#Project 2025 Anti-Trans Discrimination

[justsayyesmiss]

TRANS RIGHTS

PAGE ONE

Panel 1

A white woman with a white tank top and pink hair leans into frame, her elbow over the lower panel border, waving to the reader.

LUCY:

Hi. I’m Lucy. That’s not my real name, and this isn’t what I look like. But that’s fine, because while this is my story…

LUCY:

It’s one that thousands of other trans people have lived through, at least a little bit. It’s our story too.

Panel 2

A map of the United States. States colored in red are those with anti-trans laws on the books. Those states are: New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana.

LUCY:

I’m here to tell you how nightmarish Project 2025 will be for trans lives. Before we get to the main event, let me set the stage.

LUCY:

I’ve been out and medically transitioning as a trans woman for several years. It costs me thousands of dollars in medical expenses each year.

LUCY:

Also had to flee my home state due to bigoted laws, and faced discrimination everywhere from my own family to my job.

Panel 3

Lucy holds up up a giant textbook-sized printed copy of Project 2025. Her expression is one of outrage.

LUCY:

It’s pretty bad. And if Trump gets reelected and Project 2025 is brought into action, it’s only going to get much worse.

LUCY:

“Transgender,” “Gender Identity” and “Biological Sex” are used over thirty times in this Phone Book of Hate, so I’m going to keep it simple.

LUCY:

Three policies. Just three. That’s all they need.

Panel 4

Lucy sits at a computer, typing away. She looks over her shoulder at the reader.

LUCY:

Let’s start at the top. Page five. “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology.”

LUCY:

Any trans person’s story would be labeled as pornography. Our lives. Our experiences. Every part of us.

LUCY:

Immediately followed by, “Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.”

LUCY:

I think you can see where this is going…

PAGE TWO

Panel 1

Lucy sits on a cot in a prison, hugging herself in despair.

LUCY:

That means that any trans person talking about their transition could be imprisoned. Every statement about our lives, a potential offense.

LUCY:

Hell, the story you’re reading right now would qualify.

Panel 2

Lucy stands behind a counter with a cash register in front of her, ready to scan a bag of chips on the conveyer belt. She looks annoyed and exhausted.

LUCY:

Next. “Rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of […] gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.” Page 584.

LUCY:

Paired with page 495, “a general statement of policy specifying that it will not enforce any prohibition on […] gender identity discrimination” it paints a picture.

LUCY:

Discrimination towards trans people at places like their jobs will be fully legal, leaving us open to unmitigated harassment and hate.

Panel 3

Lucy is curled up in a ball, looking small, looking like she’s just finished crying her eyes out and is just empty.

LUCY:

Page 485. “Withdraw all guidance encouraging Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program service providers to provide controversial “gender transition” procedures or “gender-affirming care”.

LUCY:

Page 462. “Fund studies into the short-term and long-term negative effects of crosssex interventions, including “affirmation,” puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries.”

LUCY:

Page…take your pick. There’s a dozen more.

Panel 4

Lucy, still running on empty, holds a vial of Estradiol in her fingers and stares at it. It’s nearly empty.

LUCY:

By cutting federal funding from any medical facility that offers trans healthcare, and standing against it as official policy…

LUCY:

Hormones and gender care will become almost impossible to find. For those of us who are already on them, it’ll wreak havoc.

LUCY:

Our mental health. Our bodies. Damage that will ruin lives. And for trans folks who can no longer produce a safe level of hormones…

Panel 5

Lucy looks right at the reader, her expression serious and angry.

LUCY:

It could kill them.

Panel 6

Lucy sits cross-legged on the floor, pointing directly at the reader.

LUCY:

I know there’s a lot to keep track of. I haven’t even covered all the anti-trans proposals in Project 2025. If you take nothing else from here , take this:

LUCY:

For transgender people across America, defeating Trump and Project 2025 isn’t just a political race.

