The law insists on a fiction.

It requires us to pretend not to know what is already empirically established: that violence against women is patterned, overwhelmingly male-perpetrated, and predictably lethal—and that women organize for safety in response to that reality, not out of ideology or preference.

In housing policy, this denial is not abstract. It is procedural. And it has consequences.

Under U.S. fair housing law, permanent housing may not be openly designated for women. The rule is framed as neutrality, but neutrality here functions as erasure. Women may be housed only if women are not named. Protection is permitted only through indirection. Safety must be routed through euphemism.

This produces a peculiar and deeply dishonest ritual.

Housing programs are allowed to exist for women fleeing male violence only if they refuse to say so plainly. Eligibility criteria are written to describe women without naming them: individuals with documented safety risk, people exiting coercive control, survivors referred by professionals.

Everyone involved understands who will live there and why.

The law nevertheless requires a semantic detour so that the truth never appears in declarative form.

This is not a marginal inconvenience. Language is infrastructure. When the law forbids accurate naming, it forces women seeking safety to participate in their own erasure. It teaches that protection must be justified clinically, laundered through paperwork, and never asserted as a right.

Accuracy becomes a liability.
Clarity becomes disqualifying.

The contradiction is often acknowledged quietly, never publicly:

In reality, the residents will overwhelmingly be women.

That sentence appears in internal memos and strategy conversations, not in mission statements. It is how institutions tell themselves the truth while denying women the dignity of hearing it spoken aloud.

The Statistical Pattern No One Is Allowed to Say

I know this not as a slogan, but as a matter of record.

For years, I have deliberately searched for male victims of domestic violence—credible ones, not rhetorical stand-ins. In that time, I found one. He and his son fled sustained abuse by his wife and eventually entered a shelter that was otherwise entirely women.

I spoke with him at length.

He was not theoretical about what had happened to him, but the experience had altered him irrevocably. The most striking thing he said was not about the violence itself, but about its aftermath: he could no longer speak to men about it. They could not imagine it. The women understood immediately, without explanation.

He attempted to advocate for male victims of domestic violence and could not find clients.

There were too few.

That case does not undermine the pattern. It clarifies it.

The rarity of the exception is precisely why the fiction of gender symmetry persists—because the law treats statistical reality as an inconvenience to be managed rather than a fact to be named.

The Material Cost of Pretending

The cost of this dishonesty is not rhetorical.

It is material.

In practice, for every hundred women fleeing violence and trafficking, there is space for about one. Women are routinely turned away because beds do not exist, programs are capped, and eligibility frameworks move more slowly than danger.

When there is nowhere to go, women return to the conditions they fled.

Some are pursued.
Some are killed.

The law does not merely fail to protect women here; it actively delays protection by privileging formal compliance over immediacy.

Each layer of indirection consumes time.
Each refusal to name reality increases exposure.

Violence does not wait for language to become acceptable.

The Right to Name Reality

This is not an argument for secrecy.

It is an argument against compulsory dishonesty.

Women should be able to state plainly that we organize housing for women because women are disproportionately targeted by male violence.

We should be able to build long-term housing without pretending the category of women is incidental.

We should be able to name reality without accuracy itself becoming a legal risk.

Until then, every so-called compliant women-centered housing project carries the same contradiction at its core:

A truth everyone relies on.
And no one is permitted to state plainly.

That is not justice.

It is gaslighting written into law.

And it is killing women.

Notes & Sources

1. National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV) — Domestic Violence Counts census reports (annual): document that on a single day, tens of thousands of survivors are denied shelter or housing due to lack of capacity.
2. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) — Worst Case Housing Needs reports: establish the scale of unmet housing need among extremely low-income households, including survivors of violence.
3. U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) — longitudinal data on violent victimization by sex, demonstrating the disproportionate targeting of women by male perpetrators in domestic and sexual violence.
4. World Health Organization (WHO) — Violence Against Women fact sheets and global estimates confirming patterned, gendered violence and lethality risks.
5. Fair Housing Act (42 U.S.C. §§ 3601–3619) and HUD implementing regulations — prohibit sex-based discrimination in most permanent housing while permitting limited, conditional exceptions in shelters and temporary facilities.

Statistics are conservative; capacity shortfalls vary by jurisdiction but routinely exceed 90%, placing effective availability near one percent of need in many regions.