President Joe Biden began his presidency with a broad promise to protect transgender Americans from Republican policies that portrayed them as a threat to children and attempted to push them out of public life.
“Your president has your back,” Biden assured transgender people in his first State of the Union address in 2021, and he repeated a similar statement in subsequent speeches.
However, with President-elect Donald Trump days away from taking office after repeatedly attacking transgender people during his campaign, some believe Biden did not do enough to protect them from what is likely 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 people early in his administration.
Biden and Democrats, meanwhile, are debating how to handle transgender politics after the GOP used Democrats’ support for the trans community to retake the White House and control of Congress.
Vice President Kamala Harris made few mentions of transgender people during her campaign, but Trump’s campaign repeatedly cited Harris statements 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 by Election Day: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”
In his final full month in office, Biden canceled pending plans 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 strategy in which the outgoing administration rushes through policies or abandons unfinished regulations to prevent the incoming president from retooling them to further his own agenda.
However, some trans people question why Biden pushed plans that could have better protected 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 positions throughout his administration, she noted. He lifted a Trump-era ban 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 marker 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,” says Kelly Scully, a spokesperson for the White House.
The Justice Department, led by Biden, also challenged state laws in Tennessee and Alabama that prohibited gender-affirming medical care for trans youth, and it filed statements of interest in several other cases.
“But major gaps were both opened and remain,” Jones said. “The administration failed to enforce Title IX, defend trans health care, and adequately address anti-trans violence.
The list goes on. Even now, the administration may be putting in place measures to protect the transgender community, at least temporarily.”
Some LGBTQ advocates accused Biden of abandoning the transgender community after he signed the annual defense bill despite his objections to a provision that prohibits 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 stated that Biden’s decision to sign the bill is “in direct opposition to claims that his administration is the most pro-LGBTQ+ in American history.”
According to Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, this is the first federal law aimed at LGBTQ people since the 1990s, when Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as a union between a man and woman. President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, signed it into law, which he later regretted.
The restriction comes as at least 26 states have passed laws prohibiting or limiting gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, with the majority facing legal challenges.
Federal judges have declared the bans in Arkansas and Florida unconstitutional, but a federal appeals court has stayed the Florida decision. A judge’s order temporarily prohibits the enforcement of a ban in Montana.
Twenty-five states have laws prohibiting trans women and girls from participating in certain women’s sports competitions. Judges have temporarily halted the enforcement of bans in Arizona, Idaho, and Utah.
When Biden introduced his now-abandoned proposal in 2023 to prohibit outright bans on transgender student-athletes, trans rights advocates were dissatisfied, claiming it allowed individual schools to prevent some athletes from playing on teams that matched their gender identity.
The sports proposal, which was intended as a follow-up to a broader rule that extended civil rights protections to LGBTQ students under Title IX, was then postponed multiple times.
Biden’s delays were widely viewed as a political ploy during an election year, as Republicans sparked outrage over transgender athletes in female sports. If the rule had been finalized, it would have faced conservative legal challenges similar to those that prevented the broader Title IX policy from being implemented in dozens of states.
