President Joe Biden began his term in the White House with a sweeping promise to protect transgender Americans from Republican policies that portrayed them as a threat to children and sought to push them out of public life.
“Your president has your back,” Biden assured transgender people in his first State of the Union address of 2021, repeating a version of that statement in subsequent speeches.
But with President-elect Donald Trump just days away from taking office after lashing out at transgender people throughout his campaign, some fear Biden hasn’t done enough to protect them from what is likely to happen will come.
The president-elect has declared that “it will be the official policy of the Government of the United States that there are only two genders – male and female,” and has promised to sign a series of executive orders early in his presidency addressing Judge transsexuals.
Biden and Democrats, meanwhile, are grappling with how to handle transgender policy after the GOP leveraged Democrats’ support for the transgender community to win back the White House and control of Congress. Vice President Kamala Harris rarely mentioned transgender people during her campaign, but Trump’s campaign cited previous Harris comments to tirelessly argue to swing voters that she was focused on transgender issues rather than the economy.
Democrats won’t soon forget the punchline of a Trump ad that became ubiquitous on Election Day: “Kamala is for she/her; President Trump is for you.”
In his last full month in office, Biden scrapped pending plans to protect transgender student-athletes and signed a bill that would provide language coverage for transgender medical treatments for the children of service members.
His actions follow a common strategy in which the outgoing administration rushes through its policies or abandons unfinished regulations to prevent the up-to-date president from retooling them to more quickly advance his own agenda. But some transgender people question why Biden put plans that might have better protected them from Trump’s policies on hold.
“In some ways, the Biden administration has followed through on its promises to support transgender people, but not nearly to the extent that it could have done, nor to the extent of the current anti-trans attack corresponds,” says Imara Jones, a transgender woman He created the podcast “The Anti-Trans Hate Machine,” said The Associated Press.
Biden has appointed transgender people to influential positions in his administration, she noted. He lifted a Trump-era ban on transgender people serving in the military and allowed U.S. citizens who identify as neither male nor female to select an “X” as a gender marker on their passports.
“Under President Biden’s leadership, we have redressed historic injustices and advanced community equality, but there is more work to be done, and we hope the work continues after he leaves office,” said Kelly Scully, White’s spokeswoman house.
The Biden Justice Department has also challenged state laws in Tennessee and Alabama that ban gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth and has filed expressions of interest in other cases.
“But major gaps have been and continue to be opened,” Jones said. “The government has failed to implement Title IX, failed to defend trans health care, and failed to adequately address violence against trans people.” The list goes on. The government could take action now to at least temporarily protect the trans community.”
Some LGBTQ+ advocates have accused Biden of abandoning the transgender community after he signed the annual defense bill, even as he objected to a provision that prevents the military’s health program from providing certain medical treatments to transgender children covers military families.
The nation’s largest organization of LGBTQ+ service members and veterans said Biden’s decision to sign the bill is “in direct contradiction to claims that his administration is the most LGBTQ+-friendly in American history.”
Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said it is the first federal law targeting LGBTQ+ people since the 1990s, when Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as a union between one man and one woman defined. President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, signed it into law, a decision he later regretted.
The restriction comes as at least 26 states have passed laws banning or restricting gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, although most face lawsuits. Federal judges have ruled the bans in Arkansas and Florida unconstitutional, but a federal appeals court has stayed the ruling in Florida. A judge’s order temporarily blocks enforcement of a ban in Montana.
Twenty-five states have laws banning trans women and girls from participating in certain women’s sports competitions. Judges have temporarily blocked enforcement of bans in Arizona, Idaho and Utah.
When Biden introduced his now-abandoned proposal to ban outright transgender athletes in 2023, transgender rights advocates were unhappy, saying it left room for individual schools to prevent some athletes from playing on teams that corresponded to their gender identity.
The sports proposal, intended as a follow-up to a broader rule that extended civil rights protections to LGBTQ+ students under Title IX, was then delayed several times.
Biden’s delays were widely viewed as a political maneuver during an election year as Republicans sparked outrage over trans athletes in girls’ sports. Had the rule been finalized, it likely would have faced conservative legal challenges like those that have prevented broader Title IX policies from taking effect in dozens of states.
