Last week, world leaders from government, civil society, and the private sector gathered virtually for the Summit for Democracy to set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal and to tackle today’s greatest threats to democracy. In advance of the summit, the Council for Global Equality—a coalition of LGBTQI advocacy organizations of which the Center for American Progress is a proud member—in collaboration with F&M Global Barometers published report cards assessing the extent to which participating states have fulfilled their obligations to ensure LGBTQI+ people are full citizens and able to contribute to and benefit from democratic institutions. Unfortunately, the United States’ score on the human rights of LGBTQI+ people is in critical need of improvement. While we scored a 70 percent on basic human rights—a C- if our country were a school—we received failing grades in protecting LGBTQI+ Americans from violence and upholding the socioeconomic rights of LGBTQI+ Americans. We clearly need to catch up on our homework.
Why the terrible scores? A key reason is that LGBTQI+ Americans continue to lack comprehensive nondiscrimination protections at the federal level, leaving them vulnerable to discrimination in key areas of life such as taxpayer-funded programs like emergency shelters and in stores and restaurants. On top of that, this year marked the most anti-LGBTQI+ state legislative session in history, with transphobic attacks lodged at our most vulnerable community members: our children. From blocking access to necessary medical care, to prohibiting transgender kids from joining school sports teams, to erasing all mention of the existence of LGBTQI+ people from textbooks, more than 100 bills targeting transgender people were introduced in state legislatures last session. And school districts across the country are racing to pull LGBTQI+ -themed books and authors from library shelves. These attacks against the basic rights and dignity of LGBTQI+ people, and transgender people, in particular, have devastating consequences.
It should come as no surprise that, according to a 2020 survey by the Center for American Progress, over half of transgender people reported avoiding public spaces like stores and restaurants in order to avoid the trauma of discrimination. In addition to being the most anti-trans legislative session, 2021 is also the deadliest year on record for transgender and gender-nonconforming people, with over 50 reported killings of transgender or gender-nonconforming people, the majority of whom were Black and brown transgender women.
According to the Public Religion Research Institute, over 80 percent of Americans support protections for LGBTQI+ Americans such as those found in the Equality Act, which passed the House in early 2021 yet still awaits a vote in the Senate. The bill’s provisions also have support from majorities in every state across the country, regardless of political ideology or faith tradition. Despite the protections’ broad popularity, support among elected officials lags behind that of the people they are supposed to represent. Congress’ failure to enact massively popular legislation advancing LGBTQI+ equality while state legislatures launched attacks on transgender children emphasizes how our country’s crisis in democracy impacts the basic rights of LGBTQI+ Americans. It also is reflected in our country’s dismal LGBTQI grades as compared to other countries participating in the Summit for Democracy this week. Unsurprisingly, research has shown a strong correlation between the strength of a country’s democratic institutions and the legal rights of its LGBTQI+ citizens. We are also coming to understand that the inverse is also true: The full and inclusive participation of LGBTQI+ citizens strengthens democratic institutions and the democratic process itself.
The Summit for Democracy is not the end but the launch of a year of action. LGBTQI+ Americans need the Senate to get to work and bring the country closer to realizing its founding ideals by passing the Equality Act. And to ensure our elected leaders better represent the American public, Congress should also pass the Freedom to Vote Act, which would strengthen the integrity of our elections and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore and strengthen the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Let’s work together to hold our elected representatives accountable for strengthening our democracy for all Americans and bring home straight As next year.
Sharita Gruberg is the vice president of the LGBTQI+ Research and Communications Project at the Center for American Progress. Mark Bromley is the chair of the Council for Global Equality.
The South African government has taken important steps but did not provide adequate funding for shelters and other services for gender-based violence survivors during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many survivors have been made more vulnerable in the context of Covid-19.
The South African government has acknowledgedhigh rates of gender-based violence both during and before the pandemic. But South African experts told Human Rights Watch that despite promises – including in a National Strategic Plan – to address gender-based violence and femicide, the government has still failed to provide necessary funding for shelters and other services. Efforts should be made to improve access for marginalized people, including sex workers; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people; and undocumented survivors.
“South Africa is facing a situation in which survivors have been locked down with abusers, and they need economic security to free themselves from their abusers, all during a very tight job market and a period of food insecurity,” said Wendy Isaack, LGBT researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Key services such as shelters have been under huge stress for months because of pandemic-related problems and costs and long-standing difficulties like late payment of funds in some places and patchy government support.”
Human Rights Watch interviewed staff at seven shelters spread across the country and six other frontline organizations working directly with victims to prevent gender-based violence or provide emergency support to survivors. Human Rights Watch also interviewed activists and other experts from 12 organizations working to end this violence. Human Rights Watch made unsuccessful attempts to interview or obtain feedback from South Africa’s Department of Social Development (DSD), which oversees shelter services.
Those interviewed said that the biggest problem was a lack of adequate government funding to help overwhelmed nongovernmental organizations providing direct support to victims, including shelters, cope with the pandemic.
The DSD should finalize its draft Intersectoral Shelter Policy as a matter of urgency, and all government agencies involved should carry out planned improvements.
Immediate-, medium- and long-term impacts from South Africa’s Covid-19 lockdowns have increased the risk for women and girls of domestic violence and other forms of gender-based violence. Human Rights Watch research with frontline workers in South Africa suggests that this risk may be greater for additionally marginalized people like black lesbians, transgender men and women, sex workers, and older women, as well as refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants.
Those interviewed said that domestic violence victims living under lockdown were cut off from others who might help them, giving them no respite from partners or family members beating, raping, or psychologically or verbally abusing them.
Government support to shelters during the Covid-19 pandemic appeared to vary enormously among provinces. Some shelters described firm relationships and public health guidance and other support from the provincial DSD staff. Shelters in the Western Cape, for example, said that the agency provided guidance, solidarity, and personal protective equipment (PPE) and that funding for shelters arrived on time.
In other places, though, funding was late. The National Shelter Movement of South Africa, a nonprofit organization with about 78 shelters under its umbrella, said that some staff even had to take personal loans to pay expenses. The South African government did promote a hotline for victims it had set up in 2014, but civil society members said it sometimes provided confusing or out-of-date information and that it was hard for some victims to use because they were afraid their abuser would hear them.
Commentators have said that the South African government worked to keep services open for the survivors. But experts criticized the South African government, saying it was too late to acknowledge the impact of strict lockdowns and had not provided adequate public information about shelters and services to make clear that domestic violence victims could leave their homes to get help.
Frontline workers said that many people, perhaps especially among vulnerable populations, were further endangered by the sudden loss of jobs, incomes, or housing. Sex workers, in particular, were forced to leave brothels and to take greater risks to make ends meet as the work dried up, sex worker rights groups said. Research by Human Rights Watch in 2018 found that female sex workers are especially vulnerable to violence in South Africa, in part because their work is criminalized.
