Joe Biden backs ‘every single solitary right’ for trans community in interview with trans woman and TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney

In rare sit-down interview with TikTok star, US president backs gender identity bathrooms and participation of trans women in female sports.

US President Joe Biden (left) has told TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney of his support for gender identity bathrooms. Pictures. File.

President Joe Biden has backed “gender identity bathrooms” in a rare sit-down interview with trans woman and TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney, blasting Republican states that have made it harder for trans women to compete in women’s sports.

Two weeks out from increasingly knife-edge midterm elections, where cultural issues are playing a major role, the US president said he supported “every single solitary right” for America’s rapidly growing trans community, “including use of your gender identity bathrooms in public”.

Ms Mulvaney, a 25-year-old social media star with more than 8 million followers, who has chronicled her transition publicly, asked Mr Biden, 79, whether states had the right to ban “gender-affirming care”, which includes high powered medicine to block puberty and genital altering surgery.

“I don’t think any state, or anybody, should have the right to do that, as a moral and legal question I just think it’s wrong,” Mr Biden said, wading into a simmering political debate over the rights and responsibilities of trans children, their parents, schools, and trans athletes, and states’ rights more broadly.

“Sometimes they try to block you from being able to access certain medicines, being able to access certain procedures and so on, none of that should be available, I mean, you know, no state should be able to do that in my view,” Mr Biden said.

An analysis by the Washington Post found the volume of legislation in Republican-controlled states seeking to clarify or restrict trans rights has soared since North Carolina’s controversial 2016 “bathroom bill”, which required individuals in public to use the bathroom of their biological sex.

In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott in February said some sex change operations for children could be “child abuse” under state law, while Virginia’s Republican governor Glenn Youngkin courted criticism from Democrats in September by issuing a rule that prevented children from changing their pronouns and names without parental consent.

“This is my 221st day of publicly transitioning … many states have lawmakers who feel like they can involve themselves in this very personal process,” Ms Mulvaney, whose pronouns, are “she/they”, told the president.

“Our lives have become political talking points, lawmakers in many states want to exclude us from part in sports”.

Idaho banned trans women from competing in female sports last year, which preceded a weeks-long national debate on the subject prompted by 22-year-old transgender college swimmer Lia Thomas, who smashed records for Pennsylvania University after switching from the university’s male to female swim team.

In the sit-down White House interview published Sunday (Monday AEDT), Mr Biden said “being seen with people like you”, addressing Ms Mulvaney, was a critical way to break down stereotypes and reduce discrimination against trans Americans, who now make up 1.6 per cent of the adult population, according to Pew Research.

“People change their minds, people just don’t know enough to know, and it’s not because of intellectual incapability, it’s lack of exposure,” the president explained.

Mr Biden’s intervention came as national polls showed Republicans in striking distance of taking control of the Democrat-controlled congress after the November 8 midterm elections, an outcome that would throttle the Biden administration’s ability to pass legislation without Republican backing.

Speaking at a rally last week in Arizona, Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, expected to win her race, said she might follow Florida’s move to legislate against discussion of transgenderism and sexuality in schools.

“We will make sure we aren’t sending our boys off to school and have them coming home thinking they are girls; call me radical, I’m not a science or biology major, but I know one thing … there are two genders,” she said.

Republican governor of Florida Ron DeSantis prompted fierce blowback from Democrats last year after signing off on a new law, dubbed by opponents as the Don’t Say Gay law, which banned discussion of sexuality by teachers with schoolchildren up to third grade (aged 8 or 9).

The share of young adults aged 18 to 29 who said they were transgender or nonbinary was 5.1 per cent, according to a Pew Research poll conducted in May. That was more than 10 times the proportion of Americans aged over 50s (0.3 per cent), who said the same.

A separate survey published in June, conducted by the Williams Institute at the University of California, found the share of youth aged 13 to 17 who identified as transgender had doubled since 2017 to 1.4 per cent.