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For the architects of Project 2025, few things are more terrifying than LGBTQI+ people. They’re scared of our existence, of our joy, of a world where we determine how we live our lives. And on page after page, they weaponize that fear to try to demonize, dehumanize, and destroy LGBTQI+ people.
Right out of the gate, Project 2025 bemoans “transgender ideology”—a phrase that suggests that, as trans people, we’re not actual humans as much as embodiments of malignant propaganda. For Project 2025’s authors, the “ideology” of trans existence and LGBTQI+ equality has seeped into every crevice of the federal government, and it’s their mission to eradicate it.
For starters, Project 2025 calls for removing the terms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” This erasure isn’t symbolic—it’s part of a systematic effort to strip LGBTQI+ people of all legal protection from persecution, discrimination, and violence. Here are just a few examples of how Project 2025’s authors say they’d do it:
- They’d dismantle the Affordable Care Act’s protections against sex discrimination in health care.
- They’d reverse the 2024 Title IX rule, depriving LGBTQI+ students—and in fact all students, especially women and girls—of nondiscrimination protections in K–12 schools, colleges, and universities that get federal funding.
- They would gut LGBTQI+ workplace discrimination protections under Title VII, limiting them just to hiring and firing decisions.
They don’t stop there. They’d create draconian restrictions on gender-affirming care, and they cast supportive parents and health providers as engaging in “mutilation” and “child abuse.” They call for programs that promote “families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children” and treat other families as threats to a “healthy society.” They’d make it easier for LGBTQI+ people to be turned away or discriminated against by anyone with personal objection to our existence, including by weaponizing and contorting religious refusals and “free speech” rights.
Project 2025’s authors also paint supportive schools as full-on harbingers of moral collapse, infested with the “toxic normalization of transgenderism.” Their efforts to rid schools of this so-called toxicity are downright horrifying. Project 2025 calls for outlawing pornography—and equates that with materials that acknowledge the existence of LGBTQI+ people. Pornography, they say, is “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children.” It’s hard to escape the implications of what this means: If affirming LGBTQI+ people = pornography and pornography must be banned, that sounds an awful lot like criminalizing respect for our existence. They take it one step further: They say that people who make this material available should be imprisoned, and teachers and libraries who share it should be forced to register as sex offenders.
Let’s be clear: Criminalizing people like teachers and librarians is not about protecting kids. It’s about vilifying LGBTQI+ youth and turning them into bogeymen in a manufactured culture war. It’s about isolating them by threatening anyone who supports them.
But here’s the thing. Project 2025 might try to demonize us and erase our existence—but they won’t succeed. It might sound cliché, but our joy is stronger than their hate. Our strength as a community has helped us face the kind of cruel rhetoric we see in Project 2025, and it’s helped us defeat the sorts of policies that it pushes. That strength is just one of the many tools we have for fighting back against Project 2025—and for our dignity and humanity.
