Candidate Donald Trump promised he would be an LGBTQ ally. Since he’s been in the White House, however, he’s failed to live up to those promises for at least one part of the community, enacting multiple policies that directly target transgender people.
Trump campaigned on being an LGBTQ ally. He hasn’t governed like one.
His administration has pushed policies that discriminate against transgender people.
The latest: The Department of Health and Human Services is rolling back regulations that protected transgender people from being discriminated against by health care providers over their gender identity.
That’s a stance that campaign-era Trump — who styled himself as an ally to the LGBTQ community at multiple rallies — most likely wouldn’t have touted. After a shooting killed 49 people at a gay club in Orlando, Florida, in 2016, for example, Trump said he was a “real friend” to the gay community and condemned the persecution of others based on their sexual orientation. He called the attack “an assault on the ability of free people to live their lives, love who they want, and express their identity,” according to CNN.
While he was in Colorado as part of his campaign trail, he also held a rainbow flag that said “LGBTs for Trump,” a move that was seen as radical for a Republican at the time. (Although to be fair, he didn’t mention LGBTQ rights in the speech that followed). There are also tweets that show his effort to portray himself as a true ally.
Yet new policies from his administration show it hasn’t worked out that way.
Homeless transgender people have also been targeted by the administration — which is especially troubling when statistics show that one in five transgender individuals experience homelessness at some point in their life, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality. On Wednesday, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced its plan to allow federally funded shelters to deny people access based on “privacy, safety, practical concerns, religious beliefs.” Once admitted, transgender women could be forced to share bathrooms and sleeping quarters with men.
The day before the agency announced this change, HUD Secretary Ben Carson had assured Congress that the 2012 Equal Access Rule — an Obama-era rule that bans shelters from discriminating based on gender identity — was safe under his watch.
Two days later, the administration delivered another blow to the transgender community, by throwing out another policy from Obama’s tenure that bans health care providers from discriminating against LGBTQ people. The agency will restrict the definition of discrimination “on the basis of sex” by eliminating gender identity as a factor — enforcing the administration’s apparent stance of only recognizing the sex someone is assigned at birth. Under Obama, gender identity was recognized as a person’s “internal sense of gender, which may be male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female, and which may be different from an individual’s sex assigned at birth.”
The Department of Health and Human Services said this change would make the regulations “more consistent” with other agencies, according to Politico. The definition of gender had become too broad under the Obama administration, HHS director of the Office for Civil Rights Roger Severino told the Washington Post, arguing that the agency was changing regulations to be more in line with what lawmakers had originally intended.
When it comes to the military, Trump has also pushed to roll back protections for the LGBTQ community. In 2017, he had called for a blanket ban on transgender troops via Twitter because the US military “cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.” By January 2019, the Supreme Court revived a ban on openly transgender troops that had been lifted under Obama. The president’s ban went into effect on April 12, prohibiting new military recruits from transitioning and discharging those who do not present as the gender assigned to them at birth. Troops are given the chance to change their decision before the discharge is finalized, according to the Associated Press.
And Trump has sent mixed signals about his stance on the LGBTQ community in the past. In an interview with Fox News earlier this month, Trump said he was “absolutely fine” with 2020 Democrat candidate Pete Buttigieg’s marriage to his husband and added, “I think it’s great.” Then again, he reportedly made a private joke in 2017 about Vice President Mike Pence wanting to “hang” gay people.
When it comes to policies, however, the administration has continued to push new rules that define gender restrictively, despite Trump having touted himself as an ally to the LGBTQ community. And as a result, transgender people are rapidly losing protections.
