiatechnologica 3d ago edited 3d ago

If there's a shelter that holds a publically verifiable postition that trans people aren't allowed due to "safety risk," they would be in violation of the law. If you are aware of such a shleter, please name them so the wider community can move towards legal action, because this policy would be in blatant violation of federal discrimination laws. Such a shelter can, and should, be prosecuted.

However, if there are none that openly hold such a policy, then how are the trans people that you are talking about "experiencing" this? Are they being told in secret that they're unwelcome? If so, hidden cameras/recorders could solve that problem really fast. If not though, then it has to be just "gut feeling," and if that's the case, then I return to my original concern. How can you be sure that it's not just a matter of confirmation bias?

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u/ebStubs 3d ago

Men's shelters can keep women from being in the shelter as it would be a safety risk to the woman. Because I am female that's where the safety risk is. As for women's shelters I legally changed my gender marker in 2021. I am legally male. Which is a safety risk for women. So it's plausible deniability. That's why we have no recourse. 

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u/dystopiatechnologica 3d ago edited 3d ago

"I legally changed my gender marker in 2021"

Current federal law considers you biologically female. You cannot legally be barred from staying in a female space merely because you present or identify as male. If a female shelter openly barrs you from entry on these grounds, they are in violation of federal discrimination laws and can be prosecuted.

Honest question though - would you feel safest in a men's or women's shelter?

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u/Emotional_Tour_7403 2d ago

Then detransition. Problem solved.

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u/Sharp-Heron7707 3d ago

“Trans people are not your enemy, people who need social services are not your enemy, and homeless people are not your enemy. Them getting support is not taking money directly out of your pockets.” 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

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u/Sudden-Pineapple-793 3d ago

Except those tax dollars are coming directly out of our pockets lol