LUCY:

It’s a fight for survival. And we need all of you fighting with us.

https://stopproject2025comic.org/comic/anti-trans_discrimination/

[nathanleemustdie]

“project 2025 wont happen” they said. this is just the beginning of the doc.

and no, this isnt “it just means a dr wont preform trans operations if theyre against it”, it also means basic healthcare. say a queer person has a broken arm, they go to the dr and the dr is anti-lgbtq, this means the dr can legally deny the individual treatment solely based on the persons identity. and they leave without a cast for their broken arm, leading it to worsen. thats just an example. this would make it legal for a dr to deny a lgbtq person treatment even if they have something deadly like cancer.

we are WATCHING project ‘25 slowly go into action. it wont all be this immediate bc the doc is 1000 years long but within a year or two if we dont fight the fuck back hardcore, the entire doc will to into place. women, girls, and afabs, poc, disabled ppl, immigrants, we need to stand the FUCK UP RIGHT NOW.

esp trans ppl and women. some of the anti-trans and anti-woman bans and laws havent fully passed yet, but at this rate, theyre close. FIGHT. BACK. NOW. there is no more fucking waiting.

insurance companies can now legally fully deny

the USA is becoming a place where only white cishet christian abled men can access basic healthcare without discrimination or fear of being denied treatment solely based on their gender, race, sexuality, etc.

[therainbowwillow]

Resisting Project 2025's Attacks Queer and Trans Students

What is Project 2025? Project 2025 is a document produced by The Heritage Foundation, an American right-wing think tank, outlining a conservative political plan they hope to see implemented by the next Republican president (now President-Elect Donald Trump).

What does Project 2025 say about education broadly? Project 2025 suggests a wide variety of extreme measures to be taken against progressive values in public schools from promoting "school choice" (policies that, in reality, do not improve student outcomes and make education into a competitive market rather than a public good) to rolling back nondiscrimination regulations to dissolving the Department of Education entirely. Many of Project 2025's proposed policies would leave minoritized students more vulnerable to discrimination in schools and some policies support discrimination against them outright (see below).

What does Project 2025 say about queer and trans rights in school? Project 2025 makes a few proposals and claims regarding gender and sexuality:

Schools should "[reject] gender ideology" in the name of "safeguarding civil rights" (page 322)

Title IX protections (which are in place to prevent discrimination on the basis of sex in educational environments) should be rolled back (page 331)

The attempt to add a "non-binary" option when collecting school data should be rescinded (page 322)

"Sex" under Title IX should be defined to mean "only biological sex recognized at birth" (page 333)

There is "no scientific basis" for the idea that sex should be "redefin[ed]" as "sexual orientation and gender identity," a claim which they don't even attempt to cite a source for (page 333)

Being trans is a "social contagion" that causes young AFAB people to want to mutilate their bodies (pages 345-346)

Schools should forbid public education employees from using their students' preferred names and pronouns without parental consent (page 346)

We might expect to see some sources cited for these bold claims and proposals, but for all forty-five pages of the "Department of Education" section of this document, there are only 19 footnotes.

Project 2025 is an under-researched, ultra-conservative playbook that lays out the groundwork for how we can best discriminate against the most vulnerable members of our communities.

Now that Trump has been elected, what can we do to prepare for and resist Project 2025's proposals for education?

Understand what we're up against: Reading through the document itself is a disheartening process, but if you're in a place to do so, it's worth a try. The authors of Project 2025 tend to be pretty mask-off---they'll tell you all about the harm they intend to do. If you'd prefer not to waste hours of your life reading a document that periodically drops phrases so cringy they might make your soul leave your body (see: "woke diversicrats"), you can just read a summary. The ACLU has a good one that can be accessed here.

Teachers, get active in your union: Project 2025 is explicitly anti-union. It even accuses two of the US's biggest teachers' unions of "promot[ing] radical racial and gender ideologies in schools" (page 342). Working class solidarity is how we achieve the collective power we'll need to fight these policies in our schools. (Here is how the Chicago Teacher's Union is practicing resistance---a case study!)

Build community and support networks: This could mean making a point to talk to a few new people while you're attending a protest, attending school meetings with a group of fellow progressives, breaking up capitalist markets by planning/attending a mutual aid fair, or just chatting and laughing with some friends. The goal of fascism is to make us feel isolated. Don't let them succeed.

Take care of yourself: Project 2025's proposals are scary, especially for people whose very identities are being targeted. Don't let anyone tell you that you're "failing at activism" if you need to take a step back.

