My trans rights wish list for the Biden administration
By: Amy J. Ko
Tags: Transgender, Election 2020, LGBTQ, Human Rights

President-elect Joe Biden with state senator-elect Sarah McBride, also a trans activist.

In hindsight, coming out as transgender back in September 2019 was an act of defiance. We were three years into rollbacks of Obama-era trans protections: Trump removed all mentions of trans people from government websites; he withdrew guidance protecting trans students under Title IX; he halted nondiscrimination enforcement in health care; he stopped all data collection on LGBTQ people, including hate crime data; he banned trans people from the military; he prevented the CDC from using the word “transgender”; he removed anti-discrimination regulations on religiously-affiliated services offering shelter, foster care, and caregiving; he required schools to ban trans students from participating in sports. The list goes on, all disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable trans people, including trans youth abandoned by their parents, homeless trans people without work or healthcare due to employment discrimination, and Black trans women ensnared by the criminal justice system for just trying to survive.

Biden’s election this past Saturday, therefore, brought some much needed hope to the transgender community. While the conservative courts will continue to interpret trans discrimination into law for generations, and Trump’s administration may well continue to enact anti-trans executive orders for the next two months, at least the weekly civic beating by the government will slow down in January. And Biden’s promises—to protect trans people from discrimination, support trans youth, expand access to gender-affirming health care, ensure fair treatment in the criminal justice system, restore much needed data collection on hate crimes, and more—are concrete, essential restorations of Obama-era policy that will improve trans people’s safety, health, and wellness.

But they are not enough. Trans people, after all, are not only oppressed by trans rights issues. Transphobia, sexism, racism, ableism, nativism, and other forms of discrimination all intersect with transness in subtle ways, making trans rights impossible to separate from other human rights and inequities. And even beyond human rights that explicitly intersect with identity, there are other existential issues that humanity is facing, such as poverty, homelessness, climate change, automation, and the erosion of democracy, each disproportionately harming trans people. Therefore, part of fighting for trans inclusion and equity is fighting for higher minimum wages (for everyone), housing access (for everyone), reductions in carbon output (for everyone), and sensible reforms to our aging democratic structures (for everyone). In fact, making progress on these issues may be more important than more laws protecting trans people explicitly, because they meet trans people’s basic needs of jobs, housing, clean air, hospitable climate, and economic stability. After all, what good are trans employment protections if you can’t afford a lawyer to sue, don’t have employment or health insurance, and were only making $7/hour in the job you just lost for not having a passing voice?

Biden was never the candidate to make this progress. He promised to restore what Obama did, and maybe a bit more, and I trust him to do that. But restoring executive orders will do little to change the fundamental inequalities in trans people’s lives, and restoring these orders may only last for a few years anyway. And Biden’s commitment to bipartisanship, while necessary for any form of progress, is going to inherently limit what progress is possible, as he’s already negotiated against himself any more liberating vision of an America that ensures trans people—and all Americans—the kind of safety and prosperity that we all deserve.

So what vision of trans rights should Biden be pursuing with Congress? How about outstanding universal pre-K through college education to keep us creative and adaptive? Or lifelong health care to keep us healthy and well, even in times of crisis? What about transportation that quickly, quietly, and sustainably gets us to our destination without causing annual summer fires that make it impossible to breathe? Or government that focuses on the least secure of our people instead of those who have everything they need? And a commitment to do all of these in ways that are gender-affirming, anti-racist, and accessible? Do these, maybe even at the expense of more brittle, incremental, trans-inclusive executive orders that will only be reversed by the next conservative administration anyway.

If you’re a cis person reading this, you might be thinking, “C’mon, can’t we just celebrate for a bit? Do we have to get political already?” And I get it. I’d like to take a break for a bit too and enjoy the Trump-free news for a while. In fact, I did this weekend, and it would be nice to just quietly rebuild, and get us back to where we were in 2016. While rebuilding might be enough for you, and even for me as a particularly privileged trans person, but I promise you it is not enough for most trans people. And what better time to imagine a better world than when we’re remaking it?

#BlackTransLivesMatter