Joe Biden Showed Me We Weren’t Fighting Alone
I keep thinking back to Joe Biden’s town hall, to the moment when he told the mom of an eight-year-old transgender girl that he would “flat-out change the law” to protect the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans, and eliminate the executive orders that President Trump has signed that target our community.
Before Joe even started to answer the question, you could see him leaning forward, eyes wide, and he looked like he could hardly wait for the girl’s mom to finish asking the question. You could feel him putting his words together, and see his empathy and his eagerness to respond.
That might not feel like a big deal. But it’s had me thinking back over the past several years, when we’ve seen so much progress on LGBTQ+ equality that it’s been disorienting at times — but amazing, too.
My journey into election-related work started on the day President Obama and Vice President Biden won the election in 2008. I was on my feet for 16 hours that day for my first-ever volunteer shift with a campaign, asking voters to vote No on Proposition 8, the ballot measure that banned same-sex couples in California from marrying. I was exhausted and overwhelmed, riding home late at night over the Dumbarton Bridge, as President Obama’s victory speech came over the car radio. As he called for unity and said that “out of many, we are one,” I wondered if anyone would actually come back for us if we lost. It felt like the rest of the country was moving forward without us. We didn’t know that night that Prop 8 would pass, but we knew the odds weren’t in our favor.
Even in a city like San Francisco that prides itself on LGBTQ+ inclusion, being a gay transgender man was hard. Many of the other transgender men I knew worked stealth and lived in fear of being fired simply for being themselves. Health care was a luxury that we struggled hard to afford because for many of us, our survival depended on it. Bureaucracies like the DMV and the Social Security office chipped away at our wallets and our sanity, and put up daunting hurdles for us to get identification cards. I watched friends slip into substance abuse and depression, and move away from a city they deeply loved but could no longer afford.
At the state and local level, there was a lot of fierce advocacy. State by state, we started to pass anti-discrimination laws and create more space for ourselves. But we tried not to be noticed much by national politicians, particularly the Bush administration, because their attention was rarely positive. But that would change with the Obama/Biden administration.
In its first year, the administration worked with Congress to pass the Matthew Shepard & James R. Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Act, the first federal anti-discrimination law for LGBTQ+ people. Each year that followed, the administration did more and more. Big moves like repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and writing anti-discrimination protections into the Affordable Care Act’s Section 1551 followed. The administration also fought in the courts to clarify that the definition of ‘sex’ in the Civil Rights Act included our civil rights. Behind the big ticket items were a million more incremental chess moves that led government agencies to do better for LGBTQ+ people. Civil rights offices pursued our cases harder, agencies passed their own workplace non-discrimination policies, and discrimination by federal contractors was banned.
President Obama and Vice President Biden also fully understood the importance of shifting the culture. It showed when they lit the White House up in rainbow colors after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality, and when the Department of the Interior designated the Stonewall Inn a national monument. But before that, in 2012, the Vice President spoke out in favor of marriage equality a few days before President Obama, in the middle of a re-election campaign. The version of me who rode home on a darkened bridge during a heavy loss at the ballot box four years earlier couldn’t have imagined that change.
Things are far from perfect. We’re still struggling for affordable health care, a fair shake at work, day-to-day safety and so much more. And the harms done by the Trump administration to LGBTQ+ people over the past four years will be hard to undo. But as I’ve watched cisgender people and straight people learn and grow over the past few years, the hopelessness that I used to feel is gone. Even as transgender and non-binary people have been attacked by the current administration, we haven’t been left on our own. We owe a lot of that shift in support to Barack and Joe.
A vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is a vote to strip away the attacks and discriminatory orders of the past four years. It’s a vote to restore the foundation that the Obama/Biden administration built, then build it up even stronger — so that every LGBTQ+ person has a roof over their head and can have the same safety, security, health and happiness that everyone has the right to pursue.
My vote for Joe is in. Where’s yours?
