When you make a list of all the ways President Obama has been helpful to transgender people, it begins to look kind of impressive:
President Barack Obama, who established his bona fides as a gay and lesbian rights champion when he endorsed same-sex marriage, has steadily extended his administration’s advocacy to the smallest and least accepted band of the LGBT rainbow: transgender Americans.
With little of the fanfare or criticism that marked his evolution into the leader Newsweek nicknamed “the first gay president,” Obama became the first chief executive to say “transgender” in a speech, to name transgender political appointees and to prohibit job bias against transgender government workers. Also in his first term, he signed hate crime legislation that became the first federal civil rights protections for transgender people in U.S. history.
Since then, the administration has quietly applied the power of the executive branch to make it easier for transgender people to update their passports, obtain health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, get treatment at Veteran’s Administration facilities and seek access to public school restrooms and sports programs – just a few of the transgender-specific policy shifts of Obama’s presidency.
“He has been the best president for transgender rights, and nobody else is in second place,” Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said of Obama, who is the only president to invite transgender children to participate in the annual Easter egg roll at the White House.
If everyone is no more than a few steps away from knowing someone who is gay or lesbian, the same is not even close to being true for transgender people. They are the least understood and probably least sympathetic minority group in the country, and there isn’t much political upside to sticking your neck out for them. But it’s the right thing to do, and the president deserves a lot of credit for doing so much.
Thank you for pointing this out.
The Facts are always a slap in the face to those whiners and complainers who are always crying that the president is a sekrit Republican who Won’t. Even. Try. to do the right thing.
But Obama and the DemocratTM party are the more effective evil because something something neo-liberalism, something something Libya.
I’ll take good news when I read it. This sort of stuff does matter. I have a couple friends who went through gender reassignment surgery, and this will help them quite a bit.
‘The only president to invite transgender children to participate in the Easter egg roll at the White House.’ The children of transgender parents, perhaps? Or do transgender children exist?
Yes, they exist.
Human rights. Obama should be remembered as The Human Rights President. The Republicans would never, ever have made as many inroads as this Administration has made.
And that should be to their eternal shame.
First Gay President?!
James Buchanan is incensed! Incensed, I say!