Frontline workers also said that loss of income and lack of food security made undocumented migrants even more dependent on abusive partners and less likely to leave them. Human Rights Watch researchfound that the government’s Covid-19 aid programs, including food parcels during national lockdown, overlooked people with disabilities, refugees and asylum seekers, and many LGBT people.
Shelters vary in whether they accept undocumented migrant survivors. South African law prohibits sheltering immigrants without documentation but allows for emergency humanitarian support for undocumented people. The exception is not clearly defined, and some shelters fear liability for violating the law. South Africa has one shelter designed for LGBT survivors, the Pride Shelter in Cape Town. Though other shelters accept them in theory, experts said that more funding, training, and skills building is needed to counter discrimination and bias in the shelter space, provide tailored services, and raise awareness about availability of shelter services among marginalized populations.
The pandemic and lockdowns temporarily affected or made impossible some important in-house services in shelters, such as some forms of counseling and job training, Human Rights Watch found. Job opportunities for clients evaporated. Shelters were unable to carry out normal in-person outreach activities to raise awareness about their services as well as fundraising activities to support themselves or supplement government grants.
Perhaps because of uncertainty and isolation, several shelter workers said they felt that anxiety and depression among clients increased. Staff also had to make significant changes to how they worked, they and experts said, for example, working week-long shifts rather than going home every day, and there were many reports of burnout among shelter staff.
Inconsistent government support for the shelters is not a new problem. The Heinrich Böll Foundationfor example, together with the National Shelter Movement, has long noted that shelters are “chronically underfunded,” and that funding is also highly variable between and within provinces. A 2019 report on the state of shelters by the Commission for Gender Equality, an independent government watchdog body, found “grossly inadequate and misaligned” funding for shelters from the agency and late payments in some provinces.
Ongoing sensitization and skills training for shelter staff to prevent discrimination against LGBT people, sex workers, or undocumented African non-nationals and to ensure tailored services are available is important, Human Rights Watch said. The DSD should also ensure that all shelters accept undocumented survivors and know how to assist them with immigration procedures.
“The government of South Africa has been addressing gender-based violence during the crisis over the past year,” Isaack said. “But a large-scale and fully resourced effort will be needed to ensure the Covid-19 crisis and its fallout over the next years doesn’t result in South Africa’s rates for gender-based violence worsening further.”
For more information about gender-based violence in South Africa and the impact on shelter services, please see below.
Gender-Based Violence in South Africa
South Africa’s president has characterized gender-based violence in South Africa as a “second pandemic,” after the coronavirus. Statistics, including police reports, are worrying but incomplete, both because of problems with data collection and because victims often do not report abuse. Despite the lack of accurate statistics, it is evident that the rates are high, both for women and for LGBT people.
It is also not yet clear to what extent gender-based violence increased during the Covid-19 lockdowns. An analysis by the Heinrich Böll Foundation released in August 2021 found that various data, including police reporting, a government helpline, and hospitals, did not provide a clear indication that rates had increased, but said that more research was needed. Several people interviewed said that they thought rates increased, and experts and frontline workers widely agreed that the pandemic created additional vulnerabilities.
In September 2021 parliament passed three linked bills amending relevant laws. One, the Domestic Violence Amendment Act, should make it easier for victims to get protection orders.
There is political will to address the crisis, but adequate funding has long been a problem, Human Rights Watch found. The National Strategic Plan on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide attributed the high rates of gender-based violence to South Africa’s history of violence and apartheid, but also to government underinvestment in solving the problem. Others have also concluded that budgetary constraints and lack of cooperation among government departments have undermined progress. Victims lack support when attempting to report violence and lack adequate access to courts and to shelters. The experts interviewed said that the pandemic worsened these problems.
The Commission on Gender Equality’s March 2020 submission to the United Nations committee that oversees states’ compliance with Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women detailed the situation just prior to the pandemic and lockdown. It said that while there was “political willingness to lead national efforts to deal with gender-based violence”, in practice, funding and implementation of a pre-Covid-19-era Emergency Response Action Plan was “still unfolding.” Despite promises of more support, the commission said that even before the pandemic, a lack of government funding had meant the shelters were forced to close, police were undertrained, and medical services for rape survivors were lacking.
The National Strategic Plan is the result of years of activism by South African civil society, including demonstrations in August 2018 that triggered a Presidential Summit Against Gender-Based Violence. Drafted by government and activists, the South African cabinet has also approved the plan. However, it is difficult to track how the plan is being funded. In February 2021 in response to government efforts, the private sector pledged a total of 128 million South African Rand (R, about US$8.1 million) to fight gender-based violence.
Government financial support to shelters and services for survivors is an important part of meeting human rights obligations to address gender-based violence. The National Plan’s Pillar 4, “Response, Care Support and Healing,” and Pillar 5, “Economic Empowerment” tasks the DSD with increasing funding for shelters and services at shelters, and to increase access to shelters and interim housing for all victims, including LGBT people, sex workers, undocumented immigrants, older women, and women with older children.
Covid-19 and Economic Insecurity
The abrupt change in economic activity caused by the pandemic and response had a profound impact on many South African’s economic security. Interviewees said that certain marginalized populations, in particular, African LGBT asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, and sex workers, already more at risk of violence, experienced a significant drop in food security and loss of income. This compounded their risk, especially for those who were forced into homelessness.
Human Rights Watch analysis showed that the authorities did not take steps to facilitate support, including from donors, for refugees and asylum seekers whose access to food and other basic necessities were limited during the nationwide lockdown. As far as Human Rights Watch has been able to ascertain, the government did not consult with people from vulnerable and marginalized groups, such as people with disabilities, leaving many at serious risk of Covid-19 infection, hunger, and other harm.
“Things were very bad to be honest – migrant sex workers were told to move out of brothels and safe houses,” a sex worker peer advocate said about her efforts to assist sex workers in a small town in Gauteng province. “We intervened and made agreements [with the owners] like [in one place] – as long as the sex workers were able to pay electricity the owner allowed them to stay. In another brothel [the owner] gave them a few days after we intervened, but eventually they had to go.”
Dudu Dlamini, a sex worker activist, said that “Sex workers had no cash, no income, they were chased out of houses by landlords”. She said that the loss of income often affected three or four dependents. “They couldn’t go home without bringing money, (couldn’t) visit their children.”
Sex work remains criminalized in South Africa, and as a result, the South African Police Service in some places perpetuates abuse by profiling and harassing sex workers. “Lockdown amplified the challenges for sex workers,” said Nosipho Vidima, a sex workers’ rights advocate. “You can imagine if you’re trying to work and there’s no one else in the street because of curfew… sex workers were harassed and arrested by police for being out, because they were known to be sex workers.”
