Our guest bloggers are Liz Neemann, intern with LGBT Progress, and Crosby Burns, Research Associate at LGBT Progress.

If Congress fails to act during the lame-duck session, a series of onerous automatic federal spending cuts and tax hikes will go into effect on January 2, 2013. Failure to reach a compromise in this budget battle would be a painful pill to swallow for all Americans. But for LGBT people, failure to reach an agreement on the fiscal showdown would have particularly dire consequences.

If Congress fails to act, automatic across-the-board spending cuts will take effect under a process known as “sequestration.” Today a report released today by the Center for American Progress, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and a coalition of 23 national LGBT organizations highlights how across-the-board cuts under sequestration would reduce key federal programs and services that support the health, wellness, and livelihood of LGBT Americans and their families. For example,

• Sequestration would hurt LGBT workers. Sequestration would threaten the employment security of LGBT workers (who continue to experience high rates of bias on the job) because federal agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission would have fewer resources to investigate claims of employment discrimination.
• Sequestration would compromise LGBT health. Cuts under sequestration would compromise the health of LGBT Americans by blocking LGBT seniors’ access to Medicare, reducing programmatic funding to health centers designed to serve the LGBT population, and impeding suicide prevention efforts aimed at helping LGBT Americans.
• Sequestration would harm LGBT youth. Sequestration would threaten federal agencies with the removal of critical resources used to prevent bullying and school violence against LGBT youth.
• Sequestration would exacerbate LGBT homelessness and housing discrimination. Across-the-board cuts under sequestration would limit the government’s capacity to address the high rates of homelessness among LGBT youth and to combat housing discrimination against LGBT renters, tenants, and potential homeowners.
• Sequestration would threaten the basic safety of LGBT Americans. Sequestration would restrict available resources designed to address the disproportionate levels of abuse, harassment, and violent crime committed against LGBT individuals.

While the CAP/Task Force report only touches on how these wholesale cuts impact LGBT Americans, failure to reach a deal on the fiscal showdown also means that tax breaks for lower-income and middle class families will expire. This means most families would face a higher tax burden if Congress fails to act. This would be particularly devastating to LGBT families who on average report lower incomes than families headed by different-sex couples. These families cannot foot a higher tax bill, especially when so many of them are already on tenuous economic footing.

In the remaining days of the 112^th Congress, it is imperative that our lawmakers act swiftly to protect LGBT Americans from the severe sequestration consequences to federal programs that both directly and indirectly support them and their families. This means a combination of spending cuts that inflict minimal economic harm on American families along with modest tax increases on the wealthiest two percent of Americans. Only through this combination of cuts and revenue can we put our country back on stable financial footing.

To achieve this, however, congressional Republicans must abandon their quest to hold ordinary citizens hostage in order to protect tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. For all Americans—gay or straight, transgender or not—preventing millionaires and billionaires from paying their fair share at the expense of the middle-class is not in the best interest of the country.

Congress has a little over one month to broker a compromise. For all Americans – including those that are LGBT – the clock is ticking.

David Pakman sat down with the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer to discuss the recent marriage equality wins and other LGBT issues. Fischer claimed he is “for homosexuals, but against homosexuality,” wanting to help them “leave that lifestyle.” He compared homosexuality to drug use — an addiction that people can escape — and he agreed that exorcism could assist in that process:

FISCHER: I think there’s no question that there are spiritual factors at work in this —

PAKMAN: Are they demons?

FISCHER: — that using spiritual weapons of our warfare according to the New Testament can be effective. We know that people can get delivered from homosexual behavior. The former president of the American Psychological Association, Nathan Cummings — he’s seen that happen in his own private clinical practice. He’s seen people get free of homosexual behavior and change their sexual orientation, so it certainly is possible. There may be spiritual factors at work. If there are, then the power of the Gospel, the name of Jesus Christ, the power of the Holy Spirit can be of enormous help.

PAKMAN: And an exorcism might be a way to do that?

FISCHER: Well we believe in the reality of spiritual forces just like Jesus did. [If] you got a problem with demons, David, your problem’s not with me, it’s with Jesus Christ, because he believed in them.

Watch it:

Exorcisms or other forms of spiritual warfare against LGBT people are one of the most extreme forms of ex-gay ministry. Unfortunately, their provocative nature often distract from the psychological abuse of more common forms of ex-gay “therapy” that target vulnerable young people (and their parents).

Fischer went on to cite the fraudulent Regnerus study to claim that same-sex couples can never be good parents. When asked when he decided to be straight or if he could change his attractions, Fischer refused to answer, choosing instead to simply erase the experiences of millions of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals by reducing their lives to “sexual behavior.”

Crossposted from Open Society Foundations.

The list seems endless.

Deoni Jones, age 23. Stabbed to death in Washington, DC.
Agnes Torres, age 35. Decapitated and thrown in a ditch in Atlixco, Mexico.
Anil Aayiramthengu, age 39. Throat slit in Thangassery, India.
Thapelo Makutle, age 24. Throat slit and mutilated in Kuruman, South Africa.
Barbarita Alemán, age 21. Shot to death in Colonia San Martín, Honduras.
Secil Dilşeker, age 46. Throat slit in Antalya, Turkey.
Sirena Paola, age 44. Beaten to death in Maicao, Colombia.
January Marie Lapuz, age 26. Stabbed to death in New Westminster, Canada.
Rayza Morais Costa, age 18. Bound and shot to death in Belém, Brazil.
Cassandra Zapata, age 39. Strangled to death and burned in Rouen, France.

