The HHS proposal would reinterpret Title IX, which bars “sex”-based discrimination in federally-funded education and is applied to a wide range of civil rights issues from campus sexual assault to affirming the rights of trans students. HHS intends to push other government agencies to adopt the same narrow and biologically inaccurate view of gender, according to the Times. The agency’s view is also not shared by the courts, which have ruled repeatedly that “sex” includes gender identity under Title IX and Title VII.

The news about HHS came just days before a report that the Department of Justice believes employers can discriminate against employees on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation. Meanwhile, agencies such as the Department of Education and the Department of Justice have chosen to withdraw anti-discrimination guidance that protected transg people, while HHS quietly removed trans discrimination guidance from its website about health care discrimination. Massachusetts voters will decide on Election Day whether they wish to uphold a law banning gender discrimination in public accommodations.

This is an all-out assault on the transgender community in the United States, and it has sinister implications for other vulnerable groups as well. It will hit low-income trans people especially hard, amplifying already existing economic inequalities.

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“People with low or no income already struggle to acquire adequate representation to challenge their rights in court,” Harper Jean Tobin, director of policy at the National Center for Transgender Equality, said via email. “They could potentially be impacted by just the misinformation spread by this proposal. The proposal doesn’t actually rewrite laws, but it could embolden many employers or doctors or schools to disregard the rights of trans people. Those with resources enough to speak to a lawyer are more likely to know when their rights are being violated, while those who cannot might find themselves without much recourse.”

According to a 2015 report from the Movement Advancement Project and the Center for American Progress, trans people face a “financial penalty,” paying more to access health care and other services, from credit to fair housing, than their cis counterparts. They are more likely to live in poverty, with 15 percent of trans people making less than $10,000 annually in contrast with 4 percent of cis people. These numbers are even more stark for black (34 percent versus 9 percent) and Latinx (28 percent versus 5 percent) trans people.

The community overall experiences an unemployment rate double that of cis people. LGBQT people also rely more on threatened benefits programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

This state of economic precarity has a concrete impact on trans lives. For instance, the National Center for Transgender Equality has found that just 21 percent of trans people have changed over all their identification documents, due to high costs and regressive policies such as refusals to allow trans people to update identification or birth certificates without proof of surgery in some states. The lack of consistent and accurate identification can fuel discrimination, such as refusals to hire people when their identification outs them as transgender, or denial of benefits, with 16 percent of U.S. Transgender Survey respondents reporting benefits issues related to mismatching identification.

Financial instability also amplifies widespread housing, employment, education, and health care discrimination against trans people. 23 percent of trans people faced “some form of housing discrimination” in the previous year, according to the U.S. Trans Survey, while 67 percent reported being passed over for hiring, fired, or denied promotions because of their gender identity. One in four experienced problems with their health insurance. Low-income people may not be able to “go somewhere else” to access services, cannot afford alternative housing, and cannot fund litigation in cases of discrimination.

In a landscape without comprehensive and explicit civil rights protections, and with federal agencies not only refusing to enforce existing protections but actively promoting discrimination against the trans community, low-income trans people’s financial disadvantage will become much more glaring. The administration is already not enforcing Affordable Care Act protections barring discrimination on the basis of gender identity, making it challenging to access not only transition services but permitting other forms of health care discrimination; this kind of policy could make this problem even worse. Similarly, barriers to accessing identification could leave more trans people struggling to access benefits they need to thrive, such as subsidized housing, SNAP, and Medicaid.

Just as a flood of bathroom bills in 2015 and 2016 emboldened transphobic people and policymakers, moves like this fuel hatred and contribute to the distribution of misinformation about what it means to be transgender and how trans people interact with society. Legitimizing transphobia on the institutional level encourages harassment and abuse of trans people, which harms vulnerable trans populations such as sex workers, women of color, immigrants, disabled people, youth, and low-income people.

Targeting the trans community could also lay the groundwork for disrupting other civil rights, with the federal government’s pursuit of a “right to discriminate” becoming a blueprint for attacking groups such as those who are homeless on the streets of San Francisco, Native American and fighting for the right to vote in Utah, or lesbians who want to adopt a child.

The black concrete building sits across the street from a Wendy’s, next door to a window tinting business, and catty-corner to a Radio Shack that is somehow still in business. I’ve driven past it thousands of times because Pulse was always on the way to somewhere else: Publix, I-4, or friends’ houses. When I was young and terrified of my orientation, I had trouble even looking at it. I was afraid someone would see my eyes linger a second too long and my secret wouldn’t be a secret any longer.

