Project 2025 and the Republican Party's Platform
Hello everyone. I hope you are all enjoying your summer. I am getting ready for an exciting weekend where I will be celebrating my father’s 75th birthday with a big party and my birthday where I turned [redacted] years old the day after.
Today I want to talk about Project 2025, which is billed as a Presidential transition document for Trump should he win. Though Trump has said that he is not behind Project 2025, many of his former advisors and people who would work in his administration are a part of it. There are many articles and briefs which have been written about this 900 page document, but what I want to focus on is on how it will impact LGBTQIA+ communities. While it is easy to think of this as something which is far in the future, two bills have recently passed senate which are based in Project 2025: Barring the Department of Defense to use money for gender affirming surgery and barring tricare, the military healthcare, from using funds to provide gender affirming care for minors.
To be honest, this has been difficult to write for two reasons. First, it is quite a long document which is divided by federal department. Second, things that might not be considered “anti-LGBTQIA+” on the surface could easily be used to hurt the queer community. That said, to do this analysis, I went through the whole document and searched for “gender” “sexual orientation” “DEI” “critical race” and “pornography”. You can find the whole document here, but below are the LGBTQIA+ specific issues (in no particular order, and not a comprehensive list) which I and others were able to identify:
In the forward, on page 1, they explain that the purpose of this document is to fight against, amongst other things, “the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading our school libraries.”
In the forward, they also equate transgender expression to pornography. While there is no issue with pornography, to equate transgender expression with pornography is a way to attack transgender individuals. Furthermore, later in the paper, Project 2025 comes out against pornography in several places. These attacks can also be used to attack transgender expression (along with other types of LGBTQIA+ expression). Indeed, by seeing all LGBTQIA+ content as indecent puts queer content at risk for censorship.
Under the Department of Education, many of the protections for LGBTQIA+ people under Title XI would be stripped.
They would call for the CDC to stop collection data on gender identity.
Below is how they would have the National Institute of Health (NIH) treat research on gender affirming care:
When discussing the Department of Health and Human Services, they say that “Rather, the Secretary [of Health and Human Services] should proudly state that men and women are biological realities that are crucial to the advancement of life sciences and medical care and that married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.”
Remove all of the following words from the USAID Website:
“gender,” “gender equality,” “gender equity,” “gender diverse individuals,” “gender aware,” “gender sensitive,” etc. It should also remove references to “abortion,” “reproductive health,” and “sexual and reproductive rights” and controversial sexual education materials.”
They want USAID to stop promoting what it considers “gender radicalism” across the world.
Banning transgender people from being able to serve in the military.
Under the Department of Justice, they plan to go after local governments who do not uphold discriminatory laws under this plan:
Reverse any policy in the Department of Veteran’s Affairs which “… are contrary to principles of conservative governance starting with abortion services and gender reassignment surgery”
As mentioned above, these are just the issues I either found or were reported. I am sure there are more issues within the document which will harm the queer community. I cannot emphasize how important it is to vote for the Democrats this year to avoid this awful attack not just on the LGBTQIA+ community but an attack on democracy in general. I hope you have found this information useful and hopefully we will find out more about Project 2025 over the course of the next few months. As I had mentioned last week, I will be posting a bit less frequently during the summer, so I look forward to talking to you all in two weeks!