A Second Trump Term Would Be Hell for LGBTQ People
The former president's allies laid out their plan in "Project 2025."
Hello, all. Parker here.
Like a lot of LGBTQ people, I’ve been a bit worried about what, exactly, a second Trump administration would mean for my basic rights and ability to live my life in peace. And while the Biden administration has let me down in a number of ways, the playbook being drawn up for a future Trump administration, called Project 2025, is outright terrifying for LGBTQ people.
The very first page of the 920-page Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” bemoans the “toxic normalization of transgenderism,” and a few pages later includes the phrase, “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology” that “has no claim to First Amendment protections.” For one, being transgender is not an “ideology,” and information about trans people's existence is not pornography. Still, the Project 2025 document uses this definition before calling for the imprisonment of people who “produce and distribute” this "pornography.”
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The document outlines ways the government can effectively ignore the Supreme Court’s landmark Bostock v. Clayton County ruling, which found that employers can’t discriminate against someone “simply for being homosexual or transgender.” In another portion, it explains how Trump could essentially legalize medical discrimination against LGBTQ people. The list goes on and on.
What advocacy groups are saying:
“This group has worked to strip freedoms from all Americans including when and how to start a family, essential healthcare, who we can marry, and what books other people and our children can read,” said GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis in a statement to TPA.
"This document spells out exactly how they’ll continue to remove freedoms to benefit the white, wealthy and powerful should extremists regain federal power. To borrow from Maya Angelou, they are showing us who they are, and every American should believe they are serious. This is a nightmare scenario that can’t be enacted if everyone who cares about their freedom and future turns out to vote."
Human Rights Campaign National Press Secretary Brandon Wolf warns that Project 2025 would empower Republicans to “bulldoze civil liberties.”
“Project 2025 is the right wing's blueprint to weaponize the Executive Branch against personal freedoms in this country. Armed with this agenda, a conservative president could use agency rule-making processes and executive orders to limit the scope of existing regulations, impede enforcement of nondiscrimination protections, and circumvent the overwhelming number of Americans who support LGBTQ+ equality,” he says.
“States like Florida and Texas, whose governors have used state agencies to terrorize small businesses, educators, parents, and LGBTQ+ people broadly, serve as stark warnings about the threat posed by extremists who pervert executive power to bulldoze civil liberties. The Heritage Foundation and its allies have made clear their plans to hijack the levers of government, wielding authoritarian power from the White House, to assault equality and freedom in America.”
What the ACLU is saying:
I had a chance to chat with Joshua Block, an attorney with the ACLU’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender & HIV Projects about what Project 2025 and a second Trump administration would mean for LGBTQ people.
“A lot of this stuff was laid out in the last few years of the first Trump administration,” Block tells me. “They laid this out through last-minute interpretive memos or briefs to court,” pointing to the Trump administration’s efforts to use Title IX to discriminate against transgender students and the effort to alter Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act to allow for discrimination against trans people.
“They wrote the rules based on the assumption that Bostock would have come out the other way,” he continues. “Those rules were challenged, were enjoined, and then those lawsuits were settled when Biden came into office. That served as the last gasp of the Trump Administration’s [efforts to legalize anti-LGBTQ discrimination]. It was stopped by the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock and the change in administration.”
Want to know what a second Trump term would look like? Look to Texas and “shadow president” Ken Paxton.
“Since then, even though the Biden administration has reversed those policies, we've seen [Texas Attorney General] Ken Paxton being a shadow president and getting those policies enjoined from conservative courts, often adopting the same types of interpretations that were contained in old Trump memos,” Block says.
Conservative judges such as Matthew Kacsmaryk have been busily pushing the Project 2025 agenda all along, keeping the Biden Administration from advancing LGBTQ policies beyond the simple reversal of Trump’s agenda. As Block tells me, “Every good thing that comes out of the administration’s mouth gets enjoined by the Fifth Circuit,” despite being inconsistent with the statutes. This has kept a lot of policy affecting LGBTQ people up in the air.
“And so what is the Trump administration going to do? They're going to try to redo all of the policies that they tried at the end of the last administration,” Block continues. “There'll be lawsuits against those policies in courts, the same courts that had enjoined the old ones, and we'll see what the the Supreme Court ultimately says there.”
“There's a whole lot of horrible things that happened under the old Trump administration, and the Supreme Court not only failed to stop them, but they also lifted injunctions that had stopped them. So if you think about the ban on trans service members. The initial version was enjoined, and then they had basically you know, sort of a ‘trans ban 2.0.’ That was enjoined too, but the Supreme Court lifted those injunctions. I think they'll do whatever the Supreme Court will let them get away with.”
Block also tells me that part of the strategy will likely be for a second Trump Administration and its allies to go after cities and states with strong legal protections against LGBTQ discrimination and make the argument that those policies are preempted by federal law, which will be interpreted through the administration and conservative courts as being anti-LGBTQ. The result of this will be a country without “safe” states for LGBTQ people.
Additional reading on Project 2025 and its effect on LGBTQ people:
“Conservatives Plan to Ban Abortion and Cut LGBT Rights Starting Next January” by Melissa Gira Grant (The New Republic, Feb. 8, 2024)
These 900 pages lay out a Christian nationalist vision of the United States, one in which married heterosexuality is the only valid form of sexual expression and identity; all pregnancies would be carried to term, even if that requires coercion or death; and transgender and gender-nonconforming people do not exist.
“Republicans Advocate Transphobic, Authoritarian ‘Project 2025’’ Even After Election Failures” by Christopher Wiggins (The Advocate, Nov. 11, 2023)
As the country looks ahead to the 2024 presidential election, a conservative initiative known as Project 2025, which includes transphobic policies, is facing controversy over its overtly anti-LGBTQ+ aspects.
Championed on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast and closely tied to former President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, the initiative is a stark embodiment of the retribution Trump has promised against his foes who have abandoned the MAGA movement.
“Bannon’s ‘War Room’ is the media home of Project 2025 and Trump’s retribution plans” by John Knefel (Media Matters for America, Nov. 9, 2023)
Bannon’s show, War Room, is a hub of election denialism, anti-immigrant bigotry, and promises to carry out retribution against insufficiently loyal Republicans — all hallmarks of former President Donald Trump’s first term in office and his campaign to retake the White House. Although Bannon has at times found himself isolated from Trump, he is once again “one of Trump’s most important advisers,” according to ABC News’ Jonathan Karl.
As a leading advocate for the MAGA wing of the conservative movement, Bannon has been a champion of Project 2025, organized by the increasingly far-right think tank The Heritage Foundation. The initiative has brought together more than 80 groups to provide hard-right personnel and white paper proposals for Trump — or another Republican administration — should he win next November.
That’s it for me today. Thanks for reading.
Parker
I appreciate both you calling out the anti-trans rhetoric in Project 2025, as well as highlighting other folks content discussing it more in depth.
I think their manifesto, that’s what I’m calling it anyways, is incredibly alarming and from what I can tell the average person doesn’t even know it exists.
Absolutely horrifying. People need to be talking about this, it needs to be common knowledge what they’re trying to do
There’s no way the country wants to go in this direction