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It is not a coincidence that the city’s premiere gay club was relegated to its outskirts. If you wanted to go to Pulse, you had to go to Pulse. And people did, from all over Central Florida. Straight people, or people who want to go to a not-queer bar, have the luxury of going downtown knowing that when they arrive there will be a suite of options from which to choose. There are different atmospheres, vibes, and themes. It’s entirely reasonable to arrive downtown and have no idea where you will start, let alone end, the night. Queer people who want to be with other queers don’t have that flexibility. Finding that space required commitment and a clear purpose: Tonight, this is where I want to be. Pulse Nightclub was a destination.

Now it is holy ground. In the immediate hours after the attack, mourners flocked to the dark concrete block building and constructed a memorial to the 49 victims. At the makeshift shrine built of flowers and flags, mourners lit prayer candles and knelt before the chainlink fence and in their lamentations, established the path of a pilgrimage that continues today.

Clubs have always acted as a kind of church for queer folks. They’re a communal space for people who share an innate love for something larger than themselves. We’ve lost these spaces before—usually to the gentrification that comes with the mainstreaming of queerness. But what about this space, this nightclub-turned-sanctum? It’s not filled with cishet women on their bachelorette parties—it’s the home of a stunning act of violence. Instead of losing a place where we felt safe, we have gained a place that reminds us that we never were.

And now, we have to decide how to handle that.

The onePULSE Foundation, a private organization founded by Pulse nightclub owner Barbara Poma, has taken on the responsibility of building an onsite memorial to the attack. After briefly considering selling the club, Poma created the foundation and an accompanying task force comprised of victims’ families, survivors, and community leaders, to collectively decide on a memorial and museum in the coming years. A survey was sent out last fall to gather community opinions, the results of which informed the interim memorial that opened in May. A permanent memorial, also onsite, will open at an undetermined future date.

The survey’s results were disappointing and mostly unsurprising. One of the questions asked respondents, “when you think of this memorial, what do you want to feel?” People rarely want to feel anything but “generally good,” so it’s not a shock that 43 percent of the votes went to the words “love,” “unity,” and “acceptance.” “Loss” garnered only four percent support. “Sadness” got two.

That desire to gloss over the harshness of what happened is reflected in the current memorial. It’s more polished and less personal now: A long wall winds around the club and obscures the building itself. There is a single glass panel through which visitors can see the names of the victims engraved on a dark vertical slab, and at night a light illuminates the holes in the bathroom walls where survivors escaped. There are no permanent pictures of the victims, nothing about their short lives. Instead, there are hundreds of photos of the response to the attack: the handmade mementos, mass gatherings, landmarks lit in the colors of our flag, and a sign with a rainbow outline of the city skyline.

Looking at it, I felt like I was witnessing a theft. It wasn’t much of a memorial to the victims, just a memorial to Orlando itself. That falls right in line with the larger narrative the city has pushed since the attack: We’re “one Orlando” with “one pulse.” That focus on communal grieving erases an essential truth: All of Orlando wasn’t attacked. Forty-nine people—mostly queer, mostly brown—were massacred. And that didn’t just happen, it’s another chapter in the long history of violence against our communities.

Even now, LGBT people are more likely to be victims of hate crimes than any other minority group. And for hundreds of years, the government pursued queer people as criminals. This is not the distant past: Until 2002, it was still illegal in 14 states to have intercourse with a member of the same sex. Until 2014, towns in New Jersey had laws prohibiting dressing as “the incorrect sex” in public, and multiple states are still pursuing legislation policing where people go to the bathroom.

That kind of prolonged abuse doesn’t get erased just because I can receive a marriage certificate at city hall. It lives on today under the current administration—the one that calls people animals and jokes about hanging us all—as the acceptance of LGBTQ+ peoples goes down for the first time since we started measuring it. Hate crimes are up since the current president began his campaign, but my state, Florida, still voted him into office less than five months after the Pulse attack.

This treatment of marginalized groups is too ingrained in our society to attribute solely to Trump. It’s the life expectancy for trans women of color, the rates of LGBTQ+ youth homelessness, and every bullet hole in the walls at Pulse. The memorial and the survey respondents are preaching the importance of love, unity, and acceptance. Do they understand what they are asking us to accept?

I am learning to accept that Pulse does not only belong to our community anymore. But I will not accept that anyone but us owns it. As the space enters its second life as a public memorial, its first life shouldn’t be forgotten. It was a home for a specific group of people, a haven where we could commune with impunity. Queer people built that place as a shrine to their humanity and they were murdered for it. Refusing to center their legacy is also an act of violence.

The interim memorial will stand for the next few years as we collectively decide how we want to honor the victims with this space. The only honor that would amount to anything would be to end violence against marginalized communities. But we have no hope of solving a problem so intrinsic to American society if we refuse to acknowledge that it even exists. Just like the LGBTQ+ community needs space where we can safely be ourselves, society needs dedicated space to publicly reckon with its role in fostering that violence.

