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September 3, 2024
Project 2025 Is Coming After LGBTQ Americans
A close reading of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document reveals potential major setbacks for gender-affirming care, workplace protections, and same-sex marriage.
A Stop Project 2025 sign during the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago,.
(Al Drago / Getty Images)
This article is a joint publication of The Nation and Uncloseted Media, a new LGBTQ news organization launched on Substack. Founded by Spencer Macnaughton, Uncloseted is committed to nonpartisan, objective LGBTQ journalism.
When Project 2025 was first published by the Heritage Foundation in the spring of 2023, most of the legacy media ignored it. Then last December, The New York Times reported on plans that would “upend core elements of American governance, democracy, foreign policy and the rule of law,” if Donald Trump returned to the White House.
Since then, the 920 page document—also known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project—has become a household name, and has garnered negative responses from Americans on both sides of the aisle for some of its extreme policies. These include the abolition of the Department of Education; a policy that would give the White House direct control of the Department of Justice, to allow prosecution of the president’s opponents; and a recommendation to fire tens of thousands of federal civil servants so that they could be replaced by Trump loyalists.
Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, stating at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan that some of its elements are “seriously extreme.” “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he added in a Truth Social post. “I have no idea who is behind it.” These statements appear to contradict what he had said at a dinner hosted by the Heritage Foundation in 2022: “This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do…to save America.”
So far, 140 former Trump administration officials have contributed to the document, and the project has been endorsed by more than 100 conservative organizations, including the Family Research Council and the Center for Family and Human Rights, both of which are Southern Poverty Law Center–designated anti-LGBTQ hate groups.
Despite the lack of media attention about how the project could affect queer people, LGBTQ issues are referenced dozens of times in the document, beginning on the very first page, where it falsely states that “children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.”
Additionally, on page 4, the authors of the document write, “the next conservative president must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets…. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI), diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation.” “They want to erase the LGBTQ community from federal documents” says Wendy Via, president and cofounder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “It is a systematic dehumanization and abuse of the LGBTQ community.”
Current Issue
The most extreme language in Project 2025—which has been widely denounced by LGBTQ advocacy organizations—is aimed at transgender people. The “propagation of transgender ideology” is called “pornography,” the document says, and that is an essential reason pornography “should be outlawed.” “Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
Via says that while pornography and trans issues may seem unrelated, the connection made by the authors of Project 2025 is intentional because they see the deviance associated with pornography as akin to identifying as LGBTQ: “Their message is that pornography is obscene. Being transgender is obscene. Teaching our kids about affirming their identities or orientations is obscene. And all of this is happening because the left is subversive and deviant and have created this situation.”
While Project 2025 doesn’t call for the illegalization of what it refers to as “transgenderism,” Via says the way it’s connected to pornography in the document is cause for concern. “If you’re going to outlaw pornography and if transgenderism equals pornography, then the through line is once you outlaw the first thing, then everything behind it becomes illegal. And that’s why they say in that same paragraph that librarians should be labeled as sex offenders if they allow [LGBTQ inclusive] material in their libraries.”
In an interview with Uncloseted Media, Rachel Bitecofer, a political scientist and the founder of the liberal Strike Pac, pointed out that the adult entertainment website Porn Hub is already blocking access to everyone in the 11 states that require age verification, as a protest against these restrictions. The Free Speech Coalition, which opposes a ban on pornography, agrees that the text of Project 2025’s provision calling for a ban on porn seeks to create a link between what it calls harmful pornography and the transgender and LGBTQ communities.
Further down in the document, the project calls for renaming the Department of Health and Human Services “the Department of Life.” On page 451, it diminishes LGBTQ families: “Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society. Unfortunately, family policies and programs under President Biden’s HHS are fraught with agenda items focusing on ‘LGBTQ+ equity’.… These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.” It also states that “the male–female dyad is essential to human nature” and “every child has a right to a mother and father.”
“Project 2025 is driven by a far-right desire to turn America back to the 1920s, or even further back,” says Bitecofe. “It’s quite clear the goal is a religious-based biblical argument of morality,” targeted against trans rights, the LGBTQ community, marriage equality, and the reproductive control of women.
While Project 2025 does not explicitly call for the end of marriage equality, Gillian Branstetter of the ACLU’s LGBTQ and HIV Project, says it makes a lot of indirect arguments “for treating same sex marriages as second-class marriages.” For example, the chapter on the US Department of Health and Human Services instructs the next president to protect faith-based grant recipients from religious liberty violations and to maintain a biblically based definition of marriage and family. It also states that Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education grants “should be available to faith-based recipients who reaffirm that marriage is between not just any two adults, but one man and one unrelated woman.”
