Biden's Final Actions As President Leave Some Transgender People Feeling Unsupported

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.