San Francisco: 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 (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) rainbow: transgender Americans.
With little of the fanfare or criticism that marked his evolution into the leader Newsweek magazine 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 US 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.
Religious conservative groups quick to criticize the president for his gay rights advocacy have been much slower to respond to the administration's actions. The leader of the Traditional Values Coalition says there is little recourse because the changes come through executive orders and federal agencies rather than Congress.
The latest wins came this month, when the Office of Personnel Management announced that government-contracted health insurers could start covering the cost of gender reassignment surgeries for federal employees, retirees and their survivors, ending a 40-year prohibition. Two weeks earlier, a decades-old rule preventing Medicare, the government-funded health insurance program for the elderly, from financing such procedures was overturned within the Department of Health and Human Services.
Unlike Obama's support for same-sex marriage and lifting the military's ban on openly gay troops, the White House's work to promote transgender rights has happened mostly out of the spotlight.
Some advances have gone unnoticed because they also benefited the much larger gay, lesbian and bisexual communities. That was the case Monday when the White House announced that Obama plans to sign an executive order banning federal contractors from discriminating against employees on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
In other instances, transgender rights groups and the administration have agreed on a low-key approach, both to skirt resistance and to send the message that changes are not a big deal, said Barbra Siperstein, who in 2009 became the first transgender person elected to the Democratic National Committee.
"It's quiet by design, because the louder you are in Washington, the more the drama," said Siperstein, who helped organize the first meeting between White House aides and transgender rights advocates without the participation of gay rights leaders.
The 2011 meeting came 34 years after President Jimmy Carter's administration made history by meeting with gay rights groups. Obama's Cabinet and federal agencies have followed up with actions significantly expanding transgender rights without congressional approval.
For instance, Health and Human Services said in 2012 that it would apply the non-discrimination provision of the Affordable Care Act to investigate federally funded health plans and care providers that refused to serve transgender individuals.
Earlier this year, the US Education Department informed public schools that under its reading of Title IX, the 1972 law that bans gender discrimination in education, transgender students are entitled to federal civil rights protections. The information was included in a memo on schools' obligations to respond to student-on-student sexual violence.
