San Francisco launches guaranteed income program for transgender residents
Crowdfunding for a new citywide program to pay trans people $500,000 a year to live as women has generated more than 700 donations, and the city is taking the first tentative step toward implementing it.
The program, called TransPACT, is part of a long-term effort to provide resources, support and services to transgender people across the city who are living in the gender they were born with.
“Every day, transgender people and parents, teachers, school staff, health care professionals go into the community to tell people that they are living the gender they identify with,” said Lisa Siverson, executive director of the Gender Resource Center, a local nonprofit agency that runs programs serving trans and gender nonconforming communities like the TransPACT program.
As San Francisco’s first “TransCare” program, TransPACT will provide benefits to transgender people, including health care, housing, and job training, for the first three terms of the contract, which began on Oct. 1. TransPACT, which will be funded on a year-round basis, will also cover the cost of hormone therapy for clients for three years.
Funded initially by the City and County of San Francisco’s Human Services departments, the program will expand next year, when the three services are offered within the larger citywide Health Care and Human Services Department.
TransPACT will be a model program that will be replicated in every jurisdiction in the country that allows individuals to change their birth certificates, said Jani Carter, who directs the program from the Transgender Justice Program at the National Center for Lesbian Rights in Washington, DC.
“The City of San Francisco has made a decision in a very deliberate way to make this available to trans women, and it’s very exciting,” she said.
TransPACT is part of an ongoing initiative by the National
