Will Trans and Nonbinary Residents of Palm Springs Get $900 A Month Regardless of Income? Here's What's True!

It probably shouldn't be surprising to learn that the Fox News headline "California city to give universal income to transgender, nonbinary residents regardless of earnings" is plainly false.

The outlet caused a right-wing frenzy to erupt online when they posted this story earlier, which details that Palm Springs California is now looking to give monthly universal income to trans and nonbinary residents - but mostly becaue of that little sensationalist lie they tacked on at the end.

Trans and nonbinary residents of Palm Springs will NOT be given $900 regardless of income level. While the program is, in fact, meant exclusively for people who do not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth, it is also income-based: Citizens have to meet a basic poverty threshold in order to qualify.

Queer Works Chief Executive Jacob Rostovsky told LA Magazine that "the program would provide monthly payments of $600 to $900 to 20 participants who identify as transgender or nonbinary. Another 20 participants would serve as a control group and receive social services that are built into the program, but not the monthly payments."

That being said, many are questioning why the program is being restricted to only residents of the California city who are trans and nonbinary, rather than simply opening it up to anyone who falls below the poverty line - or at least, any member of a historically disadvantaged minority group who does.

One possible reason is that trans individuals are more likely to have faced alienation from their families, meaning they are far less likely to have any support system to fall back on - but then one must wonder why they wouldn't open the program up to all queer citizens.

Others have pointed out that transgender and nonbinary people face particularly high levels of discrimination in job searches as well.

Still thers question how the city will verify that those recieving the income are in fact trans or nonbinary, and not simply claiming the status for a "handout." There is no one "correct way" to be trans or nonbinary, and people can present in a number of different ways, leaving the parameters for this socio-political experiment murky to say the least.

(That, of course, does not make transphobic bad-faith arguments any more okay.)

It will be interesting to see how things shake out as this situation develops - once people actually learn what the program is actually meant to be, rather than just reading a headline and getting mad - and how it fares for the city when and if it ever does take off. 

For now, limiting the program to 20 experimental participants will surely lead to the kind of careful hand-picking everyone on Twitter is obvioulsy so eager to see occur.