I know a perfect place to start.

The reasons Trump cited to support his decision are pretty thin. He claimed that the military couldn’t possibly shoulder the medical costs, even though the military spends 50 times as much money on bands as it would on health care for trans servicemembers. He also noted that allowing transgender servicemembers would be a “disruption,” which is a pretty weighty claim to make on behalf of a force of people who are trained to deal with actual explosions.

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This announcement is, of course, a direct attack on the rights of trans Americans who are already serving in the military. It will force them back into the closet, make it impossible for them to get adequate health care, leave them vulnerable to assault, or rob them of their livelihoods. It’s also an attack on trans Americans who aren’t serving. It’s a clear statement about the value the government places on their skills, and on their lives.

American rhetoric tends to talk about servicemembers as if they’re all Captain America: Hyperpatriotic superheroes fighting evil for no reason besides their love of country. To be clear, servicemembers are often heroic, and they do a brutally difficult job. But at the end of the day, they’re doing just that: a job. And it’s a good job, with a livable wage that often provides housing and access to higher education. The catch—and it’s a big one—is that in exchange for that job, servicemembers have to be willing to trade the government their lives.

LGBT Americans have been making this trade with the government for generations. There isn’t much data on LGBT Americans in the military, at least in part because there isn’t much data on LGBT Americans at all. But many of us know there’s a home for us there, the same way we just know that Tegan and Sara’s new records will never be quite as good as “The Con.”

My high school best friend knew it. It wasn’t easy to be queer where we grew up—families tend to stick around our Rust Belt town for generations, and their old Catholic hearts are slow to change. Most folks meet social shifts with denial or quiet disapprovals, but his parents were the type of Christian who thought they could save us from ourselves. They tried to save him from his gayness every chance they got. First they tried sneaking up on him any time he left the house—including at least one incident that involved hiding in bushes—to manufacture public confrontations that were halfway between impromptu sermon and public exorcism. When they realized they couldn’t literally scare him straight, they cut him off financially. It was better to have no son than to have raised a queer.

He dropped out of college when his parents cut him off. He didn’t have the money he needed to get a degree, so he did what young Americans in need of a career have done for hundreds of years: He joined the military.

Trans Americans desperately need to have that option available to them. According to a report by the Movement Advancement Project and the Center for American Progress, half of transgender Americans earn less than $24,000 per year. One-third of black trans women earn less than $10,000 per year. Trans Americans are more likely to be rejected by their families, to be homeless, and to be forced into underground economies than the rest of the population. In some ways, that makes the military—a career that comes with a built-in family—a particularly good option for a lot of trans Americans. That option is something that trans Americans, as citizens of this country, are entitled to pursue. And it’s something that President Trump promised both LGBT Americans and veterans that he would support.

Whether Trump keeps his promises or not, trans Americans are going to fight for this country. They’ll do it in the military, even though the president just issued a declaration that orders them back in the closet. And they’ll do it right in front of the White House, with their signs raised and their heads held high, when the president tries to stop them.

We both knew we were queer in our early teens, making the odds pretty low that we’d ever end up romantically involved. But we almost got married anyway, because our parents couldn’t (or wouldn’t) help us pay for our sophomore years of college. My financial aid advisor told me marriage was the least-bad way that we could make ourselves legally independent — our other choices were “join the military” or “be 24” — so we got engaged during winter break.

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Jon’s parents had cut him off financially when he came out. Not all at once — they forced him out of their lives in fits and starts. They’d have a family dinner, then shove him through the glass in the living room window; take a vacation, then have him arrested for grand theft auto when he drove the family car back to school. Eventually they told him that he had to choose: be straight and get help paying tuition, or be gay and try to make it on his own. It wasn’t much of a choice.

My own mother was too consumed with her own demons to be particularly worried about mine. By the time I was in college, we’d gone five years without trash pickup or steady electricity. Our house had been foreclosed and my little brothers were legally squatters in our childhood home, biding their time until the bank came to claim it. When I finally called my mom to tell her I was pretty sure I’d need to leave my dream school if we didn’t figure something out, she stayed lucid just long enough to tell me to get a different dream. Then she started slurring her words, and I hung up the phone.

By then, Jon and I had been each other’s family for two years. He drove me to school and to the doctor; he slept at my house sometimes, and helped us clean up what was left of it when we finally got evicted.

When it comes to queer families, we’re pretty unremarkable. LGBT people are much more likely than straight people to cobble together ad hoc support networks — our chosen families. We’re more likely to be poor or rejected by our biological families, so we make our own families in order to survive. We’ve been doing this for as long as anyone can remember — from the romantic friendships and Boston marriages of the 1800s; to the house and ball culture that took root in the 1960s; to me and Jon, and our teen-marriage plan of December 2007.

