President Joe Biden began his term in the White House with a broad promise to protect transgender Americans against Republican policies that painted them as a threat to children and sought to push them out of public life.
“Your president has your back,” Biden assured trans people in his first State of the Union address in 2021, and he repeated a version of that statement in subsequent speeches.
But with President-elect Donald Trump days away from taking office after piling on transgender people throughout his campaign, some worry Biden did not do enough to shield them from what’s 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 pledged to sign a series of executive orders targeting trans people early in his presidency.
Biden and Democrats, meanwhile, are grappling with how to handle transgender politics after the GOP used Democrats’ support for the trans 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 statements to argue relentlessly to swing voters that she was focused on trans issues rather than the economy.
Democrats will not soon forget the punchline of a Trump ad that became ubiquitous by Election Day: “Kamala is for they/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 language stripping coverage of transgender medical treatments for the children of service members.
His actions follow a common strategy in which the outgoing administration rushes through policies or abandons unfinished regulations to prevent the incoming president from retooling them to more quickly advance his own agenda. But some trans people question why Biden let plans that might have better protected them from Trump’s policies sit on 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 named trans people to influential positions across his administration, she noted. He 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 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,” said White House spokesperson Kelly Scully.
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.