Project 2025 Is Coming After LGBTQ Americans

Further down in the document, the project calls for renaming the Department of Health and Human Services “the Department of Life.” On page 451, it diminishes LGBTQ families: “Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society. Unfortunately, family policies and programs under President Biden’s HHS are fraught with agenda items focusing on ‘LGBTQ+ equity’.… These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.” It also states that “the male–female dyad is essential to human nature” and “every child has a right to a mother and father.”

“Project 2025 is driven by a far-right desire to turn America back to the 1920s, or even further back,” says Bitecofe. “It’s quite clear the goal is a religious-based biblical argument of morality,” targeted against trans rights, the LGBTQ community, marriage equality, and the reproductive control of women.

While Project 2025 does not explicitly call for the end of marriage equality, Gillian Branstetter of the ACLU’s LGBTQ and HIV Project, says it makes a lot of indirect arguments “for treating same sex marriages as second-class marriages.” For example, the chapter on the US Department of Health and Human Services instructs the next president to protect faith-based grant recipients from religious liberty violations and to maintain a biblically based definition of marriage and family. It also states that Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education grants “should be available to faith-based recipients who reaffirm that marriage is between not just any two adults, but one man and one unrelated woman.”

In addition to taking aim at marriage equality, the report targets workplace protections for LGBTQ people. Four years ago, the Supreme Court handed down one of its most surprising decisions in support of LGBTQ rights, when it ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County that the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, meant that it was illegal to fire anyone because they were LGBTQ.

Project 2025 says the next president must interpret the Bostock decision in such a way that workplace discrimination against LGBTQ people will still be possible. “The new Administration should restrict Bostock’s application of sex discrimination protections to sexual orientation and transgender status in the context of hiring and firing,” Project 2025 states on page 584. “The President should direct agencies to withdraw unlawful ‘notices’ and ‘guidances’ purporting to apply Bostock’s reasoning broadly outside hiring and firing…. The President should direct agencies to rescind regulations interpreting sex discrimination provisions as prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, sex characteristics, etc.” Uncloseted Media requested comment from four members of the Heritage Foundation press office regarding this provision but received no response.

The plan’s attempt to roll back so many LGBTQ rights shouldn’t come as a suprise, given the track record of the Heritage Foundation, which produced Project 2025. Since its inception in 1973, the Heritage Foundation has been a power player in Republican politics. In 1981, it produced its first transition document—known as the “Mandate for Leadership”—on the eve of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. The document was described as “a blueprint for grabbing the government by its frayed New Deal lapels and shaking out 48 years of liberal policy.” By the end of Reagan’s first year in office, almost half of its recommendations had been implemented. In 2016, the foundation saw even greater success, stating that after Trump’s first year in office, his administration “had implemented 64 percent of its policy recommendations.”

Through the years, the Heritage Foundation has advocated against marriage equality, LGBTQ people in the military, LGBTQ Boy Scout leaders, and bans on conversion therapy. But Via says that over the last 10 years, the organization has become even more extreme. “It has always been unfriendly to LGBTQ people, but not abusive. We should not conflate it with classic conservatism anymore when it is actually [the] far right,” she says.

Despite Trump’s attempts to separate himself from Project 2025, the ACLU’s Gillian Branstetter describes his positions on LGBTQ rights and the relevant elements of the project as “kind of inseparable. There really isn’t any daylight between what Trump is saying and what 2025 is saying,” Branstetter says. The strongest confirmation of this comes from Trump’s own words. In a campaign video released in 2023, he said. “The left-wing gender insanity being pushed on our children is an act of child abuse.” And at one of his rallies in 2024, he said he would get “transgender insanity the hell out of US armed forces,” meaning that he would reimpose his ban on military service by transgender people.

Additionally, Trump has said he would “ask Congress to pass a law stating that the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female and they are assigned at birth.” He would celebrate rather than erase “the things that make men and women unique” and revoke “Joe Biden’s school policies on so-called gender-affirming care, a process that includes giving kids puberty blockers, mutating their physical appearance and ultimately performing surgery.”

According to HHS, “for transgender and nonbinary children and adolescents, early gender-affirming care is crucial to overall health and well-being as it allows [them] to focus on social transitions and can increase their confidence.” Via says that regardless of who becomes president in November, the ideology baked into Project 2025 will move forward. “Who is president makes a difference. But in terms of Project 2025 and all these organizations behind it, they’re moving no matter what,” she says, adding that they have the ears of many courts and state legislatures across the US.

“These groups, the people behind these groups, have been dedicated to the mission, overturning Roe, eliminating gay marriage and disavowing the LGBTQ community and women. They are not going to stop. They might change tactics, but they will not take their eye off the ball.”