These families are very real, but the law isn’t made for people like us. With just a handful of recent exceptions, we can’t get time off work to take care of each other if we’re sick, or give each other health insurance. The only way we can make the law work for us is by bending it a little to match our realities — through adult adoptions or, say, marrying your best friend.

That kind of legal status matters. It makes a practical financial impact on people’s lives. But there’s more to it than that. When the government acknowledges that your family is valid, it legitimizes your worth. It’s not a coincidence that teen suicide attempts dropped after same-sex marriage was legalized.

Jon and I didn’t end up getting married. A few months after we got engaged, Jon met a nice boy and we rethought our plans. He joined the Navy, and I staged one-person sit-ins in my dean’s office until I annoyed him into bending the rules to give me financial aid. I quit writing — the only thing I’d ever been sure I was good at — and found a job teaching so I could pay the bills.

Jon never finished college, and I have six figures worth of student debt. The fallout from that will shape the rest of our lives — and it’s from choices we never should have had to make, but did, when we were 18 years old.

Pence’s vote came as no surprise. A week into his tenure as vice president, he addressed thousands of abortion opponents at the 44^th annual March for Life. Days earlier, his administration instituted a particularly draconian version of the Global Gag Rule, which bans NGOs that receive U.S. aid from counseling anyone on abortion, and a week later it announced a nominee to the Supreme Court chosen in no small part because he poses an existential threat to Roe v. Wade.

All in the name of traditional family values.

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Pence has built an entire career on his family values narrative. In 2006, as a Congressman, he supported a constitutional amendment to define marriage as strictly between a man and a woman—same-sex couples, he said, threaten to usher in “societal collapse.” In 2015, as governor of Indiana, he made national news for signing a bill that legalized discrimination against LGBT couples. A year later, he signed a law restricting access to abortion and—as part of his continued quest to make health care as awful as possible for women—requiring that fetal remains from abortions or miscarriages at any stage of pregnancy be buried or cremated.

Plus, there’s that bit of weirdness where he calls his wife “mother,” and won’t dine alone with women or attend events with alcohol unless she’s present.

The irony of these positions, which he insists are in defense of families, is that he is actively undermining them.

For starters, access to reproductive health care, which gives families control over if and when they have children, increases economic security. That makes families less likely to undergo conflict. On the flip side, laws that restrict access to abortion actively endanger families’ financial security. Generally, the birth of a child is a big expense—and if its’s unplanned or mistimed, it’s more likely to cause an economic shock or plunge a family into poverty. Financial stress, in turn, can lead to divorce or relationship dissolution as well as domestic violence.

And all those anti-LGBT policies? LGBT people have families, too—and when Pence denies them the right to get married or use the bathroom, he denies them the humanity that he grants families that look more like his own: “Christian, conservative, and Republican—in that order.” And when he opposes legislation that prohibits discrimination against LGBT workers, like he did in 2007 and again in 2015, he also jeopardizes their families’ economic security.

Even Pence’s intense devotion to his wife, which the internet mostly wrote off as eccentric codependency, works to undermine families. When he refuses to eat dinner or attend events with female staffers––allegedly to resist temptation from other women and to uphold the sanctity of his marriage––he denies them a professional opportunity that he makes available to men. One-on-one time with managers can lead to professional capital that makes salaries or promotions possible. Pence’s inability to treat women as professional counterparts, rather than objects of sexual temptation, excludes them from those opportunities for job growth. That brings us back to women’s financial security, and—once again—to their families.

Pence’s intense devotion to “traditional family values,” isn’t wholesome, or pious, or even just weird. It’s radical and dangerous. And less than 100 days into his vice presidency, we haven’t even scratched the surface.

From my seat in the United States Senate, I can attest that the last eight years have certainly not been free of strife or confrontation, to say the least. But despite all the political posturing and polarization, the past eight years have also shown us at our best. We have sought to build up our fellow citizens and fellow human beings instead of tearing them down, and made progress in the face of adversity.

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Nowhere is the hope and promise of the last eight years better exemplified than in the progress we have made in achieving equality for the LGBTQ members of our American family.

In January 2009, when President Obama first took office, it was not a federal hate crime to attack someone because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Same-sex marriage was only legal in two states. LGBTQ people could not serve openly in the military, or access their partners’ survivor benefits or health insurance. They were anxious and unsure—should a crisis arise—about whether they would be allowed to make medical decisions for their families, or see them in the hospital during an emergency, or keep their home if their partner died.

