President Joe Biden began his term in the White House with a broad pledge to protect transgender Americans from Republican policies that portrayed them as a threat to children and sought to drive them from 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 days away from taking office after stacking up on transgender people during his campaign, some are concerned that Biden hasn't done enough to protect them from what's likely to come.
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The president-elect has declared that “it shall be the official policy of the United States government that there shall be only two genders – men and women,” and pledged early in his presidency to sign a series of executive orders targeting transgender people.
Biden and Democrats, meanwhile, are grappling with how to handle transgender politics after the Republican Party 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 Trump's campaign cited previous statements from Harris to relentlessly convince voters that she was focusing on transgender people rather than the economy.
Democrats won't soon forget the punchline of a Trump ad that became ubiquitous on Election Day: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”
In his last full month as president, Biden scrapped pending plans to provide protections for transgender student-athletes and signed a bill that includes language-stripping coverage of transgender medical treatments for the children of servicemembers.
His actions follow a common strategy of the outgoing administration rushing through policies or abandoning unfinished regulations to prevent the new president from tweaking them to advance his own agenda more quickly. But some transgender people are wondering why Biden has put plans that could have better protected them from Trump's policies on the back burner.
“In some ways, the Biden administration has made good on promises to support trans people, but not nearly to the extent that they could, nor to the extent that is comparable to the current anti-trans attack,” Imara said Jones, a transgender woman who created the podcast “The Anti-Trans Hate Machine,” told The Associated Press.
Biden appointed transgender people to positions of influence within his administration, she noted. He overturned a Trump-era ban on transgender 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 passport.
“Under President Biden's leadership, we have righted historic injustices and advanced equity for the community, but there is still more work to be done, and we hope that work will continue after he leaves office,” said spokesperson Kelly Scully White House.
The Justice Department under Biden has also challenged state laws in Tennessee and Alabama that ban gender-affirming medical care for trans youth, and has filed declarations of interest in other cases.
“But big gaps have emerged and they continue to exist,” Jones said. “The administration failed to pass Title IX, failed to defend transgender health care, and failed to adequately address anti-trans violence. The list goes on. Even now, the government could take measures to protect the trans community, at least temporarily.”
Some LGBTQ+ advocates have accused Biden of abandoning the transgender community after he signed the annual defense bill, despite his objections to a provision that prevented 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 contradiction to the claim that his administration is the most pro-LGBTQ+ in American history.”
Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said this is the first federal law to target LGBTQ+ people since the 1990s, when Congress passed 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 passed laws banning or restricting gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, although 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 court order has been issued temporarily blocking 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 in 2023 to outright ban transgender student-athletes, trans rights advocates were displeased, saying it left room for individual schools to prevent some athletes from playing on teams consistent with their gender identity.
The athletic proposal, intended as a follow-up to a broader rule that extended civil rights protections to LGBTQ+ students under Title IX, was subsequently postponed several times.
Biden's delays were widely seen as a political maneuver during an election year when Republicans sparked outrage over trans athletes in girls' sports. Had the rule become final, it likely would have faced conservative legal challenges, such as those that prevented the broader Title IX policy from taking effect in dozens of states.
