Things are as bad or worse in the United States for different reasons. Transgender elders, mostly women, are routinely turned away from nursing homes and long-term care facilities for fear of making other patients "uncomfortable," often leaving these vulnerable elderly women with no reasonable alternatives for care.

This is supposed to be against federal law, but institutions in various states leverage exceptions and court processes to discriminate as much as they can get away with.

I wrote a story a few days ago about a 78-year-old woman in Maine who is filing a pioneering lawsuit against a facility that turned her away, putting her life in jeopardy, because they didn't want to house a transgender woman.

As I say in the story, the mind boggles.

What makes it all the worse is that victims of injustice like her usually have no legal resource, because they can't afford to go to court or they are too ill to make the effort and have no one to do it for them.