Teachers (and parents of minoritized students), assure your students and kids that you are on their side: If you're able, hang up a pride flag in your classroom/house, include an optional question about students' preferred pronouns on your introduction survey, and/or include minoritized authors and history in your classes. Have your students learn about Stonewall, read some short stories by James Baldwin, analyze Audre Lorde's poems, and/or introduce them to your favorite queer/BIPOC/disabled/immigrant authors and thinkers. Representation matters!

Sign the ACLU's petition to stop Project 2025: It's important to show lawmakers that Project 2025's radical and dangerous ideas do not represent what we want for our country.

Donate: The Southern Poverty Law Center, ACLU, and lots of other civil rights organizations are fighting hard against Project 2025 and the Trump Administration's policy proposals. Consider sending a donation to an organization that aligns with your values.

No matter how hard Trump and his cronies fight, LGBTQ+ people will always exist in our schools. They will never get rid of us and they will never drown out our voices. We will always demand to be safe, accepted, and included and we will win.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Rachel Leingang at The Guardian:

Donald Trump wants to shut down the US Department of Education, saying at recent rallies that it should be disbanded to “move everything back to the states where it belongs”. The idea of dismantling the education department has become increasingly mainstream, though it’s nearly as old as the department itself, which was created by Congress as a cabinet-level agency in 1979. Trump made similar promises on the 2016 campaign trail to either cut or hobble the department.

Eliminating it would require Congress to act, which could be an impossible feat, though several of Trump and his allies’ policy goals on education could be accomplished through presidential actions. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s rightwing manifesto for a potential incoming Trump administration, lays out how dismantling the federal education department would work, leaving behind, if anything, a husk focused solely as a “statistics-gathering agency that disseminates information to the states”, writes Lindsey Burke, the author of the education chapter and leader of Heritage’s education policy center. The department’s elimination is one of many goals contained in the extensive conservative playbook that will inform a second Trump term. Project 2025 calls for privatizing education and driving out any programs related to LGBTQ+ youth or diversity.

[...]

Trump tells voters on his campaign site a few ways he would manage education:

Cut federal funding for schools that are “pushing critical race theory or gender ideology on our children” and open civil rights investigations into them for race-based discrimination.

End access for trans youth to sports.

Create a body that will certify teachers who “embrace patriotic values”.

Reward districts that get rid of teacher tenure.

Adopt a parents’ bill of rights.

Implement direct elections of school principals by parents.

[...]

The project proposes phasing out one major program, Title I, over a 10-year period. The $18bn funding source supports low-income students. Instead, the project says states “should assume decision-making control over how to provide a quality education to children from low-income families”.

“Phasing that out is going to be very detrimental to that population of students who are already vulnerable for many reasons,” James said. The Heritage Foundation also wants to eliminate Head Start, a program that funds early childhood education for low-income families, because it is “fraught with scandal and abuse”, according to a chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services. The Center for American Progress says in a new report that eliminating Head Start would reduce access and increase costs for childcare, hurting economic stability. Beyond these major funding changes, the project – and Trump – both want to see expansions of school choice, like voucher programs that allow students to use money that would otherwise fund their seats at public schools to attend a private ones. Trump has said that he supports universal school choice, or the ability of any student to use taxpayer funds to attend whatever school they want. Trump also has a video on his campaign site dedicated to how he would help home-schooling families. [...]

LGBTQ+ and diversity issues attacked

Anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-diversity policies are sprinkled throughout the education recommendations in Project 2025 and in Trump’s platform. The project also supports passing a parents’ bill of rights to give parents more access to classroom materials.

The project proposes ridding education programs of any “gender ideology and critical race theory”, like a “non-binary” category in data collection or the ability of trans youth to participate in sports aligned with their gender. It also calls for parental approval for the use of names or pronouns other than those on birth certificates. And it wants to gut protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Project 2025 suggests the federal government put anti-LGBTQ+ policies in place in the schools it oversees as a way to set an example to state and local leaders. As examples of what the project considers “critical race theory” that should be abolished, it mentions “mandatory affinity groups”, training programs for teachers that require them to “confess their privilege” or assignments in which “students must defend the false idea that America is systemically racist”. These activities are “actively disrupting the values that hold communities together such as equality under the law and colorblindness”.

