The Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a new regulation yesterday requiring federally funded homeless shelters to house transgender people in accordance with their gender identities.

The new rule, which covers all single-sex shelters funded through the HUD's Office of Community Planning and Development (CPD), seeks to ease widespread difficulty among the transgender population in accessing single-sex shelters — particularly those for women.

Transgender people already experience disproportionate rates of homelessness. And according to one study published earlier this year by the Center for American Progress, they also face pervasive anti-trans bias in the process of seeking shelter. Just 30 percent of shelters across four states said they were willing to house transgender women with other women, the study found.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has been finalizing its rules for the treatment of transgender people in shelters and the new regulations are scheduled to be released in September.

The new regulations are expected to require homeless shelters that receive federal support to treat transgender people as members of the gender with which they identify.

Transgender women are women regardless of whether they were born male.

If you’re a transgender woman and you walk into a homeless shelter and they treat you like a man, it’s traumatizing. These people are already vulnerable, they’re homeless, they don’t have a job. To face discrimination the entire time they’re there is a real problem.

--David Stacy, Human Rights Campaign

A couple of days ago, I came across Catherine Austin Fitts for the first time. Fitts, a Wall Street investor and former Assistant Secretary of Housing, uncovered the methods for sucking trillions of dollars out of the US. She explains that it is a coordinated effort between the government and the big banks -- organized crime, she calls it.

She's an excellent speaker and explains it all really well so I recommend that you listen to her rather than have me write out the juicy bits.

HUD Secretary Julián Castro has announced the agency has proposed a new rule to update the existing policy that bars discrimination against LGBT people seeking public housing or housing assistance from the federal government.

Under the new proposal HUD would provide access to housing and services based on a person's gender, not sex assigned at birth.