A social worker at People Against Suffering, Suppression, Oppression, and Poverty (PASSOP), a community-based organization working to defend the rights of asylum seekers, refugees, and non-nationals in Cape Town, said economic insecurity because of the pandemic made it even less likely that their clients, mostly undocumented immigrant LGBT survivors of gender-based violence, would leave abusive partners or report violence. “The majority [of our clients] have lost their jobs [and the need for food and shelter have been those most faced during Covid-19,” he said, adding that the group’s programming had been replaced by proving food parcels and other emergency relief.
“[Even under better times] our clients can’t get work and struggle because they don’t have documents and so have to rely on partners even if they are ill-treated,” he said. He said that at least nine clients were doing sex work to survive, and some had faced police harassment and others violence, and all were more likely to have unsafe sex.
“We did an announcement about our food parcels on the radio as well as our evacuation services and our line blew up,” the codirector from Rise Up Against Gender-Based Violence said. “[Newly homeless people needed] things like buckets to go get water and plastic bags to keep their things in. Especially during the hard lockdown, we had a lot of LGBTIQ people we needed to assist because their families had thrown them out of homes [and] we also did a lot of parcels for non-nationals because there was no assistance for undocumented people.”
Covid-19 Impacts on Gender-Based Violence Shelters
Human Rights Watch found that the pandemic had a significant impact on gender-based violence shelters. The shelters provide refuge from violence and include safe houses that offer temporary accommodation. Crises centers typically offer accommodation for three to six months, and most interviewed by Human Rights Watch also provide counseling, psychosocial and emotional assistance, and life planning, skills building and job training, as well as connections to courts or other government services such as help with protection orders or divorces.
Human Rights Watch did not receive any reports about major Covid-19 outbreaks in shelters, but protecting clients and staff from Covid-19 infection and managing lockdowns strained shelters in many ways. Several shelter workers said that stress and anxiety were greatly heightened for both clients and staff. “We probably worked harder than ever before,” said a senior social worker from a Durban shelter in KwaZulu-Natal. “We had greater levels of anxiety than before among the clients.”
One social worker said that a client and a worker, a cleaner at her shelter, had died of Covid-19, causing anxiety and distress among both staff and clients. “It was a roller coaster,” she said.
Clients at shelters had to self-isolate, especially new arrivals, meaning they lost out on solidarity and community, made worse by restrictions against visitors or making trips outside of the shelter. At one Gauteng shelter, for example, new clients had to self-isolate for 14 days. “It was a very traumatic time,” said a social worker at the shelter. “I’ve never spoken or debriefed about it, but it was frustrating and depressing and not just for the clients here but also for the staff.”
Two other senior shelter workers said that they and their staff had not had a chance to talk about the impact of the pandemic on their wellbeing, and a few people said that the work and sacrifices of shelter staff had not been acknowledged, and that burnout was increasingly a problem. “Everyone just put their heads down and did the work, but now we’re seeing the impact on staff,” said a senior social worker at a 120-bed shelter, Saartjie Bartman Centre, in Cape Town. At least two shelters moved employees from daily shifts, going home at night, to working a week at a time to reduce exposure.
Protections against Covid-19 also created additional costs. “We spent huge amounts of money on PPE in the first months, some R60,000 [about $3,800],” said a senior social worker at the Saartjie Bartman Centre. Like others, this shelter also spent precious funds on private car services to reduce staff exposure on public transport. Fundraising events were canceled and at least some shelters decided to stop in-kind deliveries of food and other support that they usually depend on to reduce opportunities for virus transmission. In-person outreach work in communities also stopped, potentially reducing people’s access and knowledge about sheltering.
Covid-19 Impacts on Services for Survivors
Shelter workers said that perhaps the most worrying loss for shelter residents from the pandemic has been job opportunities. “Women can’t find jobs now, some have been with us for six months now and have no follow-up plan because of that,” a KwaZulu-Natal social worker at a shelter said in February. “I refuse to send a client back to an abusive situation.”
“Our clients have been disappointed,” said a senior social worker from the Sahara Shelter. “A lot come here unemployed, and we try to work as much as possible with local businesses and people who can give our clients jobs, so they have income, but that’s not been possible under Covid-19.” Another social worker said that “We have 15 women [clients] with us now, and only two are employed – it’s terrible.”
Government services were harder to get, including some lifesaving services. “Some government officials were working from home and it was hard to reach them”, a social worker from a shelter in the Eastern Cape Province said. “[This] led to a delay in service delivery to our clients and also added strain on them with regard to their cases. In the beginning of the lockdown, cases were postponed in court and protection orders could not be granted on the date set.”
“We faced huge problems in getting protection orders,” another social worker said.
Others said that health services were affected, with some hospitals shutting down or canceling normal services their clients depended on, some medications being harder to get, and general anxiety and uncertainty as to when taking a client to a hospital or clinic was worth the risk of exposure to Covid-19. “Access to mental [health services] and other health care has proved to be extremely inaccessible during lockdown, even more so than before,” a domestic violence worker in the Cape Flats said.
Shelters struggled to keep essential services such as psychosocial – mental health – support and counseling ongoing, and these essential services were halted in some places for at least a period. Some shelters lost at least some programming. “We also had to stop all our extra services,” said one social worker.
Organizations like SWEAT, the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce, and Mothers for the Future, a SWEAT offshoot, who work to support sex workers including protecting them against gender-based violence, struggled with major programming losses, especially in the early days of the pandemic. “We had to stop support group meetings,” Dlamini said. “We moved over to a WhatsApp group so we could provide a little support.”
“We even saw places that had provided condoms for free had shut down,” said a sex worker activist, Megan Lessing. “Some sex workers were earning R50 a day [about $3.20] and paying R20 [about $1.30] for condoms.”
Access to Shelters for Marginalized Survivors
Human Rights Watch found that shelters differed in whom they accepted as clients. Undocumented migrants, LGBT people, and women with older male children were sometimes excluded, for reasons that range from lack of private family facilities to concern about running afoul of the immigration law, or not being able to pay expenses the government would not reimburse for non-nationals. Older women, people who use drugs, and women with severe illnesses were sometimes excluded as well, with many facilities lacking the resources to provide specialized health or services, such as personal care and other support, to people with disabilities, including older people with disabilities.
While sex workers, transwomen, transmen, and lesbians, were usually accepted in theory, people working with these vulnerable groups said that particular group often did not feel welcome and that more needed to be done to help them access shelters.
“Vulnerable groups struggle to find or use shelters mainly because of stigma,” a shelter social worker said. “They are often discriminated against by the public and by staff at shelters … and they’re coming from a place where there’s a lack of acceptance to start with from family members.”
Citing security concerns, about half of the shelters contacted would not take older boys, usually any male over 12. Two shelters said that they did not take older women, in one case because of fears that they would never find another home for them. “We can’t [discharge] them because other support structures [like [older] people’s homes] are not working,” said one social worker. More commonly shelters said that they would not take women using drugs, because they are not set up to safely provide necessary services.