Attacks on the Department of Education are a key part of the radical right-wing Project 2025 playbook, and also Donald Trump’s.

They both want to radically reshape public schooling, such as dramatic cuts to special education and Head Start, institute a certification body for certifying teachers who “embrace patriotic values” (aka MAGA values), and eliminating LGBTQ+ protections.

[silly-lil-guy-asher]

Talk about Project 2025

This is some serious bullshit, an needs to be talked about

For those of you not in America or jus unfamiliar with project 2025, it is the plan for Republicans if they get into office. It strips women, people of color, queer, trans, and lower class people of basic human rights. They plan to ban abortions, gay marriage, transgender healthcare, and get rid of anti-discrimination laws. I didn't read through it completely(it was sooooo boring) but I have seen videos about it and did a little bit of reading it myself. I wouldn't be shocked if after all this, they take away women's voting rights and other amendments.

This is getting out of control. I definitely need to do more research on project 2025, but we definitely need to stop it before it starts.

I thought I had more but yeah👍

[hislittleraincloud]

Surprised Jenna - like many other Latino/Latina people with influence have already - hasn’t come out to endorsement Kamala after Tr*mp and his supporters made that Puerto Rico garbage comment

HEY.

SHE'S 22 YEARS OLD. AND SHE DOESN'T HAVE TO DO SHIT. YOU CARE MORE THAT SHE DOESN'T FIT YOUR PERCEPTION OF A YOUNG WOMAN WITH A POSSIBLE INFLUENCE ON HER FANS WHO DOESN'T "USE" THAT POWER. LEAVE THE GIRL ALONE AND STOP INSULTING HER INTELLIGENCE, INTEGRITY, AND TAKE ON THE WORLD. YES, SHE IS A CELEBRITY BUT SHE DOESN'T OWE ANYTHING TO ANYONE.

🤭

Yes, m'dear.

I expressed the same sentiment of yours that earned me the ire of the shitbird anon I just quoted verbatim a few days ago.

I hope that everyone remembers how silent Ortega is being on this, especially when she's made a big shit about "wanting to be the Puerto Rican Dakota Fanning" (even mentioning this in newer interviews, still), whining about not having/seeing representation, etc. My critics here hate seeing me crit her up, but she's the one who puts herself and some of her views sparingly out there; but this Puerto Rico thing is just as big as the insults that happened in 2017 after Hurricane Maria (the paper towels, the lack of response from that POS orange fuckface). That ugly ass diaper wearing motherfucking imbecilic rapist from Hell wanted to trade it for Greenland. Our baby girl here was only 15 then, but she is now old enough to fucking put her platform where her mouth is (yeah, as the days have gone by, my anger about it has only risen, especially since we're even closer to Tuesday).

I'm not Puerto Rican, but I am Mexican and Spanish on my father's side. I'm a full on burrito with extra rice (my mother is Southeast Asian)

If I were famous and had a platform like she does, I'd have been begging my fans to vote blue since Day 1, because 1) we know Trump hates us brown people to begin with and has been saying horrific things since the 2016 campaign and 2) Project 2025 is terrifying and facets of it are already cutting into our lives and making a huge mess of it for women, trans people, and people of color. I mean for fuck's sake, Tennessee (our Jairo's home state 💕💔) ratified a law earlier this year that brings back Jim Crow era-like anti-miscegenation discrimination regarding marriage (it was targeted towards 🏳️‍🌈 marriages, but if an officiant objects to solemnizing the marriage of a mixed race couple, they're legally allowed to do that per the law...even Jon and Cairo [if they were real] wouldn't be able to marry if the officiant objected to Jon marrying an obviously not white Cairo). It's exactly what the Heritage Foundation wanted, and it's only going to get worse if the orange fuckface is let back in.

As usual I digress, but this shit is serious.

Anyway, all of the most famous contemporary Puerto Ricans have spoken up about the floating island of garbage and the whole "Latinos love making babies"/have no pullout game (which yanno, Ortega should really be on top of too, it was a DOUBLE insult to her and her family), but she's ✨busy✨. Too busy to stand up for her mother's peoples, but not too busy to make TikToks with Thing. Fuck that, and y'all should keep it in mind the next time she does say shit about politics.