For over two hundred years, the story of America has been one of striving to live up to our founding ideal “that all men are created equal.” Slowly—often too slowly—we have broken down the barriers that divide us; that say some of us are more equal than others.  For the LGBTQ community, many of the biggest, most daunting barriers that they had faced for generations finally came down during President Obama’s administration. The millions of men and women within the LGBTQ community, who struggled for so long to be treated equally and enjoy all the same rights and opportunities as their fellow citizens, can attest to just how momentous the last eight years have been.

With the historic passage of the Affordable Care Act, it is no longer legal to deny health coverage to anyone because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. The President also decided that the government would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in court, even before the Supreme Court struck it down as unconstitutional. He took this path because he believes, as he said during his second inaugural address, “that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still.” And when the Supreme Court finally affirmed that “love is love” by ensuring marriage equality in every corner of our nation, President Obama declared it “a victory for America” and his administration moved quickly to implement the court’s ruling.

From my position at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, I have been privileged to work with the President and members of his administration to advance the rights of the LGBTQ community in Congress. We worked together to pass the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act, repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act with new protections for the LGBTQ community. In an historic, bipartisan vote, we passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act in the Senate to ensure employers could no longer fire someone for who they are or whom they love. And though the House failed to act on this legislation, President Obama issued an executive order in July 2014 that secured this right for the 28 million Americans working for federal contractors.

But President Obama and I both know that as long as anyone is scared to put their spouse’s photo on their desk at work, or fears being evicted from their apartment if they have a same-sex partner, then our nation has not come far enough or broken down enough barriers.

That’s why I have worked with my House and Senate colleagues, President Obama’s administration, and an extraordinary coalition of grassroots and civil rights groups to craft the Equality Act, landmark legislation that would extend the same non-discrimination protections that so many of us take for granted in employment, housing, public accommodations, and more to our LGBTQ brothers and sisters.

We are proud President Obama endorsed our bill, one that his White House described as “historic legislation that would advance the cause of equality for millions of Americans.”

When the new administration comes into office on January 20, we will face a White House that is indifferent at best and hostile at worst when it comes to LGBTQ rights. It’s a daunting moment, especially in the face of all our gains over the last eight years. But these new challenges only make it more important for Americans who care about the rights of our fellow citizens to keep fighting—not just to fiercely defend the gains we have made, but to continue pushing on for full equality.

On the day we introduced the Equality Act, I knew the struggle to pass it would not be an easy one.  But I was convinced then, and I remain convinced today, that we will ultimately succeed. The arc of the moral universe is long, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, but it bends towards justice. But, it only bends when good people fight for justice. President Obama’s legacy on LGBTQ rights shows us that with hard work and struggle, we can bend the arc quite far in just a few years.

Now, it’s up to the rest of us to keep up the struggle, to do everything we can to ensure that justice reigns in our nation—and that every American, regardless of race, color, creed, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, or gender identity, can live freely and equally in the eyes of the law.

Editor’s note: TalkPoverty presents this series in collaboration with the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality.

I received, to put it mildly, a warm reception. My friends shared their support in the comments, and I even got a share and a big shout-out from my mom, who voiced her clear and unconditional love and support.

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My friend Julius, a sophomore at Wake Forest University, was not as lucky. A few weeks ago, he mentioned that his parents cut him off during his coming out process. His tone was casual, so we moved along with our conversation about whatever was going on in the queer universe that day, but he’s mentioned since then that finances have been tough. Julius’s job is a work study position that limits him to working a few hours per week, so it’ll be hard for him to make ends meet on his own.

Fortunately, Wake Forest has resources for students like Julius. School administrators helped him file as an independent so that he could apply for financial aid on his own and stay enrolled in the university. There were a lot of hoops to jump through—and he’ll have more student debt as a result—but it worked out in the end.

Most colleges and universities do not offer the type of support that Julius received. According to Campus Pride only 7% of campuses have institutional support for LGBT students, which leaves many students who are rejected by their families to fend for themselves during complicated legal and financial proceedings. Julius noted that in order to accomplish his dependency override, he needed three documents of support—one of which had to be from a certified counselor. He will also have to write a statement detailing the painful events leading up to his financial independence every year when he reapplies for his financial aid package.

Some students fare much worse, and are ultimately forced to drop out. Harlan Mitchell, a 21-year-old queer person living in Knoxville, had to leave the University of Tennessee after he fled his abusive home last year. “It’s really kind of difficult to get a degree, to get a good job, [and] to do all the things to support yourself financially,” Mitchell said. For a few months, he slept on friends’ couches while he saved money he earned at his retail job. If he hadn’t been able to rely on friends, he says he isn’t sure where he would have gone next.

