How Project 2025 will roll back social progress on LGBTQ+ issues
As the final stretch of election season gets underway, we’ll be unpacking one of the more prominent storylines from the 2024 presidential race: Project 2025.
Despite being supposedly denounced by former President Donald Trump, the Project 2025 manifesto was crafted by a number of allies who were key to his first term. Over the next three weeks, The Lede will be analyzing how this comprehensive guidebook to a possible Trump presidency will impact key aspects of American life, from reproductive rights and labor to housing and immigration policy.
Today, we will be exploring how Project 2025 seeks to weaponize the federal government against the broader LGBTQ+ community.
The 920-page document makes its standing on the issue quite clear from the very beginning.
On page four, Project 2025 calls for the removal of the terms “sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI), diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive… 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.”
That’s just what’s in the forward. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will be asked to encourage “ marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families” over President Joe Biden's administrative supposed preferences, which it claims are “fraught with agenda items focusing on ‘LGBTQ+ equity.’”
It also calls on the Department of Defense (DOD) to “reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military” and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to protect the supposed constitutional rights of individuals, businesses and institutions that would discriminate against LGBTQ+ people. Additionally, the DOJ would no longer intervene when states attempt to limit access to gender-affirming care for transgender people.
Trans rights in particular are held with particular contempt in Project 2025, which seeks to reverse the so-called “toxic normalization of transgenderism.” Peppered throughout the manifesto is the lamentation of “transgender ideology,” which Project 2025 believes is a social contagion and not a legitimate civil rights category.
This perspective is also linked to Project 2025’s position on pornography, which it calls for a total ban on. The most damning aspect of modern pornography, the forward reads, is “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children.”
While this connection may be confusing to most, it’s actually a blatant strategy to criminalize those within the broader transgender community.
“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,” Wendy Via, president and co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Uncloseted Media in a recent interview.
“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.”
That is what appears to be at the heart of Project 2025’s anti-LGBTQ+ efforts: to roll back the past 15 years of civil rights that were fought for by queer activists and implement new stigmas around gender and sexual identity.
By Zach Shaw
During an Oct. 18 appearance on Newsmax, Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI) criticized Vice President Kamala Harris for campaigning with “out-of-state billionaire” Mark Cuban — even as former President Donald Trump embraced billionaire Elon Musk for doing the same.
Responding to a question about Cuban campaigning with Harris in La Crosse, Wis. the previous day, the Wisconsin representative said it was laughable that the Harris campaign would bring in “an out of state billionaire” to campaign in Wisconsin.
“It’s a strange technique to bring in an out-of-state billionaire reading from an iPhone at a rally,” Steil said.
The comment is one of immense irony, given that Steil’s preferred nominee, Donald Trump, is campaigning with Elon Musk, a Texas-based billionaire. Musk has campaigned for Trump three times in Pennsylvania in the past month through his America PAC, with the first one occurring before Steil made those comments. Trump has praised Musk’s out-of-state barnstorming, saying, “We owe Elon a lot.” And Trump, according to his own words, is also a billionaire based in Florida.
Unlike Cuban, however, Trump has been convicted on over 30+ counts of fraud for his business dealings in New York, while also facing severe legal troubles from his role in the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol and his attempts to overturn election results in Georgia. Cuban also isn’t paying would-be voters $1 million to sign petitions and vote for Trump, which is considered by many legal experts to be wildly against the law.