“Some shelters won’t take foreign nationals, especially undocumented people, [and] we spent a lot of time trying to place foreign nationals,” said one person who had helped more than 50 women leave domestic violence in Johannesburg. “We will assist, we won’t judge them if they’ve got papers and have been referred to us and have a right to be in the country,” one shelter social worker said. Others said that they would take undocumented survivors, but it was “problematic … we then have to refer them to the correct institutions handling their cases.”
The Creighton Shelter in KwaZulu-Natal said that they had recently taken in a transwoman. “It was very hard for her to find a shelter because in her ID she’s still a man,” the manager said. Other shelters said that staff can feel reluctant to accept transwomen in the facility, especially if there are no private rooms and bathrooms, or training for staff. Another shelter manager and National Shelter Movement executive committee member, Bernadine Bachar, said that the shelter serves transwomen, but that generally, “there’s a lot of reluctance to take transwomen. Staff feel that they’re not equipped to deal with issues.”
Sex workers experience barriers to accessing shelters, including assumptions about their drug use, on whether they can remain working and not violate shelter rules, or whether they have immigration documentation. One shelter worker said: “Sex workers are sometimes [dependent on] drugs; we have a zero-tolerance policy on that.” She also said that female sex workers often “disregard” the shelter’s 5 p.m. curfew, along with the government’s Covid-19 regulations.
“Sex workers … often do not stay long because they have to leave to do their work and so they violate the shelter rules as well as Covid lockdown regulation,” another person interviewed said.
“I put one sex worker in a shelter and the staff there saw her working and told us to take her to another shelter,” Dlamini said. “And there was another case where a sex worker tested positive for drugs and so was not allowed to stay.”
Sex workers usually do not even consider a shelter an option, a sex worker peer said. “The general feeling is that without a South African ID you can’t access anything.”
Government Support During the Pandemic
Unlike many other governments in the region, South Africa does provide support to shelters, and the pandemic has placed many strains on government institutions and services, Human Rights Watch said. It is apparently difficult to calculate government spending on gender-based violence, but experts agree that more funding and focus is needed.
Experts said that the government was too slow to publicly note that the pandemic and the stringent lockdowns had increased the risks of gender-based violence. They said that national and local officials have never acknowledged the added dangers to some groups like sex workers, refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants as well as LGBT people. The experts also said that it was not made clear from the beginning that shelters and other services were essential services that would remain open and that survivors could leave their houses to get help even during curfew or the various levels of lockdown. “Women didn’t know what was going on,” Bachar said. “It was unconscionable.”
South African authorities’ enforcement of curfews and lockdowns has been strict, and sometimes violent, which may have affected victims’ ability to seek help. In June 2020 a report by the Atlantic Council noted that, “Since South Africa instituted a country-wide lockdown on March 27, the number of violent incidents by police against civilians has reportedly more than doubled, with poor and vulnerable populations most affected.”
For many shelters, work with local government officials and police continued during the pandemic even if it was bumpy. Some said they got some additional assistance like funds, PPE including masks and sanitizers, and advice from the government, although more commonly from the National Shelter Movement.
A social worker at the Sahara Shelter in Durban said: “we got masks and sanitizer … whenever there was stuff available (DSD) would drop it off and they helped with deep cleaning two or three times.”
“DSD worked with us from the beginning to prepare, even before lockdown, they sent an epidemiologist to consult with shelters,” a senior worker at a large shelter of 120 beds in Cape Town said. Other shelters said that they did not get any additional support from the government and instead were dependent on the National Shelter Movement for PPE and other resources as well as guidance on how to handle social distancing for example.
The biggest problem was when funding arrived late, those interviewed said. But the overall lack of funding for shelters, even when on time was also consistently mentioned as a problem. “A lack of funding means many shelter workers earn a minimum wage even though they are essential and the work they do is so important,” said Claudia Lopes from the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
Lopes and Kailash Bhana, who are doing research for the Heinrich Böll Foundation on the impact of Covid-19 on shelters, and Lisa Vetten, another expert, said that two shelters in the Eastern Cape had to halt their operations because they could not afford to pay for food as they had not received government funding during the pandemic. They said that at least one shelter in the Northwest province, struggled to feed about 80 clients, some of them children, and came close to collapse because of significantly delayed government funding.
Experts also expressed concerns about the quality of a government hotline set up during the pandemic for victims. “We were shocked by the GBV [gender-based violence] hotline,” the codirector at Rise Up Against Gender-Based Violence said. “[Victims are] trapped in their homes with their abuser and you’re giving them a telephone line. Many people have no phone, and [even if they do] the abuser is within earshot.”
Even when survivors could call, said Lopes, hotline workers were sometimes giving callers inappropriate advice and “deciding for themselves whether someone was eligible for shelters or not” rather than just doing referrals. In one example, she said, “the victim’s partner was a gangster, and she was needing urgent escape from the situation and the community that she lives in, but the command center told her that she was not eligible for sheltering as she could be accommodated elsewhere, essentially with her mom in the same community she had to leave for her own safety. They simply didn’t understand the dynamics.”
Transgender people are at significant risk of violence and harassment in the United States, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
The 65-page report, “‘I Just Try to Make It Home Safe’: Violence and the Human Rights of Transgender People in the United States,” documents how persistent marginalization puts transgender people, particularly Black transgender women, at heightened risk of violence at the hands of strangers, partners, family members, and law enforcement. “Every year, advocates document dozens of cases of fatal violence against transgender people,” said Ryan Thoreson, an LGBT rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. “And these killings are symptomatic of a wider pattern of physical and sexual assaults, verbal harassment, and intimidation of transgender people that demands urgent attention.”
Human Rights Watch interviewed more than 60 transgender people, service providers, and advocates, in addition to reviewing available data on anti-transgender discrimination and violence in the United States. Interviews were conducted primarily in Florida, Ohio, and Texas, where dozens of cases of fatal violence against transgender people have been documented in recent years.
While the administration of President Joe Biden has taken steps to address anti-transgender discrimination, transgender people continue to face widespread hostility in many parts of the United States. In 2021, lawmakers introduced a record number of anti-transgender bills in state legislatures, seeking to restrict transgender people’s access to health care, bathrooms, and sports and recreation. People interviewed said that such actions make them worry even more about their safety in public spaces.
Only 21 states expressly prohibit gender identity discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations under state law, leaving transgender people in many parts of the country particularly vulnerable to mistreatment.
Because of family rejection and discrimination in education and employment, many transgender people have limited employment options and work in informal economies like sex work. When this work is criminalized, sex workers are at particular risk of being assaulted or killed by clients and report being reluctant to seek assistance from law enforcement for fear of being harassed or prosecuted.
