After four years of opposition to transgender rights, the United States now has a president who is perhaps the most open trans advocate ever to sit in the Oval Office. Those who work toward trans rights are optimistic about this complete reversal of executive branch treatment—even as they recognize continued dangers to the community from police brutality, the COVID-19 pandemic and increasing legislative attacks.
It’s impossible to overstate how meaningful President Joe Biden’s full-throated support for transgender rights has been, especially given the onslaught of Donald Trump’s anti-trans attacks in the preceding four years. Biden explicitly thanked trans Americans in his victory speech, ended the previous administration’s ban on trans people in the military, and nominated a trans woman, Dr. Rachel Levine, for assistant secretary of health—the first trans person ever to be nominated for such a high-ranking cabinet position.
A sigh of relief—with ongoing concerns
In interviews with Blue Tent, representatives from both the Transgender Law Center and the Human Rights Campaign expressed how much of a relief it is to know that trans people finally have an ally in the White House.
“The Human Rights Campaign is looking forward to an administration that sees, respects, and will work with LGBTQ people to advance equality,” HRC President Alphonso David told Blue Tent. “Since day one, President Biden and his administration have already made rapid, unprecedented progress toward advancing LGBTQ equality.”
However, Transgender Law Center Executive Director Kris Hayashi echoes other advocates, warning that allies to the trans community must not become complacent.
“The reality is that we are still in the midst of a global pandemic,” Hayashi said in a phone interview. “We are still in a time where the violence and murders of Black people at the hands of the police and the state continue, we are still in a time where the murders of trans people, specifically Black trans women and femmes are continuing, and we are still at a time where trans migrants, as well as other vulnerable communities, are in detention, their lives are at risk.”
As Hayashi referenced, the increasingly visible problem of trans murder rates—which reached a high in 2020 after a reported 350 trans people were killed in the United States—is not one that will be solved via executive order or even Congressional action. These issues, which disproportionately affect Black trans women and other trans women of color, need to be addressed immediately, TLC says, and groups led by Black and brown trans women must be centered.
Because of the way race and gender oppression intersect to unduly harm trans women of color, Hayashi pointed to the defunding of police departments as a critical priority for his organization and for allies of the trans community. In addition, TLC is explicitly calling for an end to the detention of trans people in jails, prisons and immigration centers where their gender identities are most often not respected and where they face additional violence due to their identities.
“We knew this before the Trump administration, that trans people simply cannot be safely detained, and it was even more so in the last four years, and even more so in the midst of a global pandemic,” he said.
Hayashi pointed to the 2018 death of Roxana Hernández, a trans migrant who was murdered when she was detained by Immigration, Customs and Enforcement, and added that soon after COVID-19 began to spread across the U.S., TLC co-counseled a federal class-action lawsuit to free all trans people in ICE detention to protect the community “that has been rendered medically vulnerable.”
An ambitious agenda
Because it seems unlikely that the Biden administration will seriously consider calls to defund police or prisons beyond symbolic gestures like a recent executive order that terminated use of federal private prisons, Hayashi said that TLC will continue to push for other reforms. This would include a focus on trans people who are Black, brown, disabled, and/or part of migrant communities as the administration rolls out its COVID-19 recovery package.
As for the HRC, their legislative focus is on the White House supporting the Equality Act, which will enshrine LGBTQ people with legal protections under federal civil rights laws.
On his first day in office, Biden issued an executive order that codifies the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, last summer’s big LGBTQ rights case that the Trump administration refused to enforce specifically because Congress had not passed laws that granted LGBTQ people protections legislatively.
“While President Biden’s landmark executive order implementing Bostock is a crucial step in addressing discrimination against LGBTQ people, it is still vital that Congress pass the Equality Act,” HRC President David said. “The Equality Act would codify the Bostock decision by explicitly including sexual orientation and gender identity into our nation’s civil rights laws.”
Passing the Equality Act, however, will not be easy. Senate Democrats will need to work with at least a handful of Republicans to pass it without abolishing the filibuster—one of the biggest progressive agenda items for the newly Democrat-controlled Congress. With Democrats torn over whether to first work with the GOP to pass the landmark civil rights law or to abolish the filibuster, there’s a chance that the Equality Act may be lost in the fight.
Regardless of differences in lobbying tactics, the messages from these trans rights advocates are clear: The trans community and its allies cannot afford to rest on its laurels now that it has a friend in the White House. Part of the battle to ensure the rights, safety and liberty of transgender people in the United States was won when Trump lost his reelection bid, but the war is far from over.