For queer youth, this is not a fringe issue—half of us experience a negative reaction from our parents when we come out. Without financial independence, we’re particularly vulnerable—whether it’s to increased debt, the inability to complete our education, or homelessness. This follows us into adulthood, with the potential to impact our earnings and our ability to hold successful jobs. Add in the fact that it’s legal to fire and evict LGBT people because of their identity in most states, and it becomes easier to understand why the number of LGBT people who reported feeling as though they are struggling financially is up by a margin of 10% despite improvements in the economy as a whole.

The reality is, coming out is a financial privilege that not everyone can afford. Ultimately, that limits the economic mobility of queer people—it creates a space in which not all of us are free to be who we feel we are, and who we want to be.

But what is often left out of media coverage on HB2 is the fact that it does more than restrict bathroom access.  It also amends the state’s Wage and Hour Act to prevent any city, county, or other political jurisdiction within the state from passing or enforcing legislation or voter-mandated pro-worker policies, including minimum wage increases and paid family and medical leave laws. These restrictions have a tangible impact on people and families, including transgender and gender non-conforming communities, who are more likely than their peers to be job insecure and living in poverty.

In undermining the rights of workers, this law also undercuts what has become an important strategy through which antipoverty advocates are able to create change and influence state policy. Over the past year, cities, counties and states have moved to adopt higher minimum wages. Los Angeles, for example, passed legislation last year that raised its city-wide minimum wage to $15. And just this month, California passed a similar increase statewide, as did New York. Both states’ minimum wages are now far above the federal standard of $7.25 per hour.

Advocates in cities and counties have also had recent success in passing paid leave protections that are more expansive than what is provided by their states or the federal government. San Francisco recently adopted the most generous paid family leave law in the country, which requires all city employers with 20 or more workers to cover a full six weeks of paid family leave. Such laws have a significant impact on people and families with low-incomes, because low-wage workers are far less likely to have access to paid leave through work. Without these protections in place, workers may incur lost wages—or even be fired—if they take time off for unavoidable personal or medical emergencies.

Unfortunately, North Carolina isn’t the only state that is stripping cities and counties of their ability to pass proactive worker protections. In several other states, legislatures have either passed or introduced similar anti-worker bills—often in response to local minimum wage increases—with assistance and encouragement from the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC.  While Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe recently vetoed a similar bill that had made its way through the state’s legislature, anti-worker operatives continue to push damaging legislation.

The Department of Justice has rightly challenged the anti-transgender discrimination codified in HB2, but it is important to recognize that other portions of the bill deserve similar legal and political scrutiny for their dangerous impact on low-income people and communities of color.

In Alabama, the NAACP is challenging a similar law with a lawsuit against the state.  The suit claims that Alabama’s state law—which was passed earlier this year as a direct response to a city-wide minimum wage increase in Birmingham—is unconstitutional because it specifically targets Birmingham’s workers, who are overwhelmingly people of color. Last year, Birmingham became the first city in the Deep South to pass a minimum wage increase. According to the NAACP, the Alabama state legislature’s action builds upon a legacy of race-motivated preemption that was rampant during and after the days of Jim Crow.

In addition to issuing legal challenges, groups are also taking on these laws through direct action and legislative advocacy. For example, the North Carolina NAACP has joined forces with transgender rights advocates to engage in a series of protests, sit-ins, and legislative proposals that call for a full repeal of the anti-democratic HB2 law and highlight the entire range of its consequences.

“We cannot be silent in the face of this race-based, class-based, homophobic and transphobic attack on wage earners, civil rights, and the LGBTQ community,” said Reverend Dr. William Barber II, President of the North Carolina NAACP.  “Together with our many allies, we will coordinate a campaign of nonviolent direct action along with other forms of nonviolent protest that will instruct our legislators with respect to the rights of all people.”

Whether through legal advocacy or direct action, the federal government and advocates on the ground must continue to highlight and challenge the full range of damaging consequences wrought by HB2. This includes not only fighting back against North Carolina’s law, but taking on the many other pre-emptive bills across the country that will do harm to people with low-incomes and communities of color.

As the President was about to recap his administration’s numerous accomplishments over the past six and a half years—from ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to the recent elimination of discriminatory bans on gender transition care from federal employee health insurance plans—he was interrupted by a woman in the audience’s urgent request for his attention.  The woman, Jennicet Gutiérrez, wanted to draw his attention to one of the darkest marks on his presidency: the abhorrent treatment of LGBT immigrants—particularly transgender women—in the more than 200 immigration detention facilities across the nation.

On June 19th, DHS issued new guidance on detention decisions for transgender immigrants that was made public on June 29th. For the first time, in limited circumstances, transgender women will be allowed to be detained in women’s facilities. Unfortunately, the guidance ignores the fact that they often should not be detained in the first place.

