For the past four years, the Biden-Harris administration has made LGBTQ rights a cornerstone of its policy agenda. Among other efforts, the Biden-Harris administration has consistently sued states to block anti-trans laws and policies, including asking the Supreme Court to lift bans on medically-necessary health care for trans adolescents.

While there remains work to be done to protect the LGBTQ community, we have seen significant progress under the Biden-Harris administration in undoing the anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ policies of Donald Trump’s administration. Given this strong record, should Harris win in November, we’re calling on her administration to continue to ensure that the rights and freedoms of LGBTQ people are protected and prioritized across the federal government.

Learn more in our breakdown.

The Facts: Given the significantly anti-trans policy environment that has emerged over the past four years, the ACLU would push a future Harris administration to build on the foundation established during Joe Biden’s presidency by using the power of the federal government to protect LGBTQ people from harm in as many ways as possible.

The Biden-Harris administration ordered federal agencies to protect LGBTQ people against discrimination by ensuring that the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, in which the court held that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects employees against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, applied in the contexts of not just employment, but housing, health care, and credit lending. The administration also reopened the military to transgender service members, reversing the Trump administration’s ban. Additionally, the administration expanded access to gender-affirming health care through government healthcare programs, including in federal prisons, and expanded access to accurate gender markers on federal government identification documents, such as passports.

While a pro-equality president can do a lot to protect the rights and freedoms of LGBTQ people, they cannot achieve the long-sought goal of comprehensive federal protections on their own. From the earliest days of her service in the Senate, Harris consistently made clear her support for the Equality Act — legislation to provide LGBTQ people with explicit, comprehensive protection against discrimination – and, as vice president, has consistently urged Congress to pass the legislation. However, if Harris is elected and faced with a divided Congress, similar to what we have now, it will be essential for the Harris-Walz administration to remain vigilant against efforts to put anti-LGBTQ measures, including those banning access to gender-affirming care, in must-pass legislation, such as bills that fund the federal government.

Why It Matters: In addition to Trump-era policies that sought to actively disenfranchise LGBTQ people, without federal-level protections, the LGBTQ community continues to face discrimination in nearly every aspect of daily life.

In the last two years, states have considered 1,197 anti-transgender bills. Of those, 129 have been passed into law. Anti-trans or anti-LGBTQ laws restrict access to needed health care for adults and children, deny individuals the right to live freely and safely as they are, and hinder the ability to simply exist free from discrimination.

Harris on LGBTQ Rights

The ACLU will ensure that the Harris administration stays focused on protecting and expanding justice for the LGBTQ community.

Source: American Civil Liberties Union

How We Got Here: From its first day in office, the Biden-Harris administration set about undoing many of the Trump administration’s regressive anti-LGBTQ federal policies and enhancing federal protections.

However, when a new presidential administration takes office in January 2025, the LGBTQ community will still be confronting a dismal policy landscape in about half the country where trans adolescents — and increasingly trans adults — face unlawful discrimination. In many states, trans people cannot access gender-affirming medical care; are unable to use restrooms in schools and other government buildings; find that updating gender markers on identity documents is challenging or impossible; and cannot fully participate in society as their authentic selves.

Our Roadmap: To help a future Harris-Walz administration pass comprehensive federal nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people, we will continue to push Congress to reform the Senate filibuster and pass pro-equality legislation, like the Equality Act. The Biden-Harris administration has championed the Equality Act, but a vocal anti-LGBTQ minority has used the filibuster to delay its passage through Congress. The ACLU is prepared to use public pressure — including aggressive lobbying and grassroots mobilization — to compel Congress to finally act.

While the passage of explicit, comprehensive legislation protecting LGBTQ people from discrimination is the ACLU’s top LGBTQ priority in Congress, there are many other actions that a Harris-Walz administration should take to safeguard the rights of LGBTQ people. For example, one of the most significant and powerful ways for a Harris-Walz administration to support the needs of trans people is to issue an executive order on day one directing federal agencies to examine ways that they can affirmatively enhance access to gender-affirming care in federally funded programs. An executive order like this would provide clear direction to federal agencies, and do so in a way that will serve the goal of comprehensively addressing this issue.