Data suggests that transgender people face high rates of poverty, and housing insecurity, limiting their ability to leave situations where they are exposed to violence. The barriers that transgender people face in obtaining gender-affirming health care and identification documents can also heighten their risk of violence by increasing the likelihood that others perceive them as transgender and target them for harassment in public spaces, Human Rights Watch found.
While some interviewees described physical and sexual assaults by strangers in public settings, others described violence at the hands of intimate partners, family members, or law enforcement personnel.
When transgender people did experience violence, whether in public or private, many felt they did not have access to services designed to protect people from harm. Discrimination by homeless shelter staff and residents, domestic violence service providers, and law enforcement personnel left some without alternative options or basic resources to keep themselves safe.
Under international human rights law, governments have an obligation to respond to foreseeable threats to life and bodily integrity, and to address patterns of violence targeting marginalized groups. Lawmakers at the federal, state, and local levels should work to address socioeconomic conditions that put transgender people at risk of violence and provide funding and support to ensure that all survivors of violence are able to access the resources they need.
“Simply condemning violence after it happens is too little, too late,” Thoreson said. “If lawmakers are serious about stopping anti-transgender violence, they need to address the poverty and discrimination that put so many transgender people in harm’s way.”
Recent calls to ban books on race and LGBTQ issues in school libraries by elected officials are a dangerous new low amid the continued weaponization of issues like transgender athletes in school sports and the restriction of lessons on safer sex practices.
But these moves by school board members like Rabih Abuismail and Kirk Twigg in Virginia’s Spotsylvania County — and Republican governors like Henry McMaster of South Carolina and Greg Abbott of Texas — go beyond previous political fearmongering tactics around identity. Given that studies by the Trevor Project show that LGBTQ teenagers are four times as likely to attempt suicide as their heterosexual peers, they are playing politics with young people’s lives.
Access to stories about people like us, and by us, are critical for marginalized communities, especially the youngest, most vulnerable members. As a person who was called almost every homophobic slur imaginable between the ages of 11 and 14, I speak from experience. And it was a piece of queer literature that got me through the worst of it.
In the seventh grade, a friend of my parents gave me three boxes of books that belonged to her gay son, who had recently died of AIDS. Before she closed the last box, she looked at one of the books and hesitated.
“I think you might like this one,” she said, placing it inside. She looked at me with what I now know was an expression of recognition.
When I got home, that was the first book I pulled from the box: Patricia Nell Warren’s “The Front Runner.” The text on the back gave me a chill.
“Billy Sive is young, proud and gay — and he doesn’t care who knows it.”
The words felt almost like an accusation. Even growing up in the Bay Area with LGBTQ-friendly parents, the message had been drilled into me at school that queerness was inherently bad. Eventually, my curiosity won out and I began to read it.
The 1974 novel tells the story of a college track coach, Harlan Brown, and his star athlete, Billy. As the pair fall in love, Harlan comes to terms with his internalized homophobia. As I read the book, I started to deal with my own.
The story also includes lesbian and trans characters and a scene depicting the Stonewall Riots — the first time I learned about the pivotal 1969 event that ignited the LGBTQ rights movement in New York. Warren, a lesbian, made history with the novel when it became the first book of contemporary gay fiction to reach the New York Times Best Seller list. In spite of its then-common tragic ending, it contained a lot of hope. (The international LGBTQ running club that started in San Francisco took its name from the book.)
My freshman year of high school, I discovered a new world of queer literature in the school library. Perhaps not coincidentally, that was also the year I officially came out. But even after devouring books by James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Jan Morris, Carson McCullers and other LGBTQ authors, I never forgot “The Front Runner.” You never forget the life vest someone throws you when you’re drowning.
Perhaps the most disturbing statements made by Virginia school board members Twigg and Abuismail in advocating a ban on “sexually explicit” literature like Adam Rapp’s queer-themed “33 Snowfish” was that they’d like to burn such books. I don’t think I need to remind you what fascist political party hosted book bonfires in 1930s Berlin.
But don’t think it’s just the books they want to destroy: It’s also the ideas and the people they represent.
Perhaps if these officials had ever read a book, they’d know what history has to say about people who plunder libraries for kindling.
Gender-affirming healthcare for trans and non-binary people is being attacked, legally and politically, in the UK.
We’ve seen this with Keira Bell’s well-funded court case, which almost succeeded in making it so that trans kids needed court approval to get puberty blockers; we see it with the fact that the trans healthcare crisis means that a trans person in London going to their GP today for a referral to a gender clinic might wait as long as 26 years for a first appointment, going by the current rate of intake; and we see it every time a politician bleats about “only women having cervixes“, a lie that comes as many trans men and non-binary are struggling with access to timely cervical screenings and reproductive healthcare.
Transphobic rhetoric about how gender-affirming surgeries are “mutilation” and lies about how hormone replacement therapy leads to “sterility in 100% of cases” are widespread, shared by blue-tick “gender critical” activists, heterosexual newspaper columnists, and steadily creeping into parliamentary debates.
But why are cis people so bothered about gender-affirming healthcare for trans people, when they themselves get gender-affirming healthcare all the time?
Let me explain with a story. A couple of years ago, a housemate of mine was prescribed a testosterone-blocking medication called spironolactone by her GP. She has PCOS and the doctor said that spironolactone would help treat some of the symptoms she was experiencing, like increased hair growth on her body and face.
She left the appointment, prescription literally in hand, and picked up the medication from the chemist a few minutes later. After trying spironolactone she realised that she liked the side-effects of that even less, so she stopped taking it. And then, she asked me if I knew any trans women who might want the meds she had left over – because trans women, too, are prescribed spironolactone to block their testosterone.
But the vast majority of trans women in the UK can’t get spironolactone from their GP. If they wanted to block their testosterone, which many trans women do, they’d start with a GP appointment, which would lead to a referral to a gender clinic, then a wait of several years before a psychiatric assessment and a clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Then, they could be prescribed a testosterone blocker – and, most likely, also the hormone oestrogen.
This inequality in access to hormones is not limited to spironolactone. When I wanted to try taking testosterone, I first had to go to my GP for a referral that meant I then spent several years on an NHS gender clinic waiting list. Finally I had two hours-long appointments, one with a social worker and one with a clinical psychologist, discussing everything from my childhood to my sex life to my mental health. I received the precious diagnosis of gender dysphoria, which permits me to obtain gender-affirming hormones and surgery. Then, finally, I was prescribed testosterone gel.
If I’d been a cis man, say in my forties, struggling with a low sex drive, depressed and feeling a bit moody, then I also might’ve gone to my GP as a first port of call. But there the similarity ends. As a cis man, my GP could order a blood test and, if my testosterone levels were low, send me to a specialist (after a wait of weeks, rather than years) who could prescribe me testosterone gel. Note: no several years spent waiting, and no need to obtain a clinical diagnosis to prove myself.
