Trump Concludes First Term Having Weakened Or Repealed Roughly Two Dozen LGBTQ Protections, Resolving Long-Standing Concern Federal Government Was Treating LGBTQ Americans Identically To Other Americans

WASHINGTON. In a final accomplishment quietly enumerated across regulatory dockets, internal HHS memos, and several appearances before federal appellate courts where his Justice Department repeatedly argued in favor of permitted discrimination, President Donald J. Trump concluded his first term Wednesday having weakened, repealed, or reinterpreted roughly two dozen federal protections for LGBTQ Americans, resolving a long-standing concern that the federal government had been treating LGBTQ citizens identically to other citizens.

The administration's accomplishments in this area began early. In mid-2017, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Census Bureau quietly stopped collecting data on LGBTQ Americans, a procedural decision that had the dual benefit of restoring uncertainty about the size of the population and providing the data infrastructure required to ignore its needs. In 2018, the Justice Department filed a series of briefs arguing that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the statute prohibiting workplace discrimination on the basis of sex, did not prohibit discrimination against gay or transgender workers, an interpretation the Supreme Court rejected in 2020 in a 6 to 3 decision authored by a Trump appointee.

"The President believes deeply in the freedom of all Americans," a senior White House official said. "He simply believes some Americans have less of it."

In 2019, HHS finalized a "conscience rule" empowering healthcare workers to refuse care to patients on religious or moral grounds, an accommodation White House aides said was necessary because America's pluralism had begun including too many kinds of patients. The Department of Housing and Urban Development moved to allow taxpayer-funded homeless shelters to refuse transgender residents. The Department of Labor crafted a rule permitting federal contractors with religious objections to discriminate. The State Department began rejecting passport applications from transgender citizens whose documentation reflected their gender. The Education Department threatened Connecticut public schools with loss of federal funding for permitting transgender students to compete in athletics, a position the agency described as protecting fairness for the unspecified majority.

By the term's final months, the administration had finalized a rollback of Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, ending federal protection against discrimination in healthcare on the basis of gender identity, a change the President's HHS announced with the explanation that "sex" in federal civil rights statutes meant only what the administration believed it should mean. The Pentagon's policy barring transgender Americans from military service, announced by tweet in 2017 and formalized in 2019, remained in effect, with approximately 14,000 service members continuing to exist in regulatory non-existence.

"This is about restoring traditional values," explained an administration spokesperson in a written statement that did not specify which tradition or whose values.

At press time, the incoming Biden administration had pledged to reverse most of the changes within months, the President's Justice Department had filed a final brief arguing federal contractors should be permitted to refuse to hire LGBTQ Americans, and a Department of Health and Human Services data dashboard reflecting LGBTQ population estimates had been replaced with a blank page reading "page not found."