Here are 5 reasons why Jennicet’s protest still needs to be heard:

1) LGBT people in confinement face extremely high rates of abuse. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found nearly 40 percent of transgender inmates in prisons and local jails were sexually assaulted. We don’t have comprehensive data for immigration detention, but a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the Center for American Progress (CAP) returned nearly 200 reported incidents of abuse against LGBT immigrants in detention. Moreover, the Government Accountability Office found that 20 percent of substantiated sexual assaults in immigration detention were against transgender people. Prior to DHS’s new guidance, transgender women in immigration detention were routinely detained with men, or given the option of either being transferred to a segregated pod for gay and transgender immigrants in California or kept in protective solitary confinement.

2) Many LGBT immigrants are arbitrarily detained. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recognizes the particular vulnerability of LGBT people in detention. However, a FOIA submitted by CAP revealed that DHS consistently detains LGBT people who should be released. Seventy percent of LGBT immigrants who said they feared harm in detention because of their sexual orientation or gender identity could have been released under DHS’s automated intake system, but DHS instead chose detention in 68 percent of those cases.  Rather, they should be released on parole or placed in alternatives to detention pending the outcome of their cases.

3) Not being detained is critical for the safety of LGBT immigrants. Studies show that the factors with the greatest influence on case outcome are representation by counsel and not being detained. A CAP report found that, even with excellent legal representation, LGBT people in detention are more than 10 percent less likely to win asylum. For LGBT asylum seekers, being in detention can mean the difference between life and death.

4) In the rare instances bail is set, it is impossibly high. CAP found that while only 30 percent of LGBT immigrants in detention were subject to mandatory detention, 64 percent of LGBT immigrants in detention are detained without the possibility of bond—only 11 percent are eligible for bond. That 11 percent face a statutory minimum $1,500 bond, but more commonly the bond is set much higher, as high as $15,000. For LGBT people seeking protection in the US, who often used all the resources they had just to get here, or were living here without access to lawful employment, these amounts are nearly impossible to pay.

5) Immigrants provide guaranteed profits for private prisons. In addition to a Congressional quota requiring that DHS maintain the capacity to detain 34,000 immigrants every day, a report by Detention Watch Network found DHS is contractually obligated to guarantee for-profit private prisons that a minimum of 9,422 beds will be filled each day.  At an average daily cost of $164 per bed, these quotas guarantee for-profit prisons a lot of money, over $1.5 million every day. These quotas and sky-high profits disincentivize release, even of vulnerable populations like LGBT immigrants who should not have been detained in the first place.

The day before the White House Pride event, 35 members of Congress sent a letter to DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson expressing concern over the treatment of LGBT immigrants in detention and urging an end to the practice.

Ms. Gutiérrez’s protest was a reminder that—while we celebrate how far the country has come in recognizing the rights of LGBT people—our work is far from over.  We must continue fighting for the equal treatment, safety, and dignity of all LGBT people.

No, that’s not a statement of sympathy for a discriminated minority – but rather a subsection of that minority which gets little notice. The intersection of LGBT people and poverty is a largely overlooked reality.

Cameron and Mitchell, Modern Family’s much beloved gay couple, live in a lovely home and not only have the resources to adopt an Asian child, but the time to dote on her. Neil Patrick Harris and his husband in real life, David Burtka, have two adorable twins, and presumably the resources to hire nannies to watch the children while they pursue their careers. Judging from gay couples in the media, one might be tempted into believing that LGBT people are all thriving and reasonably affluent — not to mention overwhelmingly male and white. Nothing could be further from the truth.

An extraordinary report, New Patterns of Poverty in the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community, by M.V. Lee Badgett, Laura Durso and Alyssa Schneebaum from the Williams Institute (UCLA School of Law), presents a much more complete and accurate view of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people and families than the one that resides in most people’s minds.

The authors note that in reality same-sex couples are more vulnerable to poverty than married couples who are different-sex. Children of same-sex couples fare even worse—they are almost twice as likely to be poor than their peers in different-sex couple households. The most vulnerable of all are African-American children in gay male households—they have a poverty rate of more than 52 percent—higher than any children in any other household type. Children living with lesbian couples are also struggling with a poverty rate of nearly 38 percent—this compared to a national child poverty rate of approximately 20 percent (also atrocious).

The report authors point to some of the reasons so many LGB families are living on the brink, including, “susceptibility to employment discrimination, higher rates of being uninsured and a lack of access to various tax and other financial benefits via exclusion from the right to marry.”

The numbers of LGB parents raising children (biological, adopted and step-children) is not small—and they are not mostly from coastal metropolitan centers no matter what pop culture and the media might lead you to believe. In fact, the states with the largest concentrations of LGB couples raising children—between 22-26 percent of all LGB couples in these states—are Mississippi, Wyoming, Alaska, Idaho and Montana.

Yet most of these states do not currently have marriage equality and its attendant benefits for married couples and their children. In every state except for Florida, Maine and the District of Columbia, between 15-22 percent of LGB couples are raising children. So this is clearly not just an urban phenomenon. Indeed, as reported in the New York Times, “the data show, child rearing among same-sex couples is more common in the South than in any other region of the country… Gay couples in Southern states like Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas are more likely to be raising children than their counterparts on the West Coast, in New York and in New England.”

It is very difficult to separate the effects of being LGBT and poor from the additional factors of race and gender. All of these factors come together in a perfect storm which increases the likelihood of poverty among LGBT families raising children.

In Race/Ethnicity, Gender and Socioeconomic Wellbeing of Individuals in Same-sex Couples, report co-authors Bianca Wilson and Angeliki Kastanis found that people of color involved in same-sex relationships are more likely to have kids compared to whites in same-sex couples. In fact, 1 of every 3 individuals in same-sex couples raising children is a person of color. Further, while all couples with children “generally fare worse with regards to educational attainment, insurance coverage and median income”—kids are expensive!—“this is especially true for individuals in same-sex couples.”

“These data further indicate the need for public policies that aim to support families with children in achieving educational and economic goals in ways that simultaneously support racial/ethnic and sexual orientation equity,” said Wilson.

There are several ways in which Congress could help remedy this situation. States could pair Medicaid expansion (23 states currently do not have it) with a raise in the minimum wage to $10.10. Congress could expand and strengthen both the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC). Poor LGBT people would especially benefit from legislated protections and non-discrimination policies in the workplace.

It is time we stop thinking of the LGBT community as mostly white, affluent, gay males, and begin to recognize how the interlocking oppressions of race and gender affect our LGBT community and conspire to make our poverty rates higher than the norm, especially for those of us raising children. We need a deeper exploration of how sexual orientation, race and gender intersect, if we are to combat the poverty that – perhaps surprisingly – pervades much of our community.

What you may not know is what the numbers look like for LGBT Americans. Our latest report, Paying an Unfair Price: The Financial Penalty for Being LGBT in America, examines how anti-LGBT laws drive economic insecurity for LGBT people, including higher rates of poverty.

LGBT people disproportionately struggle with poverty. Twenty percent of LGBT people living alone have annual incomes of less than $12,000 compared to 17% of non-LGBT people living alone. Transgender people are four times more likely to have incomes under $10,000 per year than the general population despite having higher rates of education.

(click to expand the infographic)

There is a clear connection between economic insecurity and anti-LGBT laws. Nineteen states lack almost any form of legal protections for LGBT people, and that has a real, tangible economic impact. When a gay or lesbian worker can be fired legally in 29 states; when a transgender person can be denied comprehensive health insurance in 42 states; or when a lesbian couple can be evicted in 29 states—the economic toll adds up.

All LGBT Americans are affected in one way or another, but the impact of these penalties is felt most acutely by those who are most vulnerable: LGBT families with children; older same-sex couples; and LGBT people and families who are already living near or below the poverty line, including a disproportionate number of LGBT people of color and LGBT people living in rural communities.

When LGBT people are already poor, they have no ability to absorb these financial penalties. For example, a transgender person in a state lacking housing protections can be evicted without cause or warning. She then finds herself unable to piece together a security deposit for a new apartment or to afford a more expensive apartment leased by a landlord who doesn’t discriminate.

Struggling LGBT people also lack the financial resources needed to secure legal protections for themselves and their families. For example, a second-parent adoption—which allows a non-biological parent to be recognized as a parent—can cost more than $2,000. For a poor lesbian couple, this expense is too much to bear. Without a legal tie between parent and child, the couple is left to simply hope for the best, a potentially devastating situation should the legal parent die.

Our report includes a number of stories that show the devastating effect of discrimination.  But we also need more data about poverty in the LGBT community if we are to improve the economic security of all people living in the United States. LGBT people were absent in the released U.S. Census poverty numbers, although it is indeed possible to examine data on same-sex couples, as our research and research by others have shown. As for single LGBT people—since the Census doesn’t ask about sexual orientation or gender identity—researchers cannot track their poverty rates. Government surveys need to be modernized to include gender identity and sexual orientation in order to fully understand the scope of poverty and find the most effective policy solutions.

It is time to put an end to the financial penalties that LGBT Americans face simply because they are LGBT. Policymakers at the local, state, and federal levels need to update laws to prohibit discrimination against LGBT people in areas ranging from hiring to housing to credit. Policymakers also need to update the legal definitions and regulations of “family” so that LGBT families have access to the same protections and benefits that are available to other families.

Our policy responses to poverty in America are destined to fall short if they fail to address the economic experiences of LGBT families and individuals.