In this paper, we propose a simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) empowered transmission scheme for symbiotic radio (SR) systems to make more flexibility for network deployment and enhance system performance. The STAR-RIS is utilized to not only beam the primary signals from the base station (BS) towards multiple primary users on the same side of the STAR-RIS, but also achieve the secondary transmission to the secondary users on another side. We consider both the broadcasting signal model and unicasting signal model at the BS. For each model, we aim for minimizing the transmit power of the BS by designing the active beamforming and simultaneous reflection and transmission coefficients under the practical phase correlation constraint. To address the challenge of solving the formulated problem, we propose a block coordinate descent based algorithm with the semidefinite relaxation, penalty dual decomposition and successive convex approximation methods, which decomposes the original problem into one sub-problem about active beamforming and the other sub-problem about simultaneous reflection and transmission coefficients, and iteratively solve them until the convergence is achieved. Numerical results indicate that the proposed scheme can reduce up to 150.6% transmit power compared to the backscattering device enabled scheme.