I was recently having a conversation with a member of my family and was surprised when the question was posed, “Why should you specifically be scared of the future?” I guess I had thought all of my conversations with various people had gotten the point across as to why the results of this election did have a direct impact on me as a married gay man. With all the news that was floating around in the months before this election was decided, what rock did one have to be under to have missed that intel?
So, on my day off in recognition of Veteran’s Day, I chose to do my research and come up with an easy-to-read listing of all the options this presidency can impact me directly. Then, I’m going to cover the ways it can hurt the community that I defend and support.
I find it terribly hard to believe that anyone has missed all the media on Project 2025, a 900-page document outlining what was believed to be the presidential agenda created by The Heritage Foundation, with over 100 partner organizations that included former administration and campaign officials from Trump’s prior time in office. In this document are key tenets as to what the plan is moving forward to affect me and my demographic overall.
Directly threatens LGBTQ+ Marriage and Families:
Under the banner of “restoring the family,” Project 2025 aims to gut protections for the LGBTQ+ community, whose marriage and family rights are seen as opposed to the Project’s religious tenets. The Project urges policymakers to elevate “family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code” in order to “restore the American family.” Current policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.” Among the Project’s false claims is that heterosexual, two-parent families are safer for children, which presents an open opportunity to attack LGBTQ+ marriage. Research prepared by the American Sociological Association concluded that “there is a clear consensus in the social science literature indicating that American children living within same-sex parent households fare, just as well as those children residing within different-sex parent households over a wide array of well-being measures.”
While nothing in the document explicitly calls for ending the right to same sex marriage, Gillian Branstetter, a Communications Strategist at the ACLU's LGBTQ & HIV Project, told The Nation that it does indirectly call “for treating same sex marriages as second-class marriages.” The document indirectly states support for a “biblically based” definition of family, and by gutting policies that protect LGBTQ people (like supporting adoption agencies that refuse to allow same-sex couples to adopt, or rescinding workplace protections based on sexual orientation), would significantly erode the rights of queer couples across the board.
Attacks LGBTQ+ Protection:
The plan also advocates for “deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” This could erase LGBTQ people from federal protections entirely, seemingly attempting to write them out of existence.
The plan calls for changes to Title VII, rolling back hiring and firing protections that were won in the landmark Bostock v. Clayton County case of 2020, which understood sex discrimination as including gender identity, and that LGBTQ+ people were protected from workplace discrimination and termination. Sex discrimination, according to the Project, would be restricted to a “biological binary meaning,” or simply male and female.
This coincides with some of Trump’s actions in his first term in office, which included the following:
Arguing that employers have the right to terminate employees on the basis of their sexual orientation.
Relaying to the SCOTUS that business owners can discriminate against the LGBTQ+.
Attempted to eliminate the inclusion of LGBTQ people in that national Census.
Implicitly Attacks the Transgender Community:
If all of this wasn’t bad enough, my friends in the transgender demographic will be harmed even more than I, which is incredibly painful to know.
The Project recommends cutting federal funding for gender-affirming care for both minors and adults, matching policy goals of both Trump and other right-wing political figures. Project 2025 seeks to revisit the Biden administration’s edict that transgender minors have a right to gender-affirming care. The plan describes a “social contagion” that leads to gender-affirming care for youth and calls for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to fund research exploring the “negative effects” of gender-affirming care, be it social or medical affirmation.
The plan takes aim at the free flow of sexual and reproductive health information, aiming to restrict governmental services that help educate people about their bodies and that promote policy aimed at doing so. The NIH would, under Project 2025, “fund studies into the short-term and long-term negative effects of cross-sex interventions, including ‘affirmation,’ puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries.” And beyond that, the plan advocates for federal services and offices to take an explicitly discriminatory view, ordering that organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health start taking anti-trans positions.
This, too, coincides with his previous term objectives, which were as follows:
Withdrawing protections for transgender students
Removing transgender members of the military.
Rescinding protections for transgender patients.
Protecting health care from helping transgender patients.
So, when members of the LGBTQ+ say they fear what the next four years have to hold for them, understand they DO have a reason to be afraid and there is NO excuse for anyone not to know that.
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