Additionally, we expect Harris to work with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to use litigation to protect trans people across the country from discriminatory state laws. The ACLU will continue this work in communities across the country by engaging our activists to join the fight for LGBTQ equality in their home states.

What Our Experts Say: “The Biden-Harris administration has a strong record of protecting and expanding the freedom of LGBTQ people at a time when those freedoms have faced an unprecedented assault. With further attacks on our rights and a landmark Supreme Court case on the horizon, we would encourage a Harris-Walz administration to continue this commitment and do everything in their power to protect our rights, our health care, and our freedom to be ourselves without fear.” — James Esseks, co-director of the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project

What You Can Do Today: Recently, dangerous and discriminatory efforts to strip trans people of their rights, including efforts to use the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to limit care for trans servicemembers, have only increased. These tactics affect everyone. Write to your Congress member today to stop this assault on our freedom and on our lives.

In U.S. classrooms and libraries, a coordinated attack on students’ right to learn is underway.

Since January 2021, 44 states have introduced bills or taken other steps to restrict how teachers can teach about racism and sexism in the classroom. These unlawful efforts impact students as young as five or six, and exist throughout the education system, reaching high school students and those at higher education institutions. In addition to censoring classroom conversations, lawmakers and school boards have also enacted sweeping book bans that further restrict access to diverse viewpoints.

Defend Your Right to Learn: Join In The Fight Against Classroom Censorship

Source: American Civil Liberties Union

The ACLU has challenged classroom censorship laws and book bans nationwide as part of its broader efforts to defend education equity. To better understand who these censorship attempts harm and how young people are being impacted, this back-to-school season, we spoke to high school students from across the country at the ACLU’s annual National Advocacy Institute about how classroom censorship has impacted their right to learn.

I am not able to take AP Psychology or AP African American History. I am also unable to find a lot of the books that I like because they are being banned and removed from my local libraries. I have to work harder to find information and, because it is harder, I sometimes just decide not to look for it.

As a woman of color, I haven’t fully felt that I identify with much of the history taught in my classrooms. I think book banning, and taking away certain avenues of education for students to learn about their background and where they came from … is really harmful to students, especially youth who are trying to find their sense of community and where to belong.

If I'm in the classroom and I can't get an array of perspectives from an array of different authors, I feel that I'm not getting an education representative of our America. If I can't read authors who look like me, who look like my black and brown friends, [who look like] my friends of AAPI descent, then what am I really learning? I'm learning America from the perspective of only one kind of person, and that's not the education that I want, nor is it the education that any student should receive.

Students learn from being able to read books, voice our opinions, and hear the opinions of others. As someone who's Jewish and has had family murdered in the Holocaust, I understand firsthand that when you start to ban books and label books as forbidden the people in those books soon find themselves also labeled forbidden… Information, the right to knowledge, and the right to converse freely are what protect all of our other rights that we care about so deeply.

History isn’t as pretty and simple as some people want to make it seem. It’s very complicated. You really need to have access to all of the information you can get and hear a lot of different opinions …Having access to all viewpoints allows me to expand my knowledge and makes learning a lot more interesting.

Banning books is one of the ways that we are actively stunting educational growth for young students. I think that, for kids, the library is often a haven for where they can go and just garner so many new perspectives and gain an idea of what change can possibly be.

As a kid, I got into advocacy from reading The Hunger Games and seeing the rise of Katniss Everdeen and the revolution. And so, if books like that, like Fahrenheit 451, like The Hunger Games, or Of Mice and Men are banned, these narratives are being erased. Kids can’t get that sort of education and perspective that can encourage them to make change later on as leaders of the future.

My school district has dealt with book bans and curriculum censorship…I really saw a burden come on our educators and our students where we didn't feel like we were being adequately represented in the curriculum, and we didn't feel that we were able to grow in our knowledge in a very truthful and real way. We need to have the opportunity to explore our knowledge at a deeper level and not be restricted by adults that think that we're not smart enough to understand.

If my teachers weren’t allowed to talk about issues I cared about, I would honestly feel a little bit belittled, especially because teachers are very looked up to. They’re the people that we learn from, who educate us since we're little. And if our role models can't speak to something that we're passionate about, what does that say about our passions? Are those belittled as well? Are our feelings belittled? Are we invalidated? I think that it instills in us from a young age that we can only say certain things and can't speak our mind.