Biden Condemns Trans Healthcare Bans in Pride Declaration
President Biden’s official Pride statement said bans on trans youth healthcare are “attack our most basic values and freedoms as Americans.” We should give him more credit for it.
Opinion, by Evan Urquhart
In a bold statement tying trans healthcare to the core values of independence and freedom Americans hold dear, President Joe Biden condemned anti-trans laws that have forced families to flee their homes in red states in order to continue providing medical care for their children. But you wouldn’t know it from reading mainstream media coverage of the statement (which has been near nonexistent), or even from reading LGBTQ+ media outlets, some of whom covered Biden’s statement but made little mention of Biden’s harsh condemnation transgender care bans.
This wasn’t some milquetoast statement vaguely supporting trans kids, either. The relevant portion of Biden’s statement, titled “A Proclamation on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Pride Month, 2024” was straight to the point on the harm being done to families of transgender children in anti-trans states, as well as describing with ringing moral clarity the way such youth care bans contradict basic American values.
screenshot from Biden’s “A Proclamation on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Pride Month, 2024”
For the mainstream and LGBTQ+ media, apparently, this was a yawn. Where were these statements covered? Oh, just the Daily Wire, the viciously anti-trans home of Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and Ben Shapiro. The Daily Wire story described Biden’s condemnation of healthcare bans targeting trans youth “defending child mutilation” but in mainstream and LGBTQ+ media he might as well have remained silent.
Joe Biden’s current standing among the transgender community, and his standing among much of the left, has been threatened in recent months by his ongoing support of Israel despite its genocidal attacks on Palestinian civilians. However, it’s simply bad politics to let clear moral statements in support of trans healthcare made by the President of the United States fall by the wayside.
One year after bans on the only evidence-based healthcare for trans youth were widely adapted, families are struggling all over the country and ever-harsher laws limiting trans people’s participation in public life (including restrictions on adult trans healthcare, bathroom bans, and bans on changing gender on licenses and other documents) keep being proposed and, sometimes, adopted. These attacks on trans people’s ability to live and thrive as equal members of society have dramatically changed trans people’s day-to-day lives in a very short period of time, forcing people to move, limiting career opportunities, even making longstanding prescriptions for adults unobtainable. This in addition to the threats of violence targeting schools, gyms, and hospitals, and the increased instances of public confrontations targeting trans people and anyone who appears mildly gender-nonconforming.
In this environment, we need to take notice when strong statements of support are made by Democratic politicians. We need Democrats to feel there’s a reward for taking positions that result in a deluge of threats and harassment, we need the public to be aware of these supportive statements, and we need the media to share these supportive statements with the public. The current antipathy for Joe Biden is getting in the way of smart media strategy and smart organizing. When the President of the United States says that healthcare bans targeting trans youth are against the morals and values of our country, we need to give him full credit. To do otherwise is to risk weakening Democratic support on an issue that anti-trans activists are more than willing to attack them over in the harshest and most misleading possible terms, and may even threaten violence over.
Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media and an incoming member of the 2024-2025 Knight Science Journalism fellowship class at MIT.