Project 2025 Wrapped: Your Year in Attacks on the Health of Women and LGBTQIA+ People
We have officially entered my favorite season—no, not pumpkin-spice-everything season, or sweater weather season—but Spotify Wrapped season. A time when our Instagram feeds are flooded with screenshots boasting our unique music tastes and fandom inclinations (yes, Taylor Swift is my top artist…again).
But as we approach the end of the year, there is another kind of “Wrapped” I am keeping a close eye on: Project 2025, the 900-plus–page extremist handbook that lays out terrifying policies intended to undermine people’s lives and health, especially for women and LGBTQIA+ people.
So, welcome to “Project 2025 Wrapped: Health Harms Edition”—a recap of just some of the dangerous health-related actions the Trump administration has taken to move Project 2025 from playbook to reality.
The Trump Administration’s Favorite Genre? Harming the Lives and Well-Being of Women, Girls, and LGBTQIA+ People
When President Trump signed his so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” into law, he put several Project 2025 proposals into motion, including slashing Medicaid and food assistance programs that tens of millions of people rely on. These cuts will worsen already stark health inequities, especially for women of color and LGBTQIA+ people, many of whom already struggle to access affordable, quality health care and other resources.
At the same time, the administration has made attacking transgender, intersex, and nonbinary people and their access to necessary health care a central part of its playlist.
Under Trump’s direction, the Department of Health and Human Services will soon propose regulations that—if finalized—would significantly restrict access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth. And the administration’s relentless efforts to impose a narrow and rigid gender binary are already harming all people. The Department of Veterans Affairs, for example, recently announced it will no longer presumptively cover benefits for breast cancer in men as being connected with their military service—a deeply concerning policy rooted in Trump’s executive order that encouraged discrimination against transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people.
The Trump Administration’s Most Streamed Track: Gutting Access to Reproductive and Sexual Health Services
One track the Trump administration keeps on repeat is its assault on reproductive health and bodily autonomy. The administration has relentlessly tried to make it harder for people to stay safe and healthy before, during, and after pregnancy, including:
- Eroding access to reproductive and sexual health services (like breast and cervical cancer screenings), including through defunding Planned Parenthood health centers; and
The administration’s hostility toward reproductive rights and people’s access to critical health care clearly demonstrates that its agenda isn’t about protecting women and families, it’s about controlling them.
The Trump Administration’s Top Skipped Track: Meaningfully Improving Access to Fertility Care
Despite President Trump’s bizarre claim to be the “fertilization president” (ew??), his administration has unsurprisingly fallen short of promises to require insurance companies to cover in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment. The administration’s most recent announcement on fertility care advances a narrow and dated view of family and particularly leaves behind the diverse people and families who need IVF—including single people, LGBTQIA+ people, and Black women—and who are often excluded from conversations about fertility and face additional systemic barriers to accessing care.
In addition to failing to expand meaningful and comprehensive access to fertility care, Trump’s proposed IVF policy includes language that subtly nods to an anti-science, Heritage Foundation–backed ideology known as “Restorative Reproductive Medicine” (RRM). This unproven approach blames and stigmatizes women for infertility, delays access to evidence-based treatment, and mirrors the Project 2025-endorsed push for “pronatalism”—which, spoiler alert, is just white Christian nationalism in disguise.
Here’s a Daylist We’d Recommend for the Trump Administration: “chaotic disinformation afternoon”
RRM is just one example of the Trump administration’s broader campaign to tune out facts and undermine people’s access to unbiased information when it comes to their health and well-being.
The administration has laid off federal staff overseeing adolescent sexual and reproductive health programs; attacked diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; weakened the Department of Education; and promoted fear and censorship in classrooms.
These attacks on public education and inclusive sex education will harm girls of color and LGBTQIA+ youth most, depriving them of tools and information necessary to make informed decisions about their lives, bodies, relationships, and sexual and reproductive health.
The administration has uplifted junk-science and misinformation about medication abortion, directing the FDA to undertake a review of its regulations on mifepristone, a medication used in nearly two-thirds of abortions across the country. Unsurprisingly, this represents the administration taking steps to complete the anti-abortion policy agenda laid out in Project 2025.
The administration has also pushed dangerous falsehoods about birth control—wrongly claiming that contraceptives like IUDs and birth control pills cause abortion. And it has spread misinformation linking Tylenol and COVID-19 vaccines to autism. These reckless claims are driven by anti-disability bias and conflict with mainstream medical consensus and clinical guidance, endangering pregnant people and their infants.
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Believe it or not, this barely scratches the surface of the harms that Project 2025 envisions—and that the Trump administration is already putting into practice. Stay tuned for our release of a comprehensive report outlining all the ways the administration has attacked gender justice over the past year. And unlike your Spotify Wrapped, this recap isn’t something to brag about.