In both cases, testosterone gel is being used as a gender-affirming treatment. But the way the same medication is prescribed is hugely different.
Gender-affirming healthcare: Not just for trans people!
It’s not only hormones that cis and trans people alike use to affirm their genders.
I would, and happily will, argue that in many cases a cis person who is going to the gym, getting tattoos, shaving their legs, wearing a bra, dying their hair or wearing make-up is acting in a way that, for them, affirms their gender – however unlikely they might be to recognise that that’s what they’re doing.
But there’s no crowdfunded £250,000 court case saying that cis men shouldn’t have access to Viagra. Perhaps it would’ve been money better spent.
And that’s because when cis people affirm their genders – be it through the clothes they wear, their haircuts, their jewellery or, yes, the surgical operations they undergo to better assert their gender – it’s not a big deal. It’s commonplace. So commonplace, in fact, that we don’t even see it that way.
Yet when trans people affirm our genders through the way we dress, our haircuts, our jewellery or, sometimes, through medical interventions like taking hormones or having surgery, it’s a very big deal to cis people. It is perceived not just as healthcare, like what they have, but trans healthcare. And as such, they feel the need not only to tightly control it, but to argue against it and to make it harder for us to have it.
And for those of us who talk publicly about aspects of our own personal medical transitions, they feel it’s OK to tell us exactly why they think what we’ve chosen to do with our bodies is disgusting – in language that would rightly be lambasted if it was aimed at cis people. It’s expected that trans people will accept a certain level of abuse if we talk publicly about the gender-affirming healthcare we’re accessing, in a way that a cis woman taking hormonal contraception or a man dying his greying hair might be surprised to experience.
The answer is not to restrict cis people’s access to gender-affirming healthcare, but to make it easier for trans people to get hold of. Hormones should, as trans civil rights activists have long argued, be available at GP’s and sexual-health clinics under the model of informed consent – in other words, the same way in which the same hormones are already available to cis people. And why is it that some medication is available at big supermarkets, while other medication is not? Codeine and anti-histamines at Tesco, but not testosterone? Why?
The earlier examples of testosterone and spironolactone are not the only hormones where we see this health inequality between trans and cis people play out. We see the same thing with oestrogen: readily available to cis women as a hormonal contraceptive at their GP, yet extremely hard to get hold of for trans women, who must go through a specialist gender clinic and psychiatric assessment to access the same drug.
In fact, most trans healthcare is actually cis healthcare, if you think about it – very few of the speech and language therapists, laser hair-removal specialists, or surgeons constructing penises for trans men, originally trained to offer their services to trans people. Their services were for cis people first, and then adapted for trans people.
And the fact that cis people are happy to have these different forms of healthcare for themselves yet so vehemently against it when trans people want it takes us back to the question: Why are cis people so bothered about gender-affirming healthcare for trans and non-binary people? Perhaps it’s not the healthcare that they have a problem with, after all.
Equality legislation is close to passing in Congress, but close isn’t good enough. “Close” won’t change anything for the LGBTQ Americans who face discrimination every day. Senate Democrats and Republicans must make a push to negotiate. With a reach on both sides to find common ground, we can move equality legislation from “close” to “done deal.”
Some Democrats are waiting for the filibuster to end—despite clear evidence that they lack the votes to end it. Some Republicans are practicing a tried-and-true brand of obstructionism. To break this deadlock, we should look to the successful, bipartisan repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) as a guide.
The DADT repeal is the single reference point for LGBTQ advocates for overcoming the Senate filibuster. Other victories have been in the courts; notably, the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell decision that made gay marriage legal nationwide.
Before Obergefell, advocates had success in the state legislatures. I worked on campaigns for the freedom to marry in Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York and elsewhere, finding common ground between Democrats and Republicans who thought it was impossible to negotiate on marriage. Eventually, enough people from both parties came together to pass marriage laws in a majority of states.
Working together at the state level is one thing. Congress is another.
Despite Democrats’ control of the White House, Senate and House, negotiations are failing at the federal level. So, we lets look to ancient history—the 2010 repeal of DADT—for guidance on reaching 60 votes in the Senate.
The most important lesson from the DADT repeal is that Senate moderates must champion the cause and lead negotiations. The more partisan figures on both sides need to step back. Overcoming the filibuster is a job for moderates, not ideologues.
As it happens, the hero of the DADT repeal is still a senator and can help. Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine led the negotiations on DADT repeal.
Senator Collins supports the Equality Act in principle and even sponsored a version of the bill in past. However, the current version is too extreme for Sen. Collins, as a result, she has withdrawn as a co-sponsor. The current bill has also foundered with Sen. Lisa Murkowski, another important figure in the repeal of DADT.
The fact that moderate, pro-LGBTQ senators are unable to back the current version of the Equality Act should send a clear message to Democrats that we need to make reasonable changes to the bill. So far, the message is being ignored.
On the Democratic side, independent Sen. Joe Lieberman was essential to the repeal of DADT. There certainly were passionate, liberal Democrats who could have asserted themselves during the debate. But then, the bill would have taken longer to pass, or even might have failed.
The lesson is clear. Listen to the moderates. Let them lead this charge.
Another important lesson from the repeal of DADT is to be flexible in the legislative strategy. DADT repeal was originally an amendment to a large defense authorization bill. Rather than give up, Collins and Lieberman fought and saved DADT repeal from defeat by pulling out key provisions they knew could pass on their own and making them a standalone measure. Repeal passed with bipartisan support.
The current version of the Equality Act tries to do too much. That’s why it can’t win support from moderate Republicans who have legitimate concerns the bill might suppress free speech or shut down religious charities.
Over 60 senators can agree on the basic premise of the Equality Act. They would gladly vote to prohibit discrimination against LGBTQ Americans in employment, housing, and public accommodations, so long as the law didn’t intrude on the First Amendment.
If the far left believes that our country has too much religious liberty, they can deal with that in future legislation. But so long as we have a filibuster—and, there’s no indication it will end any time soon—the Equality Act needs to reflect our society’s current views on religious liberty.
The DADT repeal passed with 65 votes in the Senate, overcoming the filibuster. Let’s replicate that victory by using the same playbook. Moderates: Take the lead.
Tyler Deaton is the senior advisor to the American Unity Fund, a conservative nonprofit organization working to advance LGBTQ freedom and religious freedom
Let me just put all my cards on the table — I enjoy Facebook. I get a lot out of it. Instagram, not so much. But I think that’s more of a generational thing. But after recent events, I just feel a little icky about it all. I mean, don’t you?
After the damning and didn’t-we-know-all-along Senate testimony by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, being on Facebook just seems, well, a little gross. Yes, I know the irony that I am criticizing Facebook via a column that will ultimately be shared on Facebook, so don’t bother pointing that out.