But here's a celebrity who has (another Puerto Rican who has a massive, massive number of 🏳️‍🌈 wlw fans, even though she too is into guys and married), and I love her for it:

"Oh, but Tor, that wasn't an endorsement!" — Okay babies, 4 years ago vs. now

Bonus "Like" from Johnna Dias-Watson that Imma take for soft endorsement, so even freaking Divina has a tiny voice here...and she's queer. 💕 🏳️‍🌈💖✨

Once more, if Ortega finally does come out for Kamala, I will issue corrections and apologies, but it's almost too fucking late — the election is only five fucking days away — and it'll likely be too little. There are already a good handful of kids her age who think that it's okay to either vote 3rd party* or sit it out, spouting rhetoric that is well-observed and intended but impractical.

*Psst: No, it's not okay to vote 3rd party in our solidly 2 party system in our general election. The last two times a crapload of people voted 3rd party, it gave us Bush & the Iraq War and Trump & his maelstrom of domestic destruction. Republicans adore 3rd party candidates for the general election because they fucking know the kind of people who will choose them are mostly sanctimonious, ignorant and/or unhinged leftists whose votes would otherwise be unfavorable to them. Cut the shit and get serious if you're one of those 'but Republicans and Democrats are the same!' crap à la Chappell Roan (the elder Gen Z whose attitude about our politics is influencing other Zs). They are not the fucking same. Just looking at the SCOTUS picks should tell you that it's fucking laughable every time someone says this. Democrats are also not the ones who are passing misogynistic anti-abortion and phobic anti-🏳️‍🌈 and anti-🏳️‍⚧️ laws that affect everyone at their state level. Do your due diligence AND your civic duty towards your fellows and pick the one who isn't intent on destroying anyone who isn't a white (male) Christian nationalist.

[giant-bean]

Has Cassidy the nonbinary sunflowerslut (That last bit is the blog name not a slur) read anything about the TERF laws in project 2025 that outlaw trans people and cut all funding to any program that supports queer people? If so I would think these vote blue no matter what posts would be welcome as the removal of anti-discrimination laws proposed by the red will directly affect them.

Are you able to vote in US elections? Because the preachy vote blue no matter who posts are really not where it's at, Neil, and if you can't vote in the states then it's doubly fucking annoying.

I'm sorry that it annoys you that I don't have a vote in the US: if it makes you feel better, I pay the vast majority of my taxes here, I live here, and more importantly my children and grandchildren live here and will grow up in whatever version of the US the courts and government create. The effect of the US on the rest of the planet is enormous.

So I'm going to use whatever platform I have to point out that voting matters. And that sometimes you hold your nose and decide who you're voting against.

[nova8byte]

Republicans destroyed so much progress since 2016, even during Biden's administration. From Roe V Wade to countless anti-gay/anti-trans legislation across several states, to legalizing anti-queer discrimination. That was all just a slight taste of Project 2025.

As pissed off as I am at Trump voters right now for accelerating the fall of the US into Supremacist Christian Nationalism, I just can't help but wonder why did Harris barely ever talk gay and trans rights?

We were the ones who uncovered it. We saw it coming months before the mainstream media did. We are the primary targets of their planned fascist system and they didn't even attempt to hide it.

Not to mention the Biden administration facilitating the genocide in Gaza, essentially creating this "Us or Them" mindset in countless voters, with empty promises of a ceasefire "eventually".

It would have been easy, but they didn't. They didn't care about Standing Rock. They barely cared about BLM. They STILL don't care about Gaza.

Opportunists at best. The rest of us are sheep. What choice do we have?

Be ready for anything.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Violet Miller at Chicago Sun-Times:

In the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s reelection, advocates for transgender people in Illinois are scrambling to strengthen the state protections they’ve created, while some trans Midwesterners consider moving to states with shield laws for safe harbor. State Rep. Kelly Cassidy told the Sun-Times there has been a coalition effort of state lawmakers to protect trans and reproductive health care access since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade leaked in 2022. Now, they’re looking closely at Project 2025 — a conservative policy playbook created by the Heritage Foundation — and Trump policy proposals and “evaluating what further protections we can enact in the coming months,” a spokesperson for Gov. JB Pritzker said. One gap the coalition identified is medical data privacy and the use of geolocators to track people who visit health care facilities, which Cassidy said she’s confident will be fixed before the fall legislative session ends. “There’s a hole in that [legislative] shield, and that’s data privacy, so that’s the top priority,” Cassidy said.

