Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren released a wide-ranging LGBTQ policy plan on Thursday morning, vowing to enact measures and funnel resources toward fighting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender expression.
In a 12-page memo, the Massachusetts senator outlined dozens of ways a Warren administration would “fight for LGBTQ+ equality in solidarity with the leaders and organizers who have been at the helm from the very beginning.”
The measures include things like working to pass the Equality Act, which would extend civil rights protections to LGBTQ people, and amending the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to ensure it can’t be used to discriminate against LGBTQ people.
Warren said she would reverse the Trump administration policy that bans transgender people from serving in the military, as well as appoint a special envoy to the State Department to oversee LGBTQ human rights.
“I have opposed the Trump Administration’s shameful ban on transgender service members from the start, and I will reverse it on Day One,” the senator wrote in her plan.
Warren’s plan highlights the recent murders of transgender people in the U.S., most of them trans women of color, and states “it is time for a president to say their names and honor their memory.”
The senator included a number of measures aimed at reducing violence against trans women of color, including reversing the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s proposal to allow homeless shelters to deny transgender people access to their services.
Warren released the plan ahead of her participation in a Thursday town hall hosted by CNN and the Human Rights Campaign that will focus on issues affecting the LGBTQ community.
The senator is also expected to join the Las Vegas Pride Parade on Friday.
Thursday’s plan comes on the heels of a sweeping climate justice proposal Warren released on Wednesday and which reads as an ambitious blueprint of how to implement a Green New Deal.
Like her LGBTQ plan, Warren’s climate proposal looks at addressing the intersections of multiple issues ― in this case how race and privilege play into conversations about the environment.
“Justice cannot be a secondary concern ― it must be at the center of our response to climate change,” Warren wrote in the memo.
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