Transgender survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) face unique struggles in finding safe and inclusive housing as they seek reprieve from violence. Domestic violence shelters are often marked women-only with the goal of creating spaces for female empowerment, wherein women learn feminist principles of liberation and find a sisterhood of support by forging healthy female relationships. However, as a result, shelters frequently deny transgender women access because staff perceive them to be a threat to survivor comfort and to be disruptive to shelters' female-empowerment model. Consequently, though transgender women face similar gender-based oppression and a relatively higher risk of violence as compared to cisgender women, shelters commonly deny transgender women equal protection. This Note conceptualizes how a Fourteenth Amendment equal protection challenge by transgender litigants to women-only shelters might proceed in federal courts. By situating transgender identity within the Supreme Court's broader equal protection jurisprudence, it outlines three ways that the Court could analyze a transgender equal protection challenge: as an issue of first impression, as a sex-based discrimination claim, or as a sexual orientation claim.