Protections for reproductive rights and gender-affirming care were enshrined in state law in January 2023, putting Illinois on the side of people who risk prosecution by traveling to the state for treatment and also protecting the licenses of Illinois doctors who provide care that’s illegal elsewhere. The Illinois Human Rights Act also protects against discrimination based on gender identity. In July, the Legislature gave Illinois judges the tools to help people change their names and gender markers on out-of-state documents. But many of the threats made by Agenda47, the Trump campaign’s outline for the next four years, and Project 2025 would undermine these by circumventing existing protections.

“If a national ban [on gender-affirming care] passed, that’s our worst-case scenario,” Cassidy told the Sun-Times on Friday. “None of our laws will matter.” The documents outline plans to end civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ people, remove doctors who provide gender-affirming care from Medicare and Medicaid coverage, and withhold funds from schools that protect the rights of trans students, among other things.

[...] Fourteen states and Washington, D.C., have shield laws for gender-affirming care, though Minnesota and Illinois are the sole havens for displaced trans people in the Midwest.

With Donald Trump's victory and the toxic Project 2025 and Agenda 47 looming, Illinois is seeking to further strengthen protections for trans people, and that trans people residing in anti-trans states such as Missouri and Indiana are seeking safe harbor from attacks on their identity and expression by moving to Illinois.

[pashterlengkap]

Project 2025 would make workplace discrimination a lot easier

This article first appeared on Mother Jones. It has been republished with the publication’s permission. Only some 40 percent of disabled people are employed. But even that low figure is buoyed by federal laws against employment discrimination—a target of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for a right-wing transformation of government by a second Trump White House. A key institution for the just treatment of disabled workers is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces federal bans on workplace discrimination. Viewed with distaste by many on the right since its founding through the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the EEOC obtained nearly $4 million in 2023 for disabled workers subjected to employment discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Related Biden administration releases new Title VII rules protecting trans employees The agency’s new guidelines expressly prohibit misgendering, denial of bathroom access, and more. Insights for the LGBTQ+ community Subscribe to our briefing for insights into how politics impacts the LGBTQ+ community and more. Subscribe to our Newsletter today Discrimination plays a significant role, according to Stetson University College of Law professor Robyn Powell, in unemployment among disabled people, who experience it at a rate about double that of people without disabilities. In response to substantiated complaints, the EEOC can sue companies for discrimination on the basis of disability—among other categories, including race, gender, and age—and may reach a consent decree, where companies agree to changes in policy and practice, sometimes with financial settlements to the affected workers. “Consent decrees occur when there is a big employer where we’re seeing systematic examples of discrimination,” Powell said. “If we can open up employment opportunities by tackling discrimination, it helps everyone.” The decrees are quicker, cheaper, and sometimes more effective than lawsuits in combating workplace prejudice. But they have a notable enemy in the Heritage Foundation’s pet project. Jonathan Berry, who was the chief counsel of Trump’s 2016 transition team and held multiple jobs in his administration, writes in Project 2025 that EEOC “should disclaim power to enter into consent decrees that require employer actions” not already explicitly required by law. Back in 2012, during the Obama administration, a Heritage Foundation employee testified before Congress that federal agencies habitually abuse consent decrees—a viewpoint still clear in Project 2025.  “When we look at [Project 2025’s] specifics around the EEOC and consent decrees,” Powell told Mother Jones, “we can see that they really are trying to attack and decimate disability rights.”  The EEOC and DOJ “have really been critical in protecting the rights of people with disabilities,” says Shira Wakschlag, general counsel and senior director of legal advocacy at The Arc, which serves people with developmental and intellectual disabilities. “Consent decrees are really critical in any kind of civil rights monitoring or systemic action.” Anti-discrimination consent decrees tend to emphasize reform and accountability, with modest settlements compared to potential legal damages. In one representative case, a government contractor that did not provide accommodations to Deaf and hard-of-hearing employees, and that fired workers on medical leave, agreed to a $1 million settlement with updates to policies on medical leave, reasonable accommodation, and managerial training on the Americans with Disabilities Act, including five years’ monitoring for compliance. Other types of Justice Department consent decrees also come under attack in Project 2025. Wakschlag says that’s very concerning for disability rights—federal consent decrees are used to fight the continuing institutionalization of disabled people, which violates both the ADA and the Supreme Court’s Olmstead ruling.  Conservative attacks on… http://dlvr.it/TCgYHc