The long and short of it — evidence shows that Facebook is lying to us all about making any real progress against hate speech, violence, and the spread of misinformation. And aren’t those all red flags for the queer community? Essentially, Facebook isn’t just harmful to the self, but to whole groups and even societies. The parallels between this and the queer community are obvious ones. Again, aren’t our physical safety and overall wellbeing fairly paramount issues for the queer community?
Take this one point for example: the evidence of harm to ourselves by ourselves. According to the documents Haugen supplied, Facebook’s sister company Instagram essentially makes 13.5% of teen girls have thoughts of suicide. Have there been any thoughts on how social media might be impacting LGBT teens? According to the Trevor Project’s 2020 study, 15% of LGBT teens attempted suicide in the past year. Forty percent had thoughts about it. Both numbers are staggeringly high on their own and also staggeringly higher than for their straight counterparts. I would like to know what role social media plays in this. But, like Haugen’s Senate testimony, I think we all know the answer to that already. What with bullying and the spread of hate speech, it simply can’t be good.
And that’s just the issue of self-harm. What about the other issues of hate speech and misinformation? Yes, the queer community has enjoyed greater social acceptance in America. But that is by no means universal. Take the plight of trans teens, last year one of the far right’s go-to punching bags and boogey men — this time for the non-issue of high school sports. Talk about the spread of misinformation. I could enlighten us all by doing a deep dive on the right’s social presence, spreading their general talking points on the trans community, but such an exercise would be both stomach churning and time consuming.
As for queer adults, I’m not sure if things can be much better. You sometimes hear that life is just high school with money. To that I would add: then gay men can be at times that mean group of eighth grade girls. Yes, it’s true. We can be pretty damn ugly to one another. Facebook and Instagram clearly aren’t helping any of this. But can we let it go? Aren’t we all hooked? Sometimes you’ll hear when someone snaps a picture of a group event or party, post it on Facebook ‘or it didn’t happen.’ Granted you don’t hear this much anymore as so many folks, especially younger gays, have drifted off to other platforms, but honestly is there much of a difference? And to post it or it didn’t happen? Who is that for but those who weren’t there?
Who knows what will happen? I mean, what with octogenarian superstars Sens. Chuck Grassley and Diane Feinstein on this, I’m sure meaningful reform and oversight are just over the horizon. Maybe it’s time we start policing ourselves? Demanding better from our community on social media first? I’m wondering what that might look like. Until then, I guess we’ll just keep scrolling, like we have been doing. Over and over and over.
Brock Thompson is a D.C.-based writer. He contributes regularly to the Blade.
When Jaime was 44, we fell hard for each other. We had been working on queer youth projects together over 10 years and in the middle of our second date, we decided to have a child. We know the cliché — lesbians usually bring a U-Haul to the second date. Amazingly, masculine-identified, gender non-binary M’Bwende brought a bassinet.
So, in a few short months, we took a massive leap of faith that many people in love take: we got pregnant with the help of some great fertility choreography. M’Bwende’s 35-year-old eggs, Jaime’s 45-year-old womb, and sperm from a 49-year-old gay male beloved who had sired Jaime’s then 6-year-old son.
In 2006, we felt nothing but grateful for this option. When Jaime came out in 1984, lesbians could not even access sperm at a sperm bank — only heterosexual, married women “qualified.” Our family’s reproductive journey to our daughter ultimately took nearly a year of overstimulating egg production, retrieval, implantation, one failed attempt, and $40,000, which we financed by taking out a loan on M’Bwende’s house.
A recent lawsuit against Aetna insurance company for discriminating against LGBTQ women in fertility coverage has brought this all back to us in technicolor. In our family, it’s gone like this: the miracle baby is in her first year of high school; our romantic partnership long ago ended; our parenting partnership is solid; and M’Bwende lost their house to the predatory loan undertaken to bring our daughter into being.
There’s been so much more hemorrhaging of cash and dignity along the way — the work and cost of “adding” one of us to our daughter’s birth certificate, inability to access health insurance during the many years when only one of us was on the birth certificate, one of us has been fired twice for being “too activist” (actual quote), one has navigated unemployment and underemployed due to racism and their gender presentation, one of us has suffered outrageous police harassment, one has endured humiliation at various agencies for not being our daughter’s “legal” parent… the list goes on and on.
Today, Jaime is part of a team of veteran LGBTQ+ activists that has created a new National LGBTQ+ Women’s Community Survey to capture all of the blood, sweat, tears and lost assets that come when LGBTQ+ women form and grow our families. How do sexism, racism, and anti-LGBTQ animus impact families headed by lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, intersex, and/or transgender women? What do masculine spectrum people who identified as or were perceived to be women have to tell us about their experiences in relationships with women who partner with women? How do LGBTQ+ women and their families thrive, regardless? What are our brilliant adaptations and forms of resistance? We want to know!
It is thrilling to finally have this place to tell our stories. The larger world needs to see us, and all we have been forced to endure to make our amazing lives work. Policy makers, corporations, and movement organizations need to wake up to our realities and change laws and priorities. We want equity and justice for all of us. The LGBTQ+ National Women’s Community Survey is over 100 questions long and yet it will ultimately only scratch the surface of the complexity of our struggles. Six thousand people who formerly or currently identify as an LGBTQ+ women have already taken the survey. We plan to be the largest repository on data by, for and about LGBTQ+ women in the world. Come join us.
M’Bwende Anderson is an organizer/activist with various nonprofit, NGO, and government agencies. Dr. Jaime M. Grant, author of Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, and Great Sex: Mapping Your Desire, is an equity expert, researcher and trainer.
As a bisexual woman — and one who, like Sinema, is white and cisgender — I now cringe every time the senator makes the headlines. Whether it’s fashion columnists dissecting her showy personal style, cartoonists mocking her as a “manic pixie dream senator” or the seemingly endless analyses of her inscrutability, Sinema seems to embody many of the nasty assumptions about bi women I’ve worked my whole life to avoid.
Bi women are constantly told we’re untrustworthy, that our attraction to multiple genders means we’re more likely to cheat. We’re called greedy for finding more than one gender attractive, “confusing” for liking more than one gender and self-absorbed because apparently our brains are unable to think about much beyond our own sexual gratification. Within the LGBTQ community, bisexuals can be viewed as fair-weather members at best — likely to bail the second we stop having fun. Media outlets might not be talking about Sinema’s sex life, but her political reputation as greedy, unreliable and attention-seeking echoes many of the stereotypes my community has been dealing with for years.
“Is she bad for the bisexuals?” I find myself wondering on a nearly daily basis. It feels uncharitable to put so much responsibility on one woman’s shoulders. Yet given that she’s arguably the most prominent bisexual woman in the nation, it feels fair to wish she’d put a little more effort into being a bit less of a stereotype.
