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

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

2025-01-03 20:17 Last Updated At：20:21

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

“Your president has your back,” Biden assured trans people in his first State of the Union address in 2021, and he repeated a version of that statement in subsequent speeches.

But with President-elect Donald Trump days away from taking office after piling on transgender people throughout his campaign, some worry Biden did not do enough to shield them from what's likely to come.

The president-elect has declared that “it will be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders — male and female," and pledged to sign a series of executive orders targeting trans people early in his presidency.

Biden and Democrats, meanwhile, are grappling with how to handle transgender politics after the GOP used Democrats' support for the trans community to win back the White House and control of Congress. Vice President Kamala Harris rarely mentioned transgender people during her campaign, but Trump's campaign cited previous Harris statements to argue relentlessly to swing voters that she was focused on trans issues rather than the economy.

Democrats will not soon forget the punchline of a Trump ad that became ubiquitous by Election Day: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”

In his last full month in office, Biden scrapped pending plans to provide protections for transgender student-athletes and signed a bill that includes language stripping coverage of transgender medical treatments for the children of service members.

His actions follow a common strategy in which the outgoing administration rushes through policies or abandons unfinished regulations to prevent the incoming president from retooling them to more quickly advance his own agenda. But some trans people question why Biden let plans that might have better protected them from Trump's policies sit on the back-burner.

“In some ways, the Biden administration has lived up to promises to support trans people, but not nearly to the degree that they could have, nor to what is equal to the current anti-trans onslaught," Imara Jones, a transgender woman who created “The Anti-Trans Hate Machine” podcast, told The Associated Press.

Biden named trans people to influential positions across his administration, she noted. He overturned a Trump-era ban on trans people serving in the military and made it possible for U.S. citizens who do not identify as male or female to select an “X” as the gender marker on their passports.

“Under President Biden’s leadership, we have remedied historical injustices and advanced equality for the community, but there is more work to do, and we hope that work continues after he leaves office," said White House spokesperson Kelly Scully.

The Justice Department under Biden also challenged state laws in Tennessee and Alabama that banned gender-affirming medical care for trans youth, and it filed statements of interest in other cases.

“But major gaps were both opened and remain," Jones said. "The administration failed to follow through on Title IX, failed to defend trans health care and failed to adequately address anti-trans violence. The list goes on. Even now, the administration could be putting in place measures to help safeguard the trans community, at least temporarily.”

Some LGBTQ+ advocates have accused Biden of abandoning the transgender community after he signed into law the annual defense bill despite his objections to a provision preventing the military’s health program from covering certain medical 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 is "in direct opposition to claims that his administration is the most pro-LGBTQ+ in American history.”

Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said it's the first federal law targeting LGBTQ+ people since the 1990s, when Congress adopted 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 minors, though most face lawsuits. Federal judges have struck down the bans in Arkansas and Florida as unconstitutional, but a federal appeals court has stayed the Florida ruling. A judge’s order is in place temporarily blocking enforcement of a ban in Montana.

Twenty-five states have laws on the books barring trans women and girls from competing in certain women’s sports competitions. Judges have temporarily blocked the enforcement of bans in Arizona, Idaho and Utah.

When Biden in 2023 introduced his now-abandoned proposal to forbid outright bans on transgender student-athletes, trans rights advocates were dissatisfied, saying it left room for individual schools to prevent some athletes from playing on teams consistent with their gender identity.

The sports proposal, meant as a follow-up to a broader rule that extended civil rights protections to LGBTQ+ students under Title IX, was then delayed several times.

The delays from Biden were widely viewed as a political maneuver during an election year as Republicans generated outcry about trans athletes in girls' sports. Had the rule been finalized, it would likely have faced conservative legal challenges like those that prevented the broader Title IX policy from taking effect in dozens of states.

Jimmy Carter's funeral begins by tracing 100 years from rural Georgia to the world stage

2025-01-05 09:39 Last Updated At：09:40

ATLANTA, Ga. (AP) — Jimmy Carter 's extended public farewell began Saturday in Georgia, with the 39th U.S. president’s flag-draped casket tracing his long arc from the Depression-era South and family farming business to the pinnacle of American political power and decades as a global humanitarian.

Those chapters shone throughout the opening stanza of a six-day state funeral intended to blend personalized memorials with the ceremonial pomp afforded to former presidents. The longest-lived U.S. executive, Carter died on Dec. 29 at the age of 100.

“He was an amazing man. He was held up and propped up and soothed by an amazing woman,” son James Earl “Chip” Carter III, told mourners at The Carter Center late Saturday afternoon, referring also to his mother, former first lady Rosalynn Carter, who died in 2023. “The two of them together changed the world. And it was an amazing thing to watch so close.”

