President Joe Biden reversed an executive order from the Trump administration on Wednesday that would have banned federal agencies from conducting diversity trainings. Former President Trump referred to such workshops, intended to further inclusion and tolerance, as “divisive” and “un-American.”
Known as Executive Order 13950, Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping, Trump signed the controversial order last September in order to promote “unity in the federal workforce,” as its text claimed, by restricting messages used in employee training that would signify “an individual, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”
The executive order, which was met with lawsuits from several LGBTQ+ rights organizations, was among a stack of orders, memorandums, and proclamations that Biden reversed hours after his Wednesday inauguration.
The policy’s repeal was part of a larger executive order the newly elected president signed with the goal of “embedding equity across federal policymaking and rooting out systemic racism and other barriers to opportunity from federal programs and institutions,” according to a statement published in The Hill. This includes the disbandment of the 1776 Commission, which was formed by president Trump to rebuke historical data on the legacy and impact of slavery in the United States.
The commission was created as a counter to the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project, which the paper claims “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States’ national narrative.”
An injunction had already been granted against Trump’s diversity trainings ban by a district court in January. The lawsuit, which was brought by LGBTQ+organizations like Lambda Legal, resulted in the Department of Labor suspending its enforcement.
But while the order on diversity trainings was short-lived, advocacy organizations noted that it was still extremely harmful to vulnerable U.S. minority groups.
“In the few months of its existence, it negatively impacted the lives and livelihoods of countless Americans and advanced the dangerous cause of white supremacy and disinformation,” said Janai Nelson, associate director-counsel of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, in a statement to the Chicago Tribune. “We will continue to work to ensure that all vestiges of President Trump’s Executive Order are removed from workplaces across the country.”
Trump’s diversity training ban wasn’t specific to the LGBTQ+ community, but the order resulted in the cancellation of a Veteran Affairs webinar last September, which had been created to raise awareness about the needs of diverse older adults. The session reportedly included a segment by the LGBTQ+ organization SAGE.
“We think it’s clear that both the impact and in fact the intent of the presidential order was to silence and eliminate anti-racism training,” said SAGE CEO Michael Adams in a statement to ABC News.
In addition to reversing Trump’s diversity training ban, Biden also signed an executive order to expand LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination protections and another targeted at combating the COVID-19 pandemic, including the requirement of masks and physical distancing within federal buildings and on federal lands.
Biden’s swift actions to reduce the fallout from the pandemic could directly impact the LGBTQ+ community. According to The Williams Institute, a pro-equality think tank at the University of California Los Angeles, queer and trans people are at a higher risk of contracting COVID-19, with an estimated 319,800 transgender adults in the U.S. suffering from medical conditions like asthma, diabetes, and heart disease.
In a recent report on Biden’s order, Kathryn O’Neill, a public policy analyst at The Williams Institute, noted that LGBTQ+ people are disproportionately likely to “experience poverty, food insecurity, be uninsured, and lack access to proper medical care,” adding that the COVID-19 pandemic “has only exacerbated these disparities.”
“Making sure that LGBT people are included in recovery efforts and have access to health care and other support systems is vital to prevent the widening of health and economic inequities,” she said.
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