By Anthony Belotti
My path into policy began with a simple observation: the people most impacted by public policy decisions are often the least represented in the rooms where those decisions are made. I first learned this when advocating for transgender inclusion in anti-discrimination policies at my local school board as a high school student. I observed this again three years later when I was asked to review and edit HB145 at the state level, which was signed into law as the “Model Policies for the Treatment of Transgender Youth in Virgina Public Schools.” Then, the administrative guidance was rewritten two years later to include forced outings and renamed “Model Policies on Ensuring Privacy, Dignity, and Respect for All Students in Virginia's Public Schools.” As a trans person, I know how quickly systems can fail you, and how necessary it is to build alternatives rooted in care and dignity. Those experiences have shaped the way I advocate for and organize around every pressing policy issue.
Many people think of civil rights legislation when it comes to transgender constituents. However, so much of what we face is interconnected with the struggles shared by many other communities. Housing policy, criminal justice reform, universal healthcare, access to safe working environments—these are all just as related to a transgender person’s dignity and quality of life as they are for any other American. Transgender people are disproportionately represented in the unhoused and housing insecure populations in the US, and the compounding factor of discrimination against trans people in employment, shelter access, and housing puts us at a particular but not unfamiliar risk of being unhoused. Racial minorities experience this as well.
Disabled people and those returning from incarceration face similar challenges. Yet, housing policy in the US seems to be solely focused on supply-side reforms and incentives, if any action is taken at all. Housing insecurity and homelessness are treated as individual failures that should be punished, instead of a structural policy problem that can be solved.
During the summer of 2024, the US Supreme Court held that the eighth amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment does not prevent a city from enforcing civil and/or criminal penalties on those who are sleeping in public. Directly following this, I got together with other folks who had lived experiences of homelessness. Those conversations made it clear that we needed to amend existing state law to ensure that no one in Virginia would be incarcerated or fined for being unhoused. So, we got to work—I translated core ideas into policy language that was then brought to state delegates to introduce in the legislature. The agreed path forward was to ban discrimination against unhoused Virginians. This document, which started as a conversation, then became a bill to protect the right to exist in public space without criminalization.
The bill “Prohibits any locality from discriminating against any person on the basis of actual or perceived unhoused status by imposing a civil or criminal penalty against any unhoused person, defined in the bill, of any age for engaging in life-sustaining activities in or upon any public place, including in a legally parked car in a public place, provided that such activities do not obstruct the movement of pedestrian or vehicular traffic in a manner that creates a hazard to others.
Life-sustaining activities include sleeping, resting, sitting, standing, lying down, or protecting oneself from the elements.”
Going into the Virginia General Assembly Session of 2025, we knew that this legislation was unlikely to be signed by then Governor Glen Youngkin. Our bill patron carried forward nonetheless with hopes that it would at the very least make it out of committee. So much of the push back we received was resistance to decriminalizing being unhoused without first solving rehousing issues within the Commonwealth. Data points alone were not effectively swaying elected officials.
Delegates were not moved by information like the cost differential between incarceration and rehousing. The coalition decided the next step should be training up our base on how to lobby, but more importantly, how to use their experiences as lobbying material. This led to the creation of a workshop for direct service providers and folks with lived experience in homelessness. In collaboration with a local university’s social work department, we approached the training with a trauma-informed lens. Many times, when organizations ask people with lived experience about an array of issues, the process is extractive and sometimes even exploitative. Our goal was to facilitate a workshop that demystified the political process, allowed members to share as much or as little as they were comfortable with, and what to expect when engaging directly with policymakers. While I was giving this training, I realized in many ways the public at large has been conditioned to be the subject of policy, not empowered to leverage democratic structures to be change agents themselves. Members of the workshop later told me that they had never had someone explain the process of legislating in Virginia to them before.
While the bill ended in committee in 2025, I could see the power shifting. The coalition was motivated and knew this was unfortunately a likely outcome. The base of the coalition seemed more empowered, more informed, and excited about the potential should the make-up of the general assembly shift to become more sympathetic to our cause. The elected officials were shifting too—they knew it was an election year, and they saw the number of testimonies we were able to gather. In many ways, it was a show of collective strength. Members of the coalitions were supporting one another through vulnerability and understanding their own individual experiences as part of a shared political demand. We found that advocacy for direct service providers and those with lived experience were pivotal to building political power and moving elected officials toward empathy.
The Virginia legislative session is one of the shortest in the nation, which meant we had to wait about nine months to try again. In that time, we met with elected officials and impacted parties alike to strengthen our turnout for the 2026 session. This time we were more hopeful with the new governor soon to be inaugurated. We held more trainings, interest groups, and reached further into the organizing ecosystem of Virginia to recruit collaborating organizations. The same bill patron as 2025 stepped forward to reintroduce the bill in 2026.
Nearly two years after the initial draft was co-created with community members, our bill was introduced and set for a subcommittee hearing. While we only had a couple of days' notice, we ensured our people would be in the room to testify. We had met with committee members and heard from our bill patron, so we were very hopeful. Once in the committee hearing, it became very clear through the number of abstained votes that there was a slim chance of us making it any further in the process this session.
When I learned the bill had been passed over for the session yet again, my stomach sank. I thought of the trust and community building that was required to have disenfranchised folks walk into the halls of power. Then I thought of the ways this setback could ruin that. However, I found that direct service providers and people with lived experience were instead excited. A colleague on the coalition told me not to think of this as a failure, but instead an extended period to engage even more people in the coalition. This reframe allowed me to understand my own role and work within the coalition even more deeply. Advocacy is not just about passing bills; it’s about transforming who gets to shape them.
Policy reflects not just who is in the room, but who is not. By creating real pathways for those impacted by a given policy decision to have their voices heard in those rooms was no small feat. And in fact, it was that pathway that modeled what it would look like to not speak for community members, but to stand with them. This redistribution of power and the building of knowledge and infrastructure is core to changing the very inequities that brought me to this field. Real change can only happen when we include and work with those closest to the experienced challenge.