President Joe Biden differs sharply from his predecessor when it comes to how the federal government should treat Americans who identify as transgender.
Biden is a progressive leveler. He embraces the transgender ideology unreservedly, demanding that society accept and normalize transgender people, while former President Donald Trump was more restrained, respecting the right of transgender people to exist without rearranging society to accommodate them or supporting the radical socially transformative goals of the left-wing transgender movement.
Trump banned some transgender individuals from military service; Biden welcomes them. Trump opposed letting transgender persons use school bathrooms corresponding to their gender identity; Biden does not. Trump opposed expanding civil-rights protections for transgender people in employment; Biden favors expanding such protections, not just in employment, but also in other realms.
Legal Changes
Biden’s quest for radical egalitarianism is aided by a changing legal environment.That court ruling was a defeat for the Trump administration. During oral arguments, then-Solicitor General Noel Francisco said about the consolidated case, which also dealt with sexual orientation, “Sex means whether you’re male or female, not whether you’re gay or straight.”
This landmark judicial foray into the culturally contentious realm of sex versus sex roles brought an expanded meaning to the phrase “on the basis of sex” that appears in the Civil Rights Act.
Decision author Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that the ruling dealt with employment alone and didn’t apply to “sex-segregated bathrooms, locker rooms, and dress codes,” all of which are regulated under another law, Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, which wasn’t at issue in the court case.
But Biden’s sweeping order declares: “Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports. ... All persons should receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation.”
“This administration is prepared to vigorously defend and enforce the legal protections that LGBTQ people enjoy under federal law,” the ACLU wrote.
At the 2016 Republican nominating convention, Trump presented himself as a defender of LGBTQ rights, saying, “As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.” The ideology referenced was Islamism, which doesn’t tolerate the LGBTQ movement.
Sports
If such a policy were widely enforced, girls’ and women’s sports would be in jeopardy, Olympic track-and-field coach Linda Blade told the Wall Street Journal.“Finished. Done,” Blade said. “The leadership skills, all the benefits society gets from letting girls have their protected category so that competition can be fair, all the advances of women’s rights—that’s going to be diminished.”
Pro-transgender policies hurt women, said James Shupe, who, after serving as an icon of transgender activism, denounced the movement and the idea that one can change one’s sex as a fraud. Shupe was the first individual in Oregon to receive legal recognition for his “non-binary” sex designation, only to ask after his epiphany to have the status rescinded and his “male” sex restored on his birth certificate.
“Females bear the brunt of the suffering in all of it, and President Biden and the Democrats don’t care, all for the sake of politics,” he told The Epoch Times in an email interview.
“Even worse, a lot of females are perpetuating harm against other women and girls while believing they’re doing the right thing to support these transgender policies, because they think it’s the right thing to do because they’ve been led to believe that.”
Military
Biden changed military policy on transgender people, accomplishing the change with the stroke of a pen.Stating that “an inclusive military strengthens our national security,” Biden said it was his “conviction as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces that gender identity should not be a bar to military service.”
Biden took a shot at Trump, writing that “the previous administration chose to alter” an Obama-era policy, “to bar transgender persons, in almost all circumstances, from joining the Armed Forces and from being able to take steps to transition gender while serving.”
Instead of “relying on the comprehensive study by a nonpartisan federally funded research center, the previous administration relied on a review that resulted in a policy that set unnecessary barriers to military service.”
Shupe said, “President Trump really had a fairer and more balanced policy concerning the gender dysphoria ban,” which was “often and unfairly called the ‘transgender ban’ for effect by media outlets and to garner public support, but in reality, it was a ban on gender dysphoria: a serious mental illness, something I’m all too familiar with because I suffered from it while I served and still do.”
Trump’s policy allowed gender-dysphoric individuals to serve “if you remain mentally fit, can abstain from hormones and surgeries, and can serve in your birth sex” without embracing “a false reality” such as changing your sex on your personal identification, Shupe said.
Children
Biden endorsed sex-change operations for 8-year-olds during an October 2020 town hall meeting. Trump never endorsed such a radical position.Peter Sprigg of Family Research Council Action said at the time that Biden was “wrong to encourage gender transitions for 8-year-old children. The implementation of invasive physiological gender transition procedures ... upon minors raises grave concerns.”
Biden has nominated Dr. Rachel Levine, until recently Pennsylvania’s health secretary, to be assistant secretary of health, the first transgender individual to be nominated for a Senate-confirmed position.
Equality Act
Critics fear the Biden-backed proposed “Equality Act,” which they characterize as a radical assault on constitutionally protected religious freedoms, and that passed the Democrat-controlled U.S. House of Representatives on Feb. 25, will be used to force the transgender ideology on society.His comments haven’t reassured critics.
Despite extraordinary progress by that community, “discrimination is still rampant in many areas of our society,” Biden said. “The Equality Act provides long-overdue federal civil rights protections on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, locking in critical safeguards in our housing, education, public services, and lending systems—and codifying the courage and resilience of the LGBTQ+ movement into enduring law.”
“Young girls and women are incensed that they are now being forced to compete against those who are biological males,” Trump said. “It’s not good for women, it’s not good for women’s sports, which worked so long and so hard to get where they are.”
Religious Freedom
The Trump administration took a stand against the principles articulated in the Bostock decision days before it was handed down.In an effort to protect religious freedoms, in June 2020, Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) finalized a rule that followed federal court rulings finding that the Obama administration overreached when it issued a rule prohibiting discrimination in health care and health insurance on the basis of patients’ “internal sense of gender.”
The rule dealt with Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which made it unlawful to discriminate on the basis of “race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability in certain health programs and activities.”
Biden is widely expected to reverse the rule.
HHS asked U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein of New York to stay the proceedings, to give the department time to review the case in light of Biden’s executive actions. The litigants consented and the lawsuit will be held in abeyance until May 14.
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