The blueprint for a second Trump presidency, and If enacted, it would be a takeover of our government by the most conservative and radical wings of the country, threatening our rights, our freedoms, and our democracy. For LGBTQ+ people, the agenda would roll back the gains we’ve made toward full equality in nearly every area of our lives – from marriage, to health care, to education, and the workplace.

Washington, D.C. The Trump-Vance Project 2025 would take a wrecking ball to our rights, freedoms, democracy, and future. LGBTQ+ people are particular targets of this government takeover, as groups that have brought anti-LGBTQ+ cases in court and spread anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in state capitals across the nation now want to give a Trump-Vance administration new and unchecked powers to take us backwards – this time with radical members sitting on the United States Supreme Court.

What is Project 2025?

The threat that Project 2025 poses to America is especially sinister for LGBTQ+ people and our rights.

The ‘Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,’ more commonly known as “Project 2025,” is a dangerous, 922-page Trump-Vance agenda written by Donald Trump’s loyalists that would dismantle essential policies protecting civil rights, LGBTQ+ rights, health care access, voting rights, and the environment.

It is the blueprint for a second Trump presidency, and If enacted, it would be a takeover of our government by the most conservative and radical wings of the country, threatening our rights, our freedoms, and our democracy.

For LGBTQ+ people, the agenda would roll back the gains we’ve made toward full equality in nearly every area of our lives – from marriage, to health care, to education, and the workplace.

Led by two former Trump administration officials Paul Dans and Spencer Chretien, Project 2025 is spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation and includes an advisory board consisting of conservative and extremist hate groups, including anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups Alliance Defending Freedom, American Family Association, Family Research Council, and Moms for Liberty.

Authors and contributors to the plans include notable former Trump administration officials including Jonathan Berry, Ben Carson, Ken Cuccinelli, Rick Dearborn, Chris Miller, Roger Severino, and John Cementer.

Below is a summary of the biggest threats to the LGBTQ+ community included in the Trump-Vance Project 2025. Here’s what you need to know and how it will impact you and those around you, and what you can do to help stop this from becoming our reality.

Marriage Equality

• Project 2025 undermines marriage equality by trying to privilege different-sex marriage in defiance of Obergefell v. Hodges, making same-sex marriages inherently unequal by doing so. They’d like to make it more difficult for LGBTQ+ people to adopt children, access fertility services, and create families (see Adoption/Foster Care).
• They’d allow businesses to deny services to same-sex couples or customers they perceive to be LGBTQ+ (see Civil Rights).
• And it advocates for the promotion of nuclear families led by different-sex parents who are biologically related to their children. This effectively excludes step-parents, divorced parents, parents who have relied on certain fertility services, grandparents parenting grandchildren, and single parents as well as families led by same-sex couples or LGBTQ+ people.

Civil Rights and Discrimination in the Workplace

Project 2025 would remove non-discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people from every federal regulation, including health care and education nondiscrimination requirements.

Project 2025 would permit religious employees to refuse to work with LGBTQ+ colleagues and to refuse to serve LGBTQ+ customers and clients.

Project 2025 directs federal agencies to deprioritize or drop investigations into claims of discrimination by LGBTQ+ employees,

Project 2025 would allow religious employers to violate existing civil rights laws.

Project 2025 restricts implementation of the Supreme Court’s Bostock decision – allowing for harassment, demotions, unequal pay, and unequal benefits for LGBTQ+ employees – and directs the federal government to rescind regulations protecting LGBTQ+ people from discrimination.

Project 2025 would eliminate federal non-discrimination requirements protecting LGBTQ+ people in federal civil service and federal contracts, and would eliminate the office in charge of enforcement of them, because of what it calls a “DEI revolution.”

Adoption/Foster Care

Project 2025 would make it harder for LGBTQ+ people to adopt children and create families. It would reverse current policy and allow federally funded adoption and foster care providers to refuse to work with same-sex couples or LGBTQ+ people, even though they’re providing services funded by taxpayers. In fact, LGBTQ+ people are among the people most likely to be interested in foster care or adoption, and this artificially limits the number of potential families available to children in need of homes.

Education and LGBTQ+ Students

Project 2025 would allow – even encourage – discrimination against LGBTQ+ students in school. It does this by rescinding LGBTQ+ Title IX protections from discrimination in education for LGBTQ+ students and educators, and dropping all ongoing investigations.

Title IX is a pivotal civil rights law that ensures that all children have equal opportunity to an education – one of the most profound civil rights that children have. Federal courts have long held that LGBTQ+ students (and educators) should not be denied that opportunity because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Project 2025 proposes adopting a federal “Don’t Say Trans” law or policy – meaning that districts and educators who recognize and respect a student’s gender identity by, for example, using their name and pronouns, would be denied federal education funding.

Project 2025 would imprison teachers or school librarians who allow students access to books, movies, and other materials on LGBTQ+ people, classifying them as sex offenders by making the false claim that any depiction of LGBTQ+ people is inherently pornography.

Project 2025 would allow schools K-12 to refuse free breakfast and lunch services to LGBTQ+ students from low-income families.

Project 2025 would REQUIRE teachers to use a student’s name and pronouns based on birth certificates (not on gender identity) unless they have written permission from parents.

While that would have a particular impact on transgender students, it would impact any child who wants to be called by a nickname or middle name – a teacher couldn’t call Daniel “Dan”, “Danny” or any other nickname that Daniel may prefer. This anti-transgender agenda tramples over many of our social norms.

Health Care (Including Reproductive Health Care)

Project 2025 would withdraw financial support for medically necessary health care for transgender Americans through multiple funding streams, impacting HIV/AIDS programs, public health research, health benefits for service members and their families, and more.

Project 2025 pushes states to end Medicaid and Medicare coverage of gender-affirming surgeries for all trans people.

Project 2025 would prohibit federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) from conducting research or collecting data on transgender people unless that research supports the unsubstantiated, discriminatory idea that being transgender is false.

Project 2025 would repeal important protections for LGBTQ+ people against discrimination by health care providers. Unfortunately, discrimination in health care is an extremely common experience for transgender people across the country.

Project 2025 would revoke the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, one of the most important medications to treat miscarriages and provide abortions. While decrying the FDA’s scientific review of this medication as “political,” Trump appointee Roger Severino uses Project 2025 to again elevate the will of politicians over the expertise of scientists and doctors.

Military and Veterans

• Project 2025 would restore the Trump administration’s discriminatory ban on transgender people serving in the military and would prevent people who are HIV positive from serving as well.
• Project 2025 would prevent veterans’ health coverage from covering gendering affirming surgeries or abortion care.

Foreign Affairs

• Project 2025 ends support for LGBTQ+ rights abroad.
• Project 2025 prevents embassies from doing work on pro-equality projects or even flying the Pride flag.

Citations on all information available from the Human Rights Campaign here: https://dismantleproject2025.com/

Video: Human Rights Campaign Takes on Trump’s Project 2025 (Aug. 24, 2024)