Undoing Trump’s Four-Year Assault on LGBTQ Rights: Biden Provides a “Sea Change”

Advocates are hailing the Biden-Harris administration’s early actions to promote LGBTQ people’s civil rights and quality of life. “This is the most pro-LGBTQ administration we’ve seen,” said Sharita Gruberg, vice president of the LGBTQ Research and Communications Project at the Center for American Progress (CAP). “Since day one, they have been explicitly including LGBTQ people in all the executive orders and also with presidential appointments.”

One of the tools that the Trump administration employed to curtail LGBTQ civil rights was refusing to enforce federal laws prohibiting discrimination. “The Obama administration pushed forward federal protections under the sex discrimination umbrella, and there was a total retreat with Trump,” said Naomi Goldberg, deputy director and LGBTQ program director at Movement Advancement Project, a think tank. “The Trump administration also pushed religious exemptions, and the homophobic rhetoric coming from the administration on so many different issues was so harmful, especially their transphobic rhetoric at the same time that there are so many trans women being killed.”

On his first day, Biden signed an executive order directing agencies to enforce federal laws that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, consistent with the Supreme Court’s June ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County; this includes employment, education, housing, health care, and credit. This “means that the highest branch of government is now enforcing the Bostock decision and that this administration is going to be proactive on so many equity issues, not just merely responsive,” said Goldberg. “They understand what the work is and how to do it. The Biden administration’s approach on issues of equity and the speed with which they are acting is encouraging. We don’t want to squander this moment.”

The Trump administration continued its assault on LGBTQ people until its very last days. With less than two weeks left, the Department of Health and Human Services finalized a rule rolling back a regulation that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in federally funded health and welfare programs; it also removed explicit requirements to treat same-sex marriages equally. On February 10, a federal court — at the request of the Biden administration and legal advocates — postponed the rule from going into effect.

“The Trump administration’s legacy was cruelty and incompetence,” said Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. “Children, most especially trans children and immigrant children, shouldn’t be afraid of the president of the United States. One of the most impactful things that Biden is bringing is principles and competence,” and the repeal of the military ban on transgender people within days of taking office, which was something he pledged to do, “sends a message that Biden keeps his promises.”

To continue to fulfill those promises, the Biden-Harris administration will need to change the way information is gathered about LGBTQ people. “We don’t have the data that we need to get a full picture of the quality of lives of LGBTQ people, and we have a patchwork of state protections, so LGBTQ people’s quality of life, currently, is dependent on their ZIP code,” said Gruberg. “Added to that we’ve had four years of an all-out assault on LGBTQ rights.” Gruberg is the coauthor of a new report from CAP, Improving the Lives and Rights of LGBTQ People in America: A Road Map for the Biden Administration, a detailed blueprint to remedying the long list of anti-LGBTQ actions taken by the Trump administration. These include:

• banning transgender people from openly serving in the military
• erasing protections for transgender students in schools and threatening to withhold funding to schools that allowed trans youth to participate in sports consistent with their gender identity
• expanded religious exemptions to gut civil rights protections and allowing health care workers to refuse care based on personal belief
• removing explicit protections for LGBTQ people in the Affordable Care Act, as well as trying to get rid of the ACA altogether, which would have jeopardized health care for over 130 million people with pre-existing conditions, including HIV, and eliminate nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people
• weakened discrimination protections for employees of federal contractors and subcontractors

Biden has been using executive orders to begin to undo many of these harms, “which have detrimentally affected the everyday lives of LGBTQ people, particularly LGBTQ people of color,” the authors report, pointing out that in the past year alone, one in three LGBTQ people experienced discrimination. Not only should the Biden-Harris administration implement nondiscrimination policies, the authors urge, but to be most effective these policies “must be backed up by substantive and continued funding, effective enforcement, and meaningful engagement with LGBTQ stakeholders to address the assorted crises and disparities faced by these communities.”

These crises include poverty. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused high rates of unemployment, LGBTQ people and families experienced higher rates of poverty and were more likely to participate in anti-poverty programs than the general population. Poverty rates are even higher for transgender and gender-nonconforming people. Although there is over a decade of research showing high rates of poverty among LGBTQ people and families, there is little research about why this poverty is so prevalent, according to Pathways Into Poverty: Lived Experiences Among LGBTQ People, a September 2020 report from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. “The movement hasn’t been focused on poverty, and the lost story of the Trump administration is that they were engaged in a war against poor people,” said Tyrone Hanley, senior policy counsel at the National Center for Lesbian Rights and co-founder of the National LGBTQ Anti-Poverty Action Network. “Now we want to build on the Obama administration interagency working group on LGBTQ poverty by forming a similar body under the Biden administration. To hear White House officials already making the link between poverty and LGBTQ issues in our conversations with them sends signals they understand it. Historically, the approach to LGBTQ issues is that they are separate from when we talk about poverty, but that’s not the case. Liberation can’t happen until everyone has enough to eat and a roof over their head.”

Biden’s choice of Dr. Rachel Levine to be assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is yet another sign of progress. “Under Trump, the HHS was the most focal point of LGBTQ attacks, so it's a sea change to have a person at the top on health who is a trans woman,” said Gruberg. “And it’s a sea change from all of the secrecy from the previous administration where they didn’t want people to know about all the terrible things they were doing, to now, where they are releasing information on executive orders early because they are proud of them. It’s going to be more of a struggle to get legislation through Congress, but at the agency level, a lot of the work is taking existing policies and making them inclusive of LGTBQ people. It’s not like we have to re-invent the wheel. This president puts out statements that trans rights are human rights, and his early executive orders tell the country and the world that LBTQ rights are human rights. You look at the data about LGBTQ youth and it’s just horrifying in terms of mental health and quality of life disparities, and it means so much to have a president and the federal government be affirming, instead of what we’ve had the past four years.”

In fact, 86% of LGBTQ youth reported that recent politics had negatively impacted their well-being, according to the National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health 2020 conducted by the Trevor Project, a suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ and transitioning young people. “Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and legislation causes real harm,” said Casey Pick, senior advocacy fellow at the Trevor Project. “It is a breath of fresh air to see the Biden administration commit to advancing LGBTQ rights in its first few weeks. Hopefully, this will send a message to LGBTQ young people everywhere that they deserve love and respect and that our government is here to support them.”