In addition to taking aim at marriage equality, the report targets workplace protections for LGBTQ people. Four years ago, the Supreme Court handed down one of its most surprising decisions in support of LGBTQ rights, when it ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County that the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, meant that it was illegal to fire anyone because they were LGBTQ.
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Project 2025 says the next president must interpret the Bostock decision in such a way that workplace discrimination against LGBTQ people will still be possible. “The new Administration should restrict Bostock’s application of sex discrimination protections to sexual orientation and transgender status in the context of hiring and firing,” Project 2025 states on page 584. “The President should direct agencies to withdraw unlawful ‘notices’ and ‘guidances’ purporting to apply Bostock’s reasoning broadly outside hiring and firing…. The President should direct agencies to rescind regulations interpreting sex discrimination provisions as prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, sex characteristics, etc.” Uncloseted Media requested comment from four members of the Heritage Foundation press office regarding this provision but received no response.
The plan’s attempt to roll back so many LGBTQ rights shouldn’t come as a suprise, given the track record of the Heritage Foundation, which produced Project 2025. Since its inception in 1973, the Heritage Foundation has been a power player in Republican politics. In 1981, it produced its first transition document—known as the “Mandate for Leadership”—on the eve of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. The document was described as “a blueprint for grabbing the government by its frayed New Deal lapels and shaking out 48 years of liberal policy.” By the end of Reagan’s first year in office, almost half of its recommendations had been implemented. In 2016, the foundation saw even greater success, stating that after Trump’s first year in office, his administration “had implemented 64 percent of its policy recommendations.”
Through the years, the Heritage Foundation has advocated against marriage equality, LGBTQ people in the military, LGBTQ Boy Scout leaders, and bans on conversion therapy. But Via says that over the last 10 years, the organization has become even more extreme. “It has always been unfriendly to LGBTQ people, but not abusive. We should not conflate it with classic conservatism anymore when it is actually [the] far right,” she says.
Despite Trump’s attempts to separate himself from Project 2025, the ACLU’s Gillian Branstetter describes his positions on LGBTQ rights and the relevant elements of the project as “kind of inseparable. There really isn’t any daylight between what Trump is saying and what 2025 is saying,” Branstetter says. The strongest confirmation of this comes from Trump’s own words. In a campaign video released in 2023, he said. “The left-wing gender insanity being pushed on our children is an act of child abuse.” And at one of his rallies in 2024, he said he would get “transgender insanity the hell out of US armed forces,” meaning that he would reimpose his ban on military service by transgender people.
Additionally, Trump has said he would “ask Congress to pass a law stating that the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female and they are assigned at birth.” He would celebrate rather than erase “the things that make men and women unique” and revoke “Joe Biden’s school policies on so-called gender-affirming care, a process that includes giving kids puberty blockers, mutating their physical appearance and ultimately performing surgery.”
According to HHS, “for transgender and nonbinary children and adolescents, early gender-affirming care is crucial to overall health and well-being as it allows [them] to focus on social transitions and can increase their confidence.” Via says that regardless of who becomes president in November, the ideology baked into Project 2025 will move forward. “Who is president makes a difference. But in terms of Project 2025 and all these organizations behind it, they’re moving no matter what,” she says, adding that they have the ears of many courts and state legislatures across the US.
“These groups, the people behind these groups, have been dedicated to the mission, overturning Roe, eliminating gay marriage and disavowing the LGBTQ community and women. They are not going to stop. They might change tactics, but they will not take their eye off the ball.”
Can we count on you?
In the coming election, the fate of our democracy and fundamental civil rights are on the ballot. The conservative architects of Project 2025 are scheming to institutionalize Donald Trump’s authoritarian vision across all levels of government if he should win.
We’ve already seen events that fill us with both dread and cautious optimism—throughout it all, The Nation has been a bulwark against misinformation and an advocate for bold, principled perspectives. Our dedicated writers have sat down with Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders for interviews, unpacked the shallow right-wing populist appeals of J.D. Vance, and debated the pathway for a Democratic victory in November.
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The Editors of The Nation
Charles Kaiser
Charles Kaiser is the author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America. He has been media editor for Newsweek, a member of the metro staff of The New York Times, and a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, where he covered the press and book publishing.
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