As a hurricane spun toward Florida in 2021, Jasmine McKenzie filled her car with food, generators, clothes, flashlights, and other essential supplies. She and her team drove for 20 hours, crisscrossing the state from Tampa to Orlando to Jacksonville. Along the way, they dropped off supplies at the homes and hotel rooms of transgender Floridians in the path of the storm.
McKenzie, a Black trans woman living in South Florida, is the founder and executive director of the McKenzie Project, an organization formed in 2020 to serve and uplift Black trans, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary people. The organization has a special emphasis on addressing factors that can lead to homelessness, separation from families, engaging in survival sex work, and lack of access to education for young people.
McKenzie and her organization have become a lifeline for trans Floridians facing climate disasters as well as political storms. McKenzie says many trans people are experts at building community, navigating bureaucracy, and making the most of scarce resources, skills that ripple out and benefit the wider community even as they are forced to fight tooth and nail just to live.
“I live in a state where our governor and our president are trying to erase us,” McKenzie said. “We have a president who believes that climate justice is not real, who is shutting down billions of dollars or more into FEMA.” And yet, she said, “We’re still in this fight, trying to find ways to survive.”
Discrimination put trans folks in harm’s way ahead of disasters
In the U.S., trans people are more likely to be unhoused, live in poverty, be incarcerated, have a chronic mental or physical illness, and be unemployed than cisgender people, said Leo Goldsmith, a doctoral student at the Yale School of the Environment, who studies the way disasters impact LGBTQ+ people. (Editor’s note: This website is an initiative of the Yale Center for Environmental Communication at the Yale School of the Environment.)
“Transgender people do not have full rights in this country,” he said. “So they often experience social, economic, political, and health disparities that put them at higher risk when disasters actually hit.”
Federal antidiscrimination policies don’t always protect transgender people because they only use the word “sex,” which each presidential administration can define differently. President Donald Trump declared almost immediately upon taking office in January that the federal government would only recognize two sexes.
“There’s all of this uncertainty every four years, during the elections, about whether or not trans people will be recognized as full people,” Goldsmith said.
Additionally, many states restrict protections for trans people to access care and services, whether or not there is a disaster; two such states are Florida and Texas, both with high hurricane risk. Even in states without legal restrictions, cultural norms endanger trans people, particularly Black trans women.
McKenzie speaks openly about how her own experiences with homelessness and survival sex work shaped her, leading her to build an organization that fights for people in similar situations. McKenzie’s climate justice work aims to reach Black, trans, and gender expansive people before, during, and after disasters with access to safe places to go, essential supplies, and community relationships.
The McKenzie Project’s Hurricane Response Team, which, like hormone replacement therapy, is known by the acronym HRT, provides supplies to transgender Floridians who can’t safely access official services from FEMA, state emergency management, or the religious organizations that are often contracted to provide support after a disaster.
McKenzie said many trans people throughout Florida lack the identification documents required to access support. Some trans women who have been unable to change the gender marker on their driver’s licenses or other identification may not be able to access women’s shelters. Even food banks, McKenzie said, often require proof of residency.
“Only about 11% of trans people in the U.S. actually have their documents changed to their actual name and also gender,” said Goldsmith, who also has this problem. “If it gives you any sense of how hard it is – that a Yale student cannot get all of their documents changed is wild. And it’s because I was born in Missouri, and they’re one of the states that won’t change birth certificates unless you basically go through bottom surgery, which, in a sense, is forced sterilization.”
Access to safe, gender-affirming health care can save lives after disasters
McKenzie said access to medication during and after disasters is a common concern for the trans people she works with: not only hormone replacement therapy medications but also treatments for chronic conditions like diabetes.
Transgender people face higher rates of chronic illness and after a storm may have difficulty accessing insulin, medicines for cardiovascular disease, and HIV medications. According to the recently published U.S. Trans Survey, which was conducted in 2022, trans women have the highest rates of people living with HIV of any U.S. demographic. Insulin and other medications must be refrigerated, so if a hurricane or other disaster knocks out the power, “there’s no power, there’s nowhere they can store their medication,” McKenzie said.
Because disasters often damage the electricity grid, roads, and buildings, they make it difficult for anyone to access health care. They’re especially dangerous for transgender people who rely on relationships with affirming health care providers.
“There’s already limited spaces for trans people to actually feel comfortable and get the services and resources that they need,” Goldsmith said. “If those organizations are gone, that means that there really isn’t another place for them to go.”
Older transgender people are especially at risk of chronic illnesses, and they may also be more socially isolated.
“They come from a generation in which they would have been disowned for coming out as who they are,” Goldsmith said. “They lived through the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and so they may have lost a ton of friends and chosen family, and there’s often not enough support for LGBTQ+ and trans elders within elder health care and homes.”
