When trans women and romantic partners Rusty Mae Moore, PhD, and Chelsea Goodwin bought a house in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood in 1994, they never imagined it would become something extraordinary.
Moore, a former professor of international business at Hofstra University, who passed away in 2022 at age 80, had only come out as trans and started dating Goodwin a few years before they bought the house. But it was love at first sight for the couple — Goodwin said she swore she “could hear the corny music” after their eyes first locked.
They began living together, and decided to move from Long Island to Brooklyn, which had a larger trans community and was closer to Moore’s children, who lived with their other parent in Park Slope. In their 2017 interview with the New York City Trans Oral History Project, Goodwin and Moore explained that they bought the house intending to share it with a few other trans friends. Instead, “[trans] people started to come out of the woodwork… because they needed a place to live.”
The couple accidentally started what came to be called Transy House, which served as an informal shelter for trans youth and a center for trans political activism from 1995 to 2008, sometimes housing up to 13 people at a time.
The defunding of public housing and increasing rent prices due to gentrification in the 1990s had rapidly transformed the housing landscape in New York City. The city was quickly becoming unaffordable for trans people, who tend to have much lower income and employment levels than the general population. Additionally, trans New Yorkers didn’t have any codified protections from gender-based discrimination and couldn’t depend on mainstream gay rights organizations to advocate for them.
In fact, New York State’s largest gay rights organization at the time, Empire State Pride Agenda, intentionally blocked efforts to include gender identity while lobbying for the state’s Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA), which passed in late 2002. New York State didn’t add gender identity/expression as a protected category to its human rights law until 2019, over a decade and a half later.
Although New York City passed an anti-discrimination bill that did include trans people in 2002, Goodwin pointed out, it originally exempted homeless shelters. This “meant that every time a social worker got a transgender person and didn’t know where to place them, they’d call us or just, without even notifying us, send them to our door,” she told the Trans Oral History Project.
But Transy House was more than an informal collective, and Moore and Goodwin were particularly concerned about the well-being of trans youth. As Moore recalled for the Trans Oral History Project, “people [would] just load their [trans] kid in a car in Texas, drive them to New York City, dump them out in the street and say, ‘Have a good life!’”
