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Trump’s Anti-Trans Attacks Are Straight out of the Project 2025 Playbook—and Doomed to Fail
Since day one of this presidency, the Trump administration has been doing its damnedest to make Project 2025’s anti-trans vision a reality. Donald Trump might have claimed to have nothing to do with Project 2025 on the campaign trail, but he’s been hurtling his way through its wish list ever since his return to the White House.
Just hours after being sworn into office, Trump signed a sweeping executive order that had Project 2025’s fingerprints all over it, promising a cross-government effort to promote discrimination against trans people—and facing sharp condemnation from gender justice and women’s advocacy groups. That was just his first move out of Project 2025’s playbook. Since then, he has launched an all-out attack on health care for trans people and threatened to take away federal money from their providers. He’s threatened to defund schools that support trans students and is trying to bully schools into banning trans girls from playing school sports with other girls. He’s tried to bar trans people from the military, deny trans people access to accurate passports, and purge any reference to trans people from government websites—just to give a few examples.
All this has been fueled by a campaign of disinformation that would make the architects of Project 2025 proud, from outlandish claims (no, Mr. President, the previous administration did not spend $8 million on “making mice transgender”) to downright dangerous lies. Assertions that, for example, supporting trans young people is “child abuse” or that trans health care is “mutilation”—terms lifted verbatim out of the Project 2025 playbook—aren’t just off-the-wall rhetoric: They put trans people, our loved ones, and anyone who stands up for our rights at risk.
So Trump has made the Project 2025 anti-trans agenda a centerpiece of his term so far, all while fulfilling its wish of attacking the federal workforce and tearing apart the government agencies that trans people rely on from the inside out. The Project 2025 team must be downright gleeful.
Or at least they would be, if our movement weren’t so hard at work to stop these policies. Advocates have filed lawsuit after lawsuit, and as a result judges have temporarily blocked many of these policies from going into effect. Our team at the National Women’s Law Center, for example, is seeking to join a lawsuit to challenge the rollback of critical Title IX protections against sex harassment in education. We’re fighting on all fronts—in the administration, in Congress, and in the courts—to help keep us safe.
Even still, Trump’s attacks are causing chaos. Health care providers and schools are struggling to understand the ever-fluctuating mess of anti-trans policies. Whether from fear or confusion, some have rushed to comply with the aims of those unlawful policies even when they didn’t need to. And trans people are feeling the impacts of having to navigate this uncertain, scary, enraging, exhausting time.
But the Trump administration will never achieve Project 2025’s ultimate goal—rooting out trans people from public life. This administration might think it’s above the law, but no matter what it claims, it can’t undo our legal rights. It can’t turn back the clock on the acceptance and visibility we’ve gained over the years. And it sure as hell can’t erase our existence. The trans community has faced the likes of Donald Trump and Project 2025 before—and we will do it again.