Grandson Jason Carter, who now chairs the center's governing board, said, “It's amazing what you can cram into a hundred years.”

Carter’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren accompanied their patriarch as his hearse rode first Saturday through his hometown of Plains, which at about 700 residents is not much bigger than when Carter was born there Oct. 1, 1924. The procession stopped at the farm where the future president toiled alongside the Black sharecroppers who worked for his father. The motorcade continued to Atlanta, stopping in front of the Georgia Capitol where Carter served as a state senator and reformist governor.

Finally, he arrived for his last visit to the Carter Presidential Center, which houses his presidential library and The Carter Center where he based his post-White House advocacy for public health, democracy and human rights, setting a new standard for what former presidents can accomplish after they yield power.

“His spirit fills this place,” Jason Carter told the assembly that included some of the center's 3,000 employees worldwide. “You continue the vibrant living legacy of what is my grandfather’s life work,” he added.

Pallbearers on Saturday came from the Secret Service that protected the Carters for almost a half-century and a military honor guard that included Navy servicemembers for the only U.S. Naval Academy graduate to reach the Oval Office. A military band played “Hail to the Chief” and the hymn “Be Thou My Vision” for the commander in chief who also was a devout Baptist.

His longtime personal pastor, the Rev. Tony Lowden, remembered not a president but the frail man who spent the last 22 months in hospice care, “wrapped in a blanket” that included the words of Psalm 23.

Chip Carter recalled “the boss” he had to make an appointment to see in the Oval Office, but also the father who spent an entire Christmas break learning Latin and teaching his 8th-grade son who had failed a test. When he took that test again, the younger Carter said, he aced it: “I owed it to my father, who spent that kind of time with me.”

Jimmy Carter will lie in repose at the Carter Presidential Center from 7 p.m. Saturday through 6 a.m. Tuesday, with the public able to pay respects around the clock.

Scott Lyle, an engineer who grew up in Georgia but now lives in New York, was among the first mourners to pay his respects. Lyle said he joined Carter to build homes with Habitat for Humanity for the first time in LaGrange, Georgia, in 2003. Since then, he has traveled around the world to build houses with the group.

“I got to see, what some people don’t get to see, close. He was an amazing man, and he cared about others. He walked the walk,” said Lyle, who was wearing Carter-themed Habitat gear. “And I can’t think of anyone else that I would want to stand in line to pay my respects for.”

National rites will continue in Washington and conclude Thursday with a funeral at Washington National Cathedral, followed by a return to Plains. There, the former president will be buried next to his wife of 77 years near the home they built before his first state Senate campaign in 1962.

The Carters lived nearly all their lives in Plains, with the exception of his Naval service, four years in the Governor's Mansion and four years in the White House. As his hearse rolled through the town, mourners lined the main street, some holding bouquets of flowers and wearing pins bearing images of the former president and his signature smile.

Willie Browner, 75, described Carter as hailing from a bygone era of American politics.

“This man, he thought of more than just himself,” said Browner, who grew up in the town of Parrott, about 15 miles (24 kilometers) from Plains. Browner said it meant “a great deal” to have a president come from a small Southern town like his — something he worries isn’t likely to happen again.

Indeed, Carter helped plan his own funeral to emphasize that his remarkable rise to the world stage was because of — not despite — his deep rural roots.

Over the course of a few blocks in Plains, the motorcade passed near where the Carters ran the family peanut warehouse, and the small home where his mother, a nurse, had delivered the future first lady in 1927. The hearse passed the old train depot that served as Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign headquarters — a barebones effort that depended on public financing, dwarfed by the billion-dollar U.S. presidential campaigns of the 21st century.

At the Carter farm, a few dozen National Park Service rangers stood in formation in front of the home, which did not have running water or electricity when Carter was a boy. The old farm bell rang 39 times to honor Carter's place as the 39th president.

Beside the house, there remains the tennis court that Carter's father, James Earl Carter Sr., built for the family — a nod to the blend of privilege and hard rural life that defined the future president's upbringing. Carter worked the land throughout the Great Depression, but it was owned by the elder Carter, who employed the surrounding Black tenant farmers during the era of Jim Crow segregation.

Carter wrote and spoke extensively on those formative years and how the abject poverty and institutional racism he saw influenced his policies in government and human rights work.

Calvin Smyre, a former Georgia legislator, remembered that legacy Saturday at the state Capitol. Smyre, who is Black, said Carter’s repudiation of racial segregation allowed Black people to wield power in Georgia.

“We stand on the shoulder of courageous people like Jimmy Carter,” Smyre said. “What he did shocked and shook the political ground here in the state of Georgia. And we live better because of that.”

Payne reported from Plains, Georgia.

Bill Barrow, based in Atlanta, has covered national politics including multiple presidential campaigns for the AP since 2012.

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

News

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

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