At the same time, I find myself wondering why Sinema’s sexuality matters so much to me in the first place. What does “bisexual representation” actually mean in this instance?
Bisexuals have a unique perspective that should ideally be helpful when crafting legislation.
One obvious answer is that bisexuals have a unique perspective that should ideally be helpful when crafting legislation. There’s no question that bisexuals face our own particular challenges when it comes to topics like sexual health, mental health and abuse and assault.
At the height of the HIV epidemic, bi people, and especially bi men, were frequently treated as vectors of disease; yet bi-specific outreach and education was thin. Research has shown that bi people, particularly bi women, are at an elevated risk for depression, anxiety, substance use and suicide; yet mental health resources are rarely targeted specifically to the bi community. Bi women are also at an elevated risk of abuse and assault: 2010 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that over 60 percent of bisexual women reported experience with rape, intimate partner violence or stalking, compared to over 43 percent of lesbians and 35 percent of straight women. Bisexual women are also extremely vulnerable to poverty: A 2019 report showed nearly 30 percent of the community living below the poverty line — a rate matched only by the percentage of transgender people of all sexual orientations living in poverty.
In theory, electing more bisexuals will lead to better legislation that more thoughtfully addresses bisexual-specific concerns, making sure bisexuals don’t fall through the cracks of public health, anti-violence and anti-poverty initiatives. But in practice, it’s clear that politicians from marginalized backgrounds don’t always act in the best interests of their community. Sinema herself is proof of that. Despite her own history with poverty, she’s worked to gut the social safety net provisions included in the Build Back Better Act.
According to Gallup poll results published in February, about 3 percent of Americans identify as bisexual — and yet in over 200 years, there have only been two openly bisexual members of Congress: Sinema and Katie Hill, who stepped down less than a year into her first term after her ex-husband allegedly leaked private photos revealing that the couple had been sexually involved with a female campaign staffer. With Hill out of office, Sinema is the only bisexual member of Congress out of the 535 possible voting members. (For comparison, there are currently seven gay men and three lesbians in Congress.)
This brings me back to my frustration with Sinema. Watching news outlets eat her alive, it’s hard not to feel like America’s getting a rather poor first impression of what bisexuals bring to the table as legislators. Will voters shy away from other bisexual candidates out of a fear that we’ll turn out to be just as fickle as Sinema? Probably not, but it wouldn’t surprise me if some potential legislators found themselves less eager to publicly identify as bisexual in the wake of Sinema’s first Senate term.
On the other hand, perhaps the opposite will be true. Maybe Sinema will inspire a new wave of openly bisexual politicians, simply out of a desperation to prove that Kyrsten Sinema is not an accurate representation of all bisexuals. If that were to happen, it’d offer an ironic twist on Sinema’s story. She could very well be the best thing to ever happen to bisexuals in politics — if only because she inspires so many of us to stand up and reject the example she’s set for the country.
At the end of August, the last U.S. passenger plane disappeared from Afghanistan’s horizons. The Taliban had finally taken control of the entire country after several days of battles and fire within the capital city. The leaders of the Taliban declared a new state of rule from the presidential palace formerly occupied by President Ashraf Ghani.
Soon after the Taliban’s taking of Kabul, Afghan men and women panicked in troves to the airport to flee oppressive rule. Getting a ticket onto an American bound plane was like winning the lottery for many Afghans.
Canada declared it would help resettle 20,000 Afghans, purposefully including LGBT Afghans among that mix. Canada made its intention to resettle those who would suffer tremendously under Taliban rule: Gay and trans folk, and any other kind of queer person, among a few other marginalized groups.
In early August of 2021, when the Afghan crisis was unfolding, a group of Democratic senators urged Biden to prioritize LGBT refugees. This group of senators, including Amy Klobuchar, wrote a letter to the State Department asking them to explain in greater detail a statement that Secretary of State Anthony Blinken made regarding LGBT asylum seekers.
In February of 2021, President Biden signed a memorandum that instructed U.S. agencies to ensure the rights of LGBT persons around the world. After that memorandum was signed, the State Department under Sec. Blinken said that it would make an enhanced effort to protect LGBT asylum seekers.
But the group of senators, in their letter, are still asking what has specifically been done to protect LGBT asylum seekers. What new steps has the Biden administration taken? And specifically, what steps has it taken to protect these LGBT refugees in Afghanistan?
It’s time that the United States not only resettle Afghan refugees, but purposefully make it part of its mission statement to resettle LGBT people. Although, since 1994, the U.S. has acknowledged asylum claims based on homosexuality, during the latest Afghan crisis, the Biden administration never made any intentional effort to prioritize LGBT folk as refugees. Biden never came out and aggressively prioritized LGBT Afghans.
Under Taliban rule, gay people are killed and thrown off buildings. Under the former Afghan administration, being gay was a punishable crime and LGBT folk who were outed were sent to jail.
Taliban rule also spells disaster for trans people: Being trans is not even an option in Afghanistan, where the Taliban would surely kill trans people as well as those who are gay.
Article 130 of the Afghan constitution implements Sharia law, which bans homosexuality. In these cases, men who have sex with men or women who have sex with women can be put to death. Moreover, Sections 645 and 646 of the constitution punish intimacy between two women with jail time.
Some recent victims of Taliban rule describe how the Taliban is asking LGBT folk to identify others in the LGBT community within the country. They are promising a safe rite of passage to those who identify members of the queer community. Such targeting is inordinately cruel—asking members of the LGBT community to turn on each other.
The Biden administration, armed with a liberal agenda, should create an LGBT refugee resettlement initiative. Some details about this kind of initiative have to be ironed out—take, for instance, the issue of metrics. How would the U.S. accurately assess someone’s LGBT status? If you were to argue that this initiative already exists, then I must ask—where is it? Where are these concrete steps that Biden has taken to make the lives of LGBT Afghans safer? Has he given a speech on this topic?
Perhaps the administration can start by reaching out to LGBT nonprofits in these uncertain regions—Rainbow Railroad, is, for instance, an organization that helps LGBT people in the Middle East find better lives in safe countries. Other groups in countries such as Jordan help smuggle trans people to safer countries, such as Turkey. Preexisting LGBT citizens who seek help from these nonprofits can be identified by the Biden administration to come to the United States, seeking a safe rite of passage.
Afghanistan serves as an example to help LGBT people who suffer in crisis. It’s high time that the U.S. government not only acknowledge LGBT asylum seekers, but place them on a pedestal, along with other groups who are immune to abuse.
Isaac Amend (he/him/his) is a transgender man and young professional in the D.C. area. He was featured on National Geographic’s ‘Gender Revolution’ in 2017 as a student at Yale University. Isaac is also on the board of the LGBT Democrats of Virginia. Find him on Instagram @isaacamend.