Biden's final actions as president leave some transgender people feeling unsupported

President Joe Biden began his term in the White House with a broad promise to protect transgender Americans from Republican policies that painted them as a threat to children and sought to exclude them from public life.

“Your president has your back,” Biden assured the crowd 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 heaping on transgender people throughout his campaign, some worry that Biden hasn't done enough to protect them from what might happen.

The president-elect announced that “it will be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two sexes – male and female,” and promised to sign a series of executive orders targeting trans people early in his administration.

Biden and Democrats, meanwhile, are at odds over how to handle transgender politics after the GOP used Democrats' support for the trans community to retake the White House and control Congress. Vice President Kamala Harris rarely mentioned transgender people during her campaign, but Trump's campaign cited Harris' previous statements of consistent opposition to changing voters to focus on gender issues instead of the economy.

Democrats won't soon forget the line from Trump's ubiquitous Election Day ad: “Kamala is theirs; President Trump is yours. “

In his last full month in office, Biden scrapped pending plans to provide protections for transgender athletes and signed a bill that included the release of transgender treatment languages ​​for the children of service members.

His actions follow a common strategy where outgoing administrations rush through policies or scrap unfinished legislation to prevent an incoming president from retooling it to advance his agenda more quickly. But some conservatives are asking why Biden is letting programs that could better protect them from Trump's policies sit on the floor.

“In some ways, the Biden administration has delivered on promises to support transgender people, but not nearly as much as they could have, or as much as the current attack,” said Imara Jones, a transgender woman. created the podcast “The Anti-Trans Hate Machine”, he told the Associated Press.

Biden has called changemakers into influential positions throughout his administration, he noted. He overturned a Trump-era ban on human trafficking and required US citizens who do not identify as male or female to choose an “X” as the gender symbol on their passports.

“Under President Biden's leadership, we have redressed historic injustices and advanced social equality, but there is more work to be done, and we hope that work will continue after he leaves office,” said White House spokeswoman Kelly Scully.

The Justice Department under Biden also challenged state laws in Tennessee and Alabama that prohibit sex-affirming medical care for young people, and filed interest statements in other cases.

“But big gaps were opened and left,” Jones said. “The administration has failed to follow Title IX, it has failed to protect health care and it has failed to address counter-terrorism. The list goes on. Even now, the administration may be putting in place measures to help protect the public, at least temporarily.”

Some LGBTQ+ advocates accused Biden of abandoning the transgender community after signing the annual defense bill despite opposing a provision that bars the military's health care system from covering certain 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 “directly contradicts allegations that his administration is the most pro-LGBTQ+ in American history.”

Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said the first federal legislation targeting LGBTQ+ people dates back to 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 adopted laws banning or limiting gender-affirming medical care for transgender children, although most face lawsuits. Federal judges struck down bans in Arkansas and Florida as unconstitutional, but an appeals court upheld the Florida decision. A judge's order is in effect temporarily halting enforcement of the ban in Montana.

Twenty-five states have laws on the books that prohibit women and girls from competing in certain women's sports. Judges have temporarily blocked enforcement of the ban in Arizona, Idaho and Utah.

When Biden in 2023 introduced his now-abandoned proposal to ban transgender athletes outright, transgender advocates were not satisfied, saying it left room for individual schools to prevent certain athletes from playing on teams that match their gender.

The sports proposal, which was intended to follow a broader law that extended civil rights protections to LGBTQ+ students under Title IX, was then delayed several times.

The delay from Biden was widely seen as a political ploy in an election year as Republicans created an outcry over trans athletes in girls' sports. Had the legislation been finalized, it would likely have faced as strong legal challenges as those that prevented the broader Title IX policy from taking effect in many states.