Denton police believe that the suspect in the slaying of 20-year-old Dylan Gurley was motivated by money rather than hate or bias toward Gurley.
She was a transgender woman. She was also experiencing homelessness at the time.
Even though these factors may not have directly contributed to her death, experts say gender identity and homelessness are compounding in violent victimization.
Gurley was at least the 23rd trans or gender-expansive victim of fatal violence identified in 2024, according to the Human Rights Campaign.
She was at least the fifth transgender person to be killed while experiencing homelessness in 2024, HRC reports. Since HRC began tracking fatal violence in 2013, she’s the 36th transgender or gender-expansive victim of fatal violence in Texas.
“It’s important for us to put it out there that it didn’t occur in a vacuum,” Elena Shehan said. “As a community, we need to do better. As a state, we need to do better. Nationally, as well.”
Shehan is the chair of the Denton County Homeless Coalition and has served in leadership roles for organizations within the coalition, such as United Way of Denton County and Denton County Friends of the Family.
DCHC oversees the collaboration and communication of more than two dozen Denton County government agencies, nonprofits, businesses and schools with the goal of “making homelessness rare, brief and nonrecurring.”
Through her work, Shehan said, she knows homelessness to be inherently dangerous for those experiencing it. That danger can be compounded by race, gender, disability and other factors, she said.
“People in a marginalized population are at a much higher risk for crimes to be committed against them,” Shehan said. “That’s the same for the LGBTQIA2S+ community. They are at a much higher risk for crimes to be committed against them as well. When you overlap those marginalized communities, that increase just continues to twofold upon itself.”
Transgender people are over four times more likely than cisgender people — those who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth — to experience violent victimization, according to the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law.
Both the number of people experiencing homelessness and the number of people who identify as LGBTQ+ and are experiencing homelessness are growing in Denton County.
The Denton County Homeless Coalition conducts a yearly point-in-time count of people experiencing homelessness in the county each winter. In 2024, the coalition counted 518 people, 424 of whom were living in the city of Denton.
That’s the largest total the coalition has ever counted and a 20% increase in total population since 2023.
The number of people experiencing homelessness who identified as LGBTQ+ rose from 26 in 2023 to 42 in 2024, a 62% increase.
“Because the population was small in the beginning, any increase is going to look like a substantial increase,” Shehan said.
However, people who identify as transgender or gender-nonconforming experience homelessness at higher rates.
The National Alliance to End Homelessness reports that they also tend to experience unsheltered homelessness at higher rates than cisgender people.
Unsheltered or sheltered homelessness is defined by where a person resides or sleeps, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Someone experiencing unsheltered homelessness stays in a place not meant for human habitation, such as cars, parks or sidewalks. Experiencing sheltered homelessness includes an emergency or temporary shelter, hotel or transitional housing.
The alliance reports that in Texas, 53% of cisgender people experiencing homelessness are unsheltered and 47% are sheltered.
Similarly, of transgender Texans experiencing homelessness, 51% were unsheltered and 49% were experiencing sheltered homelessness.
However, those who identify as gender-nonconforming were more likely to be unsheltered — with 82% of them unsheltered, compared to 18% experiencing sheltered homelessness.
The Denton County coalition also collects data on who is unsheltered and sheltered. However, Shehan said, they do not report the intersection of who is unsheltered versus sheltered among those who identify as LGBTQ+. Breaking down the group of 42 people into subgroups could compromise their privacy and safety, Shehan said.
Heightened job and housing insecurity — compounded with a lack of affordable housing availability in general — are what advocates report as the reason why transgender and gender-nonconforming people experience homelessness at higher rates.
At the root of these insecurities, the Partnership for Strong Communities reports, is prejudice.
Despite anti-discrimination laws, PSC reports that transgender and gender-nonconforming people still have more difficulty getting jobs and may struggle to maintain that job due to prejudice in the workplace.
They may face similar difficulties when attempting to rent, the Texas Homeless Network reports. Landlords may be prejudiced if the person discloses their gender identity.
Or, a background check could reveal their deadname, THN reports, and the name disparity could cause the landlord to be suspicious of renting to them. A deadname is the name a transgender person was given at birth and no longer uses.
When experiencing homelessness, these individuals say they avoid sheltering systems due to fear of mistreatment or harassment. In a UCLA Williams Institute study on homeless shelter access among transgender adults, 84.7% of respondents said they didn’t seek shelter. Among them, 25.7% reported they did not attempt to access shelters due to fear of mistreatment because of their identity.
Of the 15.3% of respondents who sought shelter, 44% reported experiencing mistreatment, harassment, assault or being required to dress as the gender they did not identify with in the shelter.
As for whether the total population of people experiencing homelessness in Denton County are at more or less risk of victimization if they are sheltered or unsheltered, Shehan said she couldn’t say for sure.
Homelessness in and of itself puts the person who is experiencing homelessness at risk of danger, Shehan said, whether they are sleeping in a shelter, an encampment, a vehicle or on the street.
“I think each category is going to have their own risk factor,” Shehan said. “… Each one of them comes with complications.”
Regarding levels of crime involving people experiencing homelessness, Shehan said it’s important to remember they don’t have a home to retreat to.
“They’re also in crisis,” Shehan said. “When you’re experiencing homelessness, you’re not getting a good night’s sleep most nights, if not every night. If you’re living in a constant state of fight-or-flight, there’s a lot of situations that could come about ... that would impact not only your safety but those around them. I think with more affordable housing, more services, that impact [of crime] would be less on our community in the future.”
DCHC’s mission is to move people through its Housing Crisis Response System to be successfully housed. As of May, the coalition reported successfully housing 983 people in the past seven years.
The coalition is seeking to make sure that the point-in-time count of people experiencing homelessness doesn’t continue to increase in future years, Shehan said. Thus, the goal is to reduce the number of people vulnerable to the inherent dangers of homelessness.
Scaling housing and resources is the first step in the coalition’s strategic plan to reduce homelessness. Shehan said each agency in the coalition is always looking at any available funding and collaborating on applications.
“My hope is that if we keep bringing those dollars up and increasing our fundraising and really supporting our agencies and the folks who are accessing our service, that number doesn’t increase,” Shehan said.
“I always say that homelessness is my passion, but I would love to be out of a job because we’ve ended homelessness in Denton County. That’s my goal and our agency’s goal as well.”