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ahmed Baba:

We’re only a few days into President Trump’s second term, and so far, he has behaved exactly as many of us warned. Trump has taken multiple executive actions straight out of the Project 2025 playbook, as predicted. From Trump’s immigration orders, his reinstatement of Schedule F to make firing civil servants easier, his executive order targeting trans rights, and his environmental regulation rollbacks, Trump is proving that those who were deemed “alarmists” for calling out the fact Trump’s Agenda 47 aligns directly with Project 2025 are actually realists. There’s one policy area in particular where President Trump’s executive orders echo Project 2025 almost verbatim, and that’s Trump’s targeting of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. But, as we’ve seen, Trump isn’t simply targeting DEI. He’s targeting civil rights. Just as anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) efforts became a catch-all method to target the teaching of civil rights education more broadly, anti-DEI efforts have become a smokescreen to target fundamental civil rights era anti-discrimination policies. DEI is mentioned at least 39 times in the 920-page Project 2025 policy playbook. Project 2025 explicitly calls for the elimination of all federal DEI programs and calls for the prosecution of “local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers” who implement DEI policies. It mentions this all under the guise of targeting discrimination, which they falsely equate with DEI.

This week, President Trump signed executive orders that seek to accomplish much of what Project 2025 laid out, and he uses the same anti-discrimination pretenses. After ending all federal DEI initiatives on Monday, in a Tuesday executive order, President Trump revoked a foundational anti-discrimination executive order from the civil rights era. Trump’s order, titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” doesn’t end illegal discrimination or promote merit-based opportunity. It permits it. Trump’s executive order terminates all DEI practices in the federal government and revokes decades of executive orders from the Clinton and Obama administrations. It goes even further. Trump rolled back the “Equal Employment Opportunity Executive Order 11246” of September 24, 1965, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ).

This LBJ executive order enforced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and prohibited federal contractors from discriminating “against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.” It also called for contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.” That concept of “affirmative action” became a focal point of decades of right-wing opposition. LBJ’s executive order has been the government’s key anti-discrimination enforcement mechanism for federal contractors for 60 years, opening up opportunities for people of color and women who were eager to work for these companies. But this change didn’t come without pushback. The Heritage Foundation, which now leads Project 2025, published a 1985 report entitled “Revising Executive Order 11246: Fulfilling the Promise of Affirmative Action.” President Ronald Reagan wanted to fulfill the Heritage Foundation’s wishes to roll back this executive order but faced pushback. Now, Trump has finally done it.

Donald Trump’s push to end DEI and affirmative action is part of the satanic Project 2025/Agenda 47 agenda.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Samantha Riedel at Them:

The Trump campaign has been building out “Agenda47” into a 20-point platform — explained in a series of videos on the campaign site — since late 2022. Most of the component planks deal with perennial Trump scapegoats: Chief among Trump’s priorities, for example, is bringing an end to what he calls the “migrant invasion,” partly via a massive deportation campaign. Two “Agenda47” policies target LGBTQ+ people in particular, specifically transgender people, with Trump promising to wage war on “radical gender ideology” in schools and also “keep men out of women’s sports.”

Republicans have eagerly latched on to trans women athletes as a wedge issue in recent years, asserting that trans women have biological athletic advantages over cis women (despite a lack of evidence for such claims). In a February 2023 message decrying “left wing gender insanity,” Trump affirmed that if elected, he would interpret the federal anti-discrimination statute Title IX to entirely prohibit trans women from participating in women’s sports, and ask Congress to pass legislation to affirm that interpretation. Although President Joe Biden introduced new trans-inclusive rules for interpreting Title IX during his term