President Joe Biden began his White House term with a sweeping promise to protect transgender Americans against Republican policies that portrayed them as a threat to children and sought to expel them from public life.
“Your president has your back,” Biden assured trans people in his first State of the Union address in 2021, and repeated a version of that statement in subsequent speeches.
But with President-elect Donald Trump days away from taking office after singling out transgender people during his campaign, some fear Biden hasn’t done enough to protect them from what’s likely to come.
The president-elect has stated that “the official policy of the United States government will be that there are only two genders: male and female,” and pledged to sign a series of executive orders targeting trans people at the beginning of his presidency.
Meanwhile, Biden and Democrats are grappling with how to handle transgender politics after the GOP used Democrats’ support for the trans community to regain the White House and control of Congress. Vice President Kamala Harris rarely mentioned transgender people during her campaign, but the Trump campaign cited previous statements by Harris to relentlessly argue to undecided voters that she was focused on trans 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 them; President Trump is for you.”
In his last full month in office, Biden scrapped pending plans to provide protections for transgender student-athletes and signed a bill that includes removing language from covering transgender medical treatments for children of service members.
Their actions follow a common strategy in which the outgoing administration rushes through policies or abandons unfinished regulations to prevent the incoming president from modifying them to more quickly advance his own agenda. But some trans people wonder why Biden put plans that could have better protected them from Trump’s policies on the back burner.
“In some ways, the Biden administration has kept its promises to support trans people, but not to the extent that they could have, nor to what amounts to the current anti-trans attack,” said Imara Jones, a transgender woman. He created the podcast “The Anti-Trans Hate Machine,” he told The Associated Press.
Biden appointed trans people to influential positions throughout his administration, she noted. It overturned a Trump-era ban on trans people serving in the military and made it possible for U.S. citizens who do not identify as male or female to select an “X” as a gender marker on their passports.
“Under President Biden’s leadership, we have remedied historic injustices and promoted equality for the community, but there is more work to do, and we hope that work will continue after he leaves office,” said the White House spokeswoman, Kelly Scully.
Biden’s Justice Department also challenged state laws in Tennessee and Alabama that banned gender-affirming health care for trans youth, and filed statements of interest in other cases.
“But significant gaps have opened and remain,” Jones said. “The administration failed to comply with Title IX, failed to advocate for trans healthcare, and failed to adequately address violence against trans people. The list goes on. Even now, the administration could be implementing measures to help safeguard the trans community, at least temporarily.”
Some LGBTQ advocates have accused Biden of abandoning the transgender community after he signed the annual defense bill into law despite their objections to a provision that prevents the military health program from covering certain medical treatments for transgender children in military families.
The nation’s largest organization of LGBTQ service members and veterans said Biden’s decision to sign the bill is “in direct opposition to claims that his administration is the most pro-LGBTQ+ 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 adopted the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman. President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, signed it into law, a decision he later said he regretted.
The restriction comes as at least 26 states have adopted laws banning or limiting gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, although most face lawsuits. Federal judges struck down the bans in Arkansas and Florida as unconstitutional, but a federal appeals court stayed the Florida ruling. There is a judge’s order temporarily blocking enforcement of a ban in Montana.
Twenty-five states have laws prohibiting trans women and girls from competing 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 prohibit an outright ban on transgender student-athletes in 2023, trans rights advocates were dissatisfied, saying it left room for individual schools to prevent some athletes from playing on consistent teams. with their gender identity.
The sports proposal, intended as a follow-up to a broader rule extending civil rights protections to LGBTQ students under Title IX, was delayed several times.
Biden’s delays were widely seen as a political maneuver during an election year in which Republicans sparked protests over trans athletes in women’s sports. Had the rule been finalized, it likely would have faced conservative legal challenges like those that prevented the broader Title IX policy from taking effect in dozens of states.
