President Joe Biden began his presidency with a sweeping vow to protect transgender Americans from Republican policies that portrayed them as a menace to children and attempted to force them out of public life.
“Your president has your back,” Biden assured transgender individuals in his first State of the Union address in 2021, and he reiterated a similar message in subsequent talks.
However, with President-elect Donald Trump days away from entering office after repeatedly attacking transgender individuals during his campaign, others believe Biden did not do enough to protect them from what is sure to come.
The president-elect has declared that “it will be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders — male and female,” and has promised to sign a slew of executive orders targeting trans persons early in his administration.
Biden and Democrats, meantime, are debating how to approach transgender politics after the GOP utilized Democrats’ support for the LGBT community to retake the White House and control of Congress. Vice President Kamala Harris made few mentions of transgender individuals during her campaign, but Trump’s campaign repeatedly highlighted Harris utterances to convince voters that she was more concerned with trans issues than the economy.
Democrats will never forget the punchline of a Trump ad that went viral on Election Day: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”
In his final full month in office, Biden canceled pending proposals to protect transgender student-athletes and signed legislation that excludes coverage of transgender medical treatments for service members’ children.
His actions are consistent with a common tactic in which the leaving administration pushes through measures or abandons unfinished rules to avoid the incoming president from retooling them to further his own agenda. However, some trans people ask why Biden pushed initiatives that could have better shielded them from Trump’s policies to the back burner.
“In some ways, the Biden administration has lived up to promises to support trans people, but not nearly to the degree that they could have, nor to what is equal to the current anti-trans onslaught,” Imara Jones, a transgender woman who created “The Anti-Trans Hate Machine” podcast, told The Associated Press.
Biden appointed transgender people to high-level jobs throughout his administration, she noted. He lifted a Trump-era restriction on transgender people serving in the military and allowed US citizens who do not identify as male or female to use a “X” as the gender designation on their passports.
“Under President Biden’s leadership, we have remedied historical injustices and advanced equality for the community, but there is more work to do, and we hope that work continues after he leaves office,” said Kelly Scully, a spokesman for the White House.
The Justice Department under Biden also challenged state laws in Tennessee and Alabama that banned gender-affirming medical care for trans youth, and it filed statements of interest in other cases.
“But major gaps were both opened and remain,” Jones said. “The administration failed to follow through on Title IX, failed to defend trans health care and failed to adequately address anti-trans violence. The list goes on. Even now, the administration could be putting in place measures to help safeguard the trans community, at least temporarily.”
Some LGBTQ advocates have accused Biden of abandoning the transgender community after he signed into law the annual defense bill despite his objections to a provision preventing the military’s 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’s 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, though most face lawsuits. Federal judges have struck down the bans in Arkansas and Florida as unconstitutional, but a federal appeals court has stayed the Florida ruling. A judge’s order is in place temporarily blocking enforcement of a ban in Montana.
Twenty-five states have laws on the books barring trans women and girls from competing in certain women’s sports competitions. Judges have temporarily blocked the enforcement of bans in Arizona, Idaho and Utah.
When Biden in 2023 introduced his now-abandoned proposal to forbid outright bans on transgender student-athletes, trans rights advocates were dissatisfied, saying it left room for individual schools to prevent some athletes from playing on teams consistent with their gender identity.
The sports proposal, meant as a follow-up to a broader rule that extended civil rights protections to LGBTQ students under Title IX, was then delayed several times.
The delays from Biden were widely viewed as a political maneuver during an election year as Republicans generated outcry about trans athletes in girls’ sports. Had the rule been finalized, it would likely have faced conservative legal challenges like those that prevented the broader Title IX policy from taking effect in dozens of states.