November 20th is the Transgender Day of Remembrance, when we remember these names among those of the hundreds of other transgender people who were murdered in 2012. According to the Transrespect versus Transphobia Worldwide project, murder took the lives of more than 1,080 transgender people in 56 countries between 2008 and 2012. This number is only the tip of the iceberg, as it includes only the handful of cases that garner media attention.

As the trans scholar and advocate Susan Stryker puts it, many people have difficulty recognizing the humanity of another person if they cannot recognize that person’s gender. As a result, trans people in countries around the world frequently encounter extreme prejudice, harassment, and even murderous violence based simply on who they are.

There have been many different ways throughout history and across cultures of conceptualizing gender and describing the process of negotiating socially determined gender boundaries. Over the last century, the term ‘transgender’ has evolved as a popular umbrella term for people whose gender identity — their internal sense of being a man, a woman, or another gender — or gender expression is different from that typically associated with their birth sex. Some people claim a trans identity, while others are identified as trans on the basis of social definitions of masculine and feminine.

Trans people, like any group of people, come from a wide range of backgrounds. They live in cities and rural areas; are young, elderly, and middle-aged; began to live as their true gender when they were children, young adults, or much later in life; and live in families of all varieties. Trans people, and the communities they live in, are diverse in terms of factors such as race, income, and sexual orientation.

While violence can affect trans people from any background, its patterns are anything but random. The overwhelming majority of the lost trans lives that we honor on the Transgender Day of Remembrance are transgender women of color. Some were immigrants. Many struggled to make a living through sex work and were attacked by clients and police alike. Most were poor. In life and in death, their names and histories hover on the edge of invisibility in societies that accorded them few safe places to call their own.

This invisibility, like the brutality of the violence that claims so many trans people, is a reflection of the pervasive poverty, sexism, and other forms of systematic exclusion that circumscribe trans lives. Transgender people routinely confront institutionalized discrimination in areas of everyday life such as health care, housing, employment, education, and legal recognition in their true gender.

Anti-trans discrimination in health care is a particularly cruel reality, since many trans people need transition-related medical services to fully embody their true selves. And even while seeking the same basic health care that anyone might need to fix a broken bone or treat the flu, trans people frequently encounter biased and inadequate treatment from health care providers and denials of financial support from national health systems and health insurance programs.

The consequences of discrimination in health care are deadly. Transgender people are not only disproportionately likely to be victims of violence: They are also more likely to contract HIV, to go without preventive care that can catch diseases like cancer early, and to attempt suicide. In a recent study of more than 6,400 transgender people in the United States, for example, 41 percent of trans people reported attempting suicide — a rate 25 times higher than the general population.

Across the world, trans people are being excluded from jobs, turned away by doctors, funneled into prisons, and left to die by the side of the road. They are not slipping through the cracks: Indifference, hatred, and violence are actively forcing them down through the gaps in our social safety nets, our health care systems, and the legal systems of citizenship by which our societies determine whose lives matter.

The thousands of trans people whom we remember this November 20th must rely on the living to seek their justice. Fortunately, trans activists and their allies in countries across the globe are fighting to end the violence and invisibility that erase trans lives and advocating for policies that respect gender diversity and the full human rights of trans people.

A forthcoming report from the Sexual Health and Rights Project at Open Society Foundations, Transforming Health: International Rights-Based Advocacy for Trans Health, provides snapshots of 16 trans health and rights initiatives from 9 countries and the World Health Organization. The report makes recommendations across fields such as health care, data collection, and government identity document policies that we hope can help build a world in which there are no new names to read out at the Transgender Day of Remembrance. Until then, we must not only work for justice here and now — we must pause this November 20th and remember our dead.

Deoni, Agnes, Anil, we remember you. Thapelo, Barbarita, Secil, we remember you. Sirena, January, Rayza, Cassandra, and so many others — you will remain forever in our hearts.

Teresa Guajardo and Tina Roose tour the Capitol with their neice. (Photo Credit: Chelsea Krotzer, The News Tribune.)

Back in February, Teresa Guajardo and Tina Roose reserved the Washington Capitol Rotunda for December 15 to hold their wedding. Roose calculated that would be the first Saturday after marriage equality becomes law assuming voters passed Referendum 74. In addition to a tribute to the legislature for passing the law, Roose explained that the Capitol reservation was “an act of faith in the voters of the state of Washington.” Now, the couple wants to open their reservation to any other same-sex couples who want to join them:

GUAJARDO: We just said, “Let’s share the joy.” Let’s share the fun and give everybody an opportunity to have a beautiful event in a way that’s somewhat easy.

They have ordered cake for over 200 and are inviting other couples to join them via Facebook. Their wedding will begin at 12:30, then other couples can get married from 1-2:30 on the Rotunda’s various balconies as receptions are ongoing above that.