Project 2025 spells a dark future for queer rights

With Joe Biden dropping out of the 2025 race, Democrats’ are riding a wave of enthusiasm for Kamala Harris’ presidential bid. But even as there’s new energy in the race, the dark vision of Project 2025 is still a major threat to queer—and so many other—rights.

Project 2025 is one of a series of so-called “Mandates for Leadership” right wing organization The Heritage Foundation has put together for decades. It outlines the policies a new conservative president should adopt, and this particular edition lays out an emphatically Christian-nationalist future for America.

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Project 2025 seeks to dismantle all things conservatives typically characterize as liberal culture, from dismantling environmental agencies to gutting any policies it identifies as DEI-related. So it’s no surprise the mandate seeks to turn back the clock on LGBTQ+ rights, starting with redefining gender, sex and family life.

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While Project 2025 does not call for abolishing gay marriage outright, it does plan to redefine marriage along biblical lines and to privlege straight spouses over gay spouses. It stipulates restricting family-based grants “to faith-based recipients who reaffirm that marriage is between not just any two adults, but one man and one unrelated woman.” It also plans to strengthen protections for homophobic adoption agencies.

Project 2025 takes a much more hardline stance against the trans community, calling for “transgender ideology” to be made illegal. This includes removing words like sexual orientation, gender identity and most things to do with gender from all federal regulations, essentially denying the existence of trans people. The mandate also directs agencies to end federal funding for trans healthcare but start funding for studies on “the short-term and long-term negative effects” of it.

It takes particular aim at the Biden administration’s interpretation of “sex” in sex discrimination law, which includes sexual orientation and gender identity. Instead, it directs the incoming administration to “focus their enforcement of sex discrimination laws on the biological binary meaning of ‘sex.’” This would also undermine Title IX and greenlight an anti-LGBTQ+ agenda in schools.

Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, showing just how extreme and unpopular it is. “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he wrote on TruthSocial. “I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it.”

In 2022, Trump gave a speech at a Heritage Foundation gathering and referenced Project 2025, which was still being written at that time. “This is a great group,” he said, “and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do, and what your movement will do, when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”