Ahead of the Wednesday inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, new reports suggest that the administration is laying the groundwork toward undoing his predecessor’s most egregious anti-trans policies.
According to the LGBTQ+ news outlet Washington Blade, Biden’s Defense Department nominee, Gen. Lloyd Austin, confirmed on Tuesday that he supports the repeal of a 2018 executive order signed by outgoing President Donald Trump banning most trans people from enlisting in the armed forces. “I truly believe that if you’re a fit and you’re qualified to serve and you can maintain the standards, you should be allowed to serve,” he reportedly told Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand during a confirmation hearing.
Advocacy groups applauded the statements. Palm Center Executive Director Aaron Belkin told the Blade that it is “heartening” to know that Austin, who previously served as the vice chief of staff of the United States Army prior to his pending appointment, “understands the urgency of ending the military’s harmful transgender ban.”
“Very little needs to be done administratively to finally end discrimination against transgender troops, and we look forward to the arrival of fully inclusive policy very soon,” Belkin said.
While the Blade claimed that it could take up to a year before Trump’s trans military policy is fully reversed, the revelation that the Biden administration is moving toward the ban’s repeal is not a revelation. In an interview with the queer news publication Dallas Voice earlier this year, Biden pledged to overturn the incumbent’s discriminatory policies on “day one.”
“I will direct the Department of Defense to allow transgender service members to serve openly and free from discrimination,” he said.
New polling suggests that the move, which would be among the first in Biden’s presidency, would be widely popular among Americans. In a sample of 11,000 adults, Morning Consult and the national youth suicide organization The Trevor Project found that three in five respondents (60%) support allowing trans people to enlist in the military without restriction, while 26% believe they should not be able to serve.
Republicans are evenly divided on the subject, with 40% favoring trans inclusion in the armed forces and 45% opposing it. Young conservatives, though, say that transgender people should be allowed to serve their country by a 16-point margin.
Recent reports, however, suggest that the military ban isn’t the only one of Trump’s estimated 181 attacks on the LGBTQ+ community Biden will address without delay. Ahead of a pledge to pass the Equality Act within his first 100 days in office, which could be complicated by Trump’s recently launched impeachment trial in the Senate, Biden has promised to restore 2016 guidance allowing trans students to use the restroom that best affirms their gender identity on his first day in office.
In a wide-ranging LGBTQ+ policy platform released during the presidential race, Biden also pledged to loosen restrictions on gay and bisexual blood donors, ban conversion therapy, and end discriminatory policies preventing same-sex couples from adopting, but a timeline for those proposals is unknown.
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