Access to reliable mental health care is also critical after a storm. In their research, Goldsmith has found through preliminary data that trans people are about 22 times more likely than cisgender people to experience mental health problems after disasters.
K Casenhiser, a queer political ecologist who is the rector of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Tiverton, Rhode Island, collected LGBTQ+ oral histories in western North Carolina after Tropical Storm Helene caused devastating flooding in the region in fall 2024. Casenhiser heard from many trans and nonbinary people who lost access to therapists and mental health providers after the disaster.
“Many, many people were like, the thing that helped me outside of community and care was reconnecting with my therapist, and it was very, very bad for me to not be with my therapist for all these months,” they said.
Lack of safe shelter and services during and after a disaster
Even trans people who find shelter face the added burdens of discrimination, violence, and harassment from providers and other residents. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a Black trans girl and a Black trans woman staying in a shelter in Houston were arrested for using the bathroom that aligned with their gender.
“[Trans people are] going from a private space where they can be themselves into the public eye, where they’re going to be scrutinized,” Goldsmith said.
Many transgender men and people with other gender expansive identities rely on garments called binders to flatten their chests. Because binders can restrict blood flow and make it more difficult for the wearer to breathe, it’s not recommended to wear a binder for more than six to eight hours. But in an emergency shelter, a trans person may not feel safe or comfortable removing their binder and may wear it much longer than recommended.
A binder can also help trans men to pass as cisgender men and keep them safe from service providers and other disaster survivors who may be transphobic.
Religious organizations play a large role in disaster response and recovery in the U.S., and some faith-based organizations turn away LGBTQ+ people. The Helene survivors Casenhiser interviewed said that, for the most part, trans and nonbinary people felt safe accessing support from known community organizations, but not always from out-of-town churches and organizations.
“One person described this horrendous experience of going to a shower station that they popped up outside of a grocery store, and there was a religious organization tabling next to the showers,” Casenhiser said. “This trans person was misgendered, harassed, and then chased through the parking lot with really religious pamphlets.”
Vanessa Raditz, a graduate student and organizer with Queers for Climate Justice, said that in their work, they have seen LGBTQ+ affirming faith-based organizations play important roles in disaster recovery. After Hurricane Maria, they said, one Florida church with a Puerto Rican minister helped transgender survivors access essential medications that they couldn’t get on the island.
“I think this is a really important time for faith-based institutions that are affirming to step up and do what they can to be allies and accomplices,” Raditz said. “We do have ways in which the federal government can give money, direct money, to faith-based institutions for disaster relief.”
Raditz also said they would like to see funding mechanisms via FEMA or private philanthropy created to support LGBTQ+ community centers that serve as disaster response centers.
“We really do need to move money,” they said. “So whatever we can do, it may not be in the government realm right now, maybe it’s in philanthropy or private equity, whatever we can do to move resources towards the grassroots, makeshift institutions that people are building to keep their neighbors and loved ones safe, I think that’s really important.”
McKenzie noted that money is also a major need for the McKenzie Project. Its HRT Hub started with a $1,000 grant from a Miami organization called The Smile Trust. In the years since, the large scale of the need has become clear, and McKenzie is consistently advocating for trans organizations to be better represented in climate justice conversations and funding.
“We need the funding, we need the resources, we need the tools, we need the support, we need the allies,” she said.
Transgender community care can be a model for better disaster response
Although transgender people face greater risks during disasters, they are also experts in building community and dreaming up alternate futures.
“Trans people are agents of change,” Goldsmith said. “Our knowledge and our ways of doing things can change emergency management in a transformative way that is beneficial for everyone.”
For instance, after Hurricane Helene, trans and nonbinary people worked to get each other access to hormones through Reddit, WhatsApp groups, and Discord channels, Casenhiser said.
Blue Ridge Pride, an organization and community center where LGBTQ+ people can access support, supplies, and just hang out, hosted workshops and office hours for trans and nonbinary people to fill out disaster paperwork so they didn’t have to be alone while dealing with documents that misgendered or misnamed them.
Back in Florida, the McKenzie project is expanding its climate justice work and bringing other trans organizations into the fold, too. McKenzi would like to see HRT Hubs throughout the state, she said.
“Right now, a lot of people are so scared to come to Florida, where they think there’s no resources,” McKenzie said. “We’re going to be here with or without this political climate, so we want people to understand that there are organizations in the state of Florida that is doing the work, and there is a trans organization that is doing the work to make sure that trans people have the necessities to thrive and survive before and after any type of natural disaster.”
Chavobart Digital Media contributed reporting.
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