It was January in Anchorage, Alaska, when a familiar face showed up at the door of Downtown Hope Center. Sherrie Laurie, the shelter operator, recognized the person immediately. She had spent more than a decade working with Anchorage’s homeless population and remembered him as a man who had frequented the local soup kitchen.
But that night, he was wearing a pink nightgown, bleeding from a large gash on his face, and asking to spend the night in Laurie’s women-only shelter.
“He was very belligerent and demanding to stay,” Laurie recalled in an interview with IW Features. “So I had to get creative. So I finally convinced him that I would get him a cab so he could go to the hospital and get stitches.”
Her shelter requires sobriety, but the man appeared heavily intoxicated, she remembered. But Laurie had another reason to feel concerned: in her care were roughly 50 homeless women preparing to sleep on cots in one room, just three feet apart from each other. Many had survived rape, sex trafficking, domestic violence, and years on the streets––conditions that are unlivable in the unforgiving Alaskan winter. And some of these women knew the man at the door, too.
“The fear in the room when he was at the door, because it’s one big room, so they saw me at the door with him,” Laurie said.
So Laurie sent him to the hospital, even paying for his transportation there.
But about a week later, her judgment call was under scrutiny by the city, as she received notice that Downtown Hope Center was facing a discrimination complaint.
“I started investigating a little bit. I thought, ‘This is going to be bigger than I have any idea,’” she said.
Laurie was right. This one encounter would lead to a years-long fight over whether Anchorage could use its nondiscrimination laws to force Laurie’s Christian nonprofit to open its female-only sleeping quarters to males who self-identified as women. Downtown Hope Center would take the city to federal court, win, and then face a rewritten ordinance, and end up fighting Anchorage again.
But Laurie never sought out a spotlight and certainly had no desire to be the woman at the center of a national fight over women’s right to their own safe spaces. In fact, before she ran a homeless shelter, she was afraid of homeless people, she said.
Laurie spent her career as a FedEx pilot, and after retiring and raising her children, she was looking for something meaningful to do with her time. That’s when she decided to confront a fear that had followed her since childhood––her uncle had been homeless, and interactions with him left lasting fright in her mind.
So in 2005, she took a leap of faith and walked into a soup kitchen in downtown Anchorage to volunteer.
“I went right down to a soup kitchen downtown and just started volunteering. And in the process, just fell in love with the people,” she recalled. “Even though it was hard, I got to know them as human beings, and they’ve had very difficult backgrounds, most of them.”
Laurie eventually joined the board and became the executive director of what is now Downtown Hope Center. In 2015, amid a synthetic drug epidemic that had left her city struggling with homelessness, her organization began opening its dining hall overnight to women.
The need was obvious to her. Many of the women Laurie encountered had been homeless for years. Several had histories of severe childhood abuse, others had been prostituted or sex trafficked, and their other option was a shelter down the street that housed both men and women together.
“I went there once,” Laurie added. “It was actually quite terrifying.”
Originally, Laurie intended Downtown Hope Center’s new operations to be a temporary cold-weather shelter, as Anchorage’s temperature can drop to -5°F and -20°F overnight. But it stayed open year-round, and three years later, protecting that female-only space had become a full-time job in and of itself.
The male who arrived at Downtown Hope Center in 2018, identifying as a woman, later filed a complaint with the Anchorage Equal Rights Commission alleging discrimination based on sex and “gender identity.”
Anchorage sought to apply its nondiscrimination ordinance to Downtown Hope Center in a way that Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which represented the shelter, argued could require them to admit males who identified as women in the future, too.
“They used that as an opportunity to then try to apply their local ordinances to force the shelter to allow in the future men who identify as female when they come to the shelter,” ADF Senior Counsel Kate Anderson told IW Features.
But for Laurie, changing her shelter’s women-only policy was never under consideration.
“No, never once,” Laurie affirmed. “It’s nothing against the person, it’s that we are a women’s-only shelter, period.”
In 2019, a federal court ruled that Downtown Hope Center was likely to succeed in its argument that Anchorage’s public accommodations ordinances did not apply to the shelter. Anchorage then settled the case, dismissed the administrative complaint, and agreed not to enforce the provision against Downtown Hope Center.
Anchorage later amended its ordinance, prompting another lawsuit from Downtown Hope Center in 2021. A federal judge again ruled in Laurie’s shelter’s favor, concluding that it was not a “public accommodation” subject to the challenged ordinance.
Laurie prevailed in Anchorage, but the broader debate over protections for women’s shelters is far from settled. The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), first enacted in 1994, was amended in 2013 to add “gender identity” to its nondiscrimination requirements for federally funded programs. As Congress looks toward the law’s next reauthorization, lawmakers should clarify protections for female-only intimate spaces and accommodations when privacy and safety are at stake. Downtown Hope Center illustrates why that distinction can matter in practice.
The shelter Laurie was fighting to preserve is not a collection of private bedrooms, she clarified. Today, 80 women sleep in one large room, sharing two bathrooms and four showers. And because there is no privacy in the sleeping quarters, women have to change somewhere else in the shelter.
Some residents suffer from night terrors, some fight, and some arrive at the door injured after years on the streets. Laurie has had to call ambulances in the middle of the night. And overnight staffing is deliberately female-only to give these struggling women a chance to seek shelter––literally and figuratively––in a sex-segregated space.
Laurie remembered one woman who had been living in a tent when a man tried to rape her, poured gasoline on her, and set her on fire.
“I saw her the next morning, and she was burned,” Laurie recalled. “There’s some terrible trauma that happens here [in Anchorage], and it’s really good to make people aware that this is what happens to women on the streets. They’re not there because they want to be, but many of them are trapped there, and they need safe shelters to go to where it’s just women.”
Though Laurie protected these women in private, the sudden public scrutiny from litigation brought her plenty of unwanted attention. She received what she described as “terrible hate mail,” which included messages she said came from people associated with LGBTQ groups.
“It’d make me cry a lot,” she said of the backlash.
Despite the negative attention, Downtown Hope Center kept growing. The shelter opened with 30 beds in 2015 and had 50 when the dispute began. Today it has 80, and of its 32 staff members, Laurie said 23 are former students of the center’s programs––many of them women who once arrived carrying similar burdens of trauma as the women they now help.
The court fight has also made Laurie a resource for other faith-based shelters. Downtown Hope Center is part of Citygate Network, a network of roughly 400 faith-based missions across the United States, and Laurie said other shelter leaders have called her to confide in her and seek advice when confronting similar issues.
“They’re curious when they call, what did we do and how do we stand up against it?” Laurie said. “I think it has helped them.”
Laurie said only a handful of men have attempted to stay there since the litigation, and they are directed to another shelter down the road.
The women, however, keep coming.
“It takes quite some time to get people free of the trauma they come in here with,” Laurie said.
Some eventually leave, find work, or come back as employees and help the next woman who arrives at the door. And they know that no matter what, every night after 8:00 p.m., the building belongs to women only.
