Virginia’s civil rights policy is now in the hands of a former Biden official who enforced housing rules requiring male access to women’s facilities.
Helen Hardiman leads Virginia’s new Public Advocacy Division under recently elected Democratic Attorney General Jay Jones. Hardiman’s legal career has focused largely on alleged housing discrimination, which led her to former President Joe Biden’s pro-LGBTQ Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Her new division under Jones will enforce civil rights and other policy-focused areas of law, Jones’ office told the press in January.
Between 2022 and 2025, Hardiman was an attorney for HUD’s Enforcement Division while the agency compelled federally-funded facilities to house transgender-identifying men in women’s domestic violence shelters and other spaces. HUD also expanded taxpayer-funded housing opportunities for illegal immigrants and sought to make housing providers file “Equity Plans” before the Trump administration gutted the agency’s left-wing agendas.
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s radical new government also includes a chief energy officer strictly opposed to fossil fuels, a chief diversity officer who once endorsed dismantling the Constitution and a security official who helped the FBI investigate traditional Catholics as potential “violent extremists.” Additionally, Jones won his attorney general race despite a public scandal over leaked text messages in which he fantasized about Republicans and their children dying.
Hardiman’s migration from Biden’s government could mean that Virginia is in for a mountain of over-regulation, American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Howard Husock told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Any ‘civil rights enforcement’ that goes beyond traditional fair housing tests [for] racial and ethnic discrimination will mean state or federal involvement in local land use and zoning decisions that really don’t involve ‘fair housing’ — such as where to permit construction of schools, libraries and supermarkets,” Husock said. “This was the nature of the Biden HUD overreach.”
Jones’ office did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment. Hardiman could not be reached directly.
While at HUD, Hardiman “advised Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity offices across the country, drafted legal opinions and regulatory guidance, and counseled Department leadership on high-impact fair housing issues,” her state profile says.
The agency’s transgender housing rule began under the Obama administration and drew criticism from conservatives. Former HUD Secretary Ben Carson, for example, reportedly warned staff in 2019 about “big, hairy men” having access to women’s shelters. HUD Secretary Scott Turner announced he would scrap the regulation in February 2025, the DCNF previously reported.
HUD based the policy partially on reports that “transgender persons and gender nonconforming persons are often asked inappropriate, intrusive questions; asked to provide evidence about their physical anatomy; or asked for medical records relating to their gender identity or identification documents that record their gender identity,” the agency said in 2016. “There are multiple reasons why this documentation is problematic and prohibited by this rule.”
“It is important that transgender or gender nonconforming persons can self-identify their gender identity orally and not be asked intrusive questions or asked to provide documentary, physical, or medical evidence to prove their gender identity,” HUD said at the time.
Hardiman used her previous role in former Democratic Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring’s office to “advance key expansions of the Virginia Fair Housing Law” to ban discrimination against classes that included “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” according to her government bio. Hardiman called the LGBTQ protections “historic” in a 2021 statement.
“This important and strengthened civil rights law helps assure a free and fair housing market in Virginia where no one is rejected or segregated by characteristics that have nothing to do with one’s ability to be a good neighbor,” Hardiman said.
A 2023 LinkedIn post also shows her praising HUD’s proposal that would have required housing providers to give detailed “Equity Plans” to the government every five years to address discrimination.
“Really exciting announcement not only for fair housing nerds like me, but all Americans who care about equity!” she wrote.
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