Project 2025, the controversial policy playbook written by former President Donald Trump administration officials, could usher in an intense rollback of LGBTQ+ rights if Republicans win the Nov. 5 election, leaders from across the country warned during a virtual panel.
The 900-page document published by the conservative Heritage Foundation proposes major changes to the U.S. government should Trump win the upcoming election. Although Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, the playbook mentions him more than 300 times and builds on the policies enacted during his 2017-2021 term.
Nearly a dozen LGBTQ+ elected officials, activists and other community leaders broke down Project 2025 during a virtual panel Oct. 23 presented by News is Out, a collaborative of six legacy LGBTQ+ news outlets (including Windy City Times) from across the country. A recording of the discussion can be viewed here.
Project 2025’s implications on LGBTQ+ people include everything from a rollback of nondiscrimination policies and inclusive language at the federal level to broader issues like abortion access, education, immigration rights and climate change.
“Project 2025 is what you see from a political party that has lost its mooring,” said Chasten Buttigieg, husband of U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. “[The Republican Party] has no idea what it is, and is going to focus on hatred and division and scare tactics in an effort to win over people.”
Among those vilified by Project 2025 and the Trump campaign has been the transgender community, with the playbook stating that “children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their schools.”
Additionally, the Trump campaign has spent millions of dollars on anti-trans advertisements running during professional and college football games and in swing states across the country.
“We’ve already seen in Trump’s book that trans people are disposable,” said Precious Brady-Davis, commissioner for the Cook County Metropolitan Water Reclamation District and a longtime trans activist. “We witnessed first-hand Donald Trump saying when he was president that trans people cannot serve in the military. And we have seen trans people being the butt of the joke in this campaign, the sacrificial lamb [or] red meat to the base.”
Project 2025 also sets the stage for a second Trump administration to go over nondiscrimination policies at the federal level, said Kevin Jennings, CEO of Lambda Legal. Without the Equality Act, there is no federal law that guarantees nondiscrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation, so LGBTQ+ people rely on various federal regulations to ban such discrimination.
“Let me give you a very specific example, [which is] about 40% of all kids in foster care are LGBTQ+,” Jenning said. “Thanks to federal regulations, they cannot be discriminated against and they must be protected from harm based on gender identity and sexual orientation.”
But should those regulations be rolled back, it would be “open season” on LGBTQ+ youth in foster care, Jennings said.
“If Project 2025 is enacted, the nondiscrimination regulations go away […] and all of a sudden LGBTQ+ foster kids, of which there are 150,000, may be finding themselves placed in homes where people want to pray the gay out of them or control their gender expression, and there’s no escape.”
Such scenarios could play out in various departments across the federal government, Jennings said.
All LGBTQ+ youth will be affected by Project 2025’s education policies, said Jennings, a former history teacher who founded the first school-based gay-straight alliance in the country.
Project 2025 proposes closing the federal Department of Education, which would return control of schools to the local level, allowing for conservative jurisdictions to strip civil rights protections from students based on gender identity and sexual orientation, as well as sex, ability, status and race, Jennings said. It would also mean that poorer communities would have less funding for their schools.
“So Project 2025 is a real danger and could make our already very unequal system of education even more unequal,” Jennings said.
Texas State Rep. Julie Johnson, who is running for the U.S. House of Representatives, warned of Project 2025’s implications on abortion access and reproductive rights.
Texas was the first state to pass a “very oppressive” abortion ban after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, “and that’s had devastating consequences,” Johnson said.
But Project 2025 aims to make such bans even more strict, removing more peoples’ access to birth control and abortion care, Johnson said.
“That also translates over into LGBTQ+ healthcare, especially with respect to trans healthcare,” Johnson said. “They want to prohibit any kind of access to healthcare for the trans community, and also just LGBTQ+ healthcare all around. They’re trying to make it very hard for us to be us.”
Other speakers during the panel included Pennsylvania State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta; activist Charlotte Clymer; Janelle Perez, executive director of LPAC; Allen Morris, policy director of the National LGBTQ Task Force Action Fund; and political consultant Leah Israel. The discussion was moderated by Dana Piccoli, managing director of News is Out, and Christopher Kane, White House correspondent and senior politics writer for the Washington Blade.
Most of the speakers warned that Project 2025 would be just the beginning and set the stage for an even greater rollback of LGBTQ+ and other rights across the country.
“Throughout history, and especially during the period of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, whatever the far right and the bulk of the Republican Party has stated they want to do in terms of policy against LGBTQ+ people—in secret, they want to go to the right of that,” Clymer said.