A cisgender Canadian woman recently left a women’s shelter for recovering addicts after the shelter assigned her a transgender roommate. Kristi Hanna, 37, is a former paramedic and service industry worker who told Canada’s National Post that a history of sexual abuse led to struggles with cocaine and alcohol. She’d been living at the central Toronto women’s shelter for seven months, but said she left after just two days spent sharing a room with a trans woman.

Hanna said she was immediately offended by the new roommate’s presence, and felt uncomfortable sleeping five feet away from her. She complained to shelter staff — but when they offered to move Hanna to a separate, doorless room, she left the shelter altogether. In an interview with the Post, Hanna claimed that having a trans woman as a roommate was “affecting everyone in the house. This can completely ruin your recovery, let alone your safety, let alone your life.”

Both the case and Hanna’s complaint to a Canadian human rights agency highlight an ongoing debate about the inclusion of trans women in women’s shelters.

In March of this year, U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson was roundly criticized by LGBTQ+ advocacy groups for remarks he made during House and Senate hearings, in which he was quizzed about the removal of LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination rules from HUD websites.

Carson told Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Illinois), in response to questions about the removal of HUD’s LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination guidelines, “There are some women who said they were not comfortable with the idea of being in a shelter, being in a shower, and [sic] somebody who had a very different anatomy.”

But according to U.S. federal law, shelters and programs that receive funding from the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) cannot discriminate based on gender identity — nor on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, or disability. The Justice Department’s 2014 guidance states that VAWA grant recipients can segregate by sex in some cases — like domestic violence shelters — but that the services must be provided equally.

And the Justice Department’s guidance on trans people in VAWA-funded programs is crystal clear. A shelter or program that receives federal funding stemming from VAWA must “ensure that its services do not isolate or segregate victims based upon actual or perceived gender identity.”

“A recipient may not make a determination about services for one beneficiary based on the complaints of another beneficiary when those complaints are based on gender identity,” says the guidance. This means that according to U.S. policy, a cisgender woman’s complaints about a trans woman in a shelter should not be able to inform the shelter’s decision about where to place the trans woman.

Ontario’s Human Rights Code is even more straightforward: It simply states that people cannot be discriminated against on the basis of gender identity (among several other protected classes) when it comes to housing, employment, and other areas.

“We had no pre-warning of any of this...We were all just blindsided,” Hanna told the National Post. “Everyone in the house has had at some point male-enforced trauma. This is not about discrimination, this is about the safety of male-enforced trauma victims.”

The Post was unable to track down the trans woman from the shelter to tell her side of the story, but the nonprofit that runs the shelter — the Jean Tweed Centre — told the paper its staff is “fully aware of the requirements under the Ontario Human Rights Code and are well known for our work in providing trauma-informed care across our programs.”