Fermion damping in hot gauge theories

The damping rate to order $g^{2}T$ for fermions in the long-wavelength limit of hot gauge theories is calculated using the recently developed resummation methods in terms of hard thermal loops. Both a heavy and a massless fermion are considered. Ward identities between the effective propagators and vertices are used to formally prove the gauge independence of the damping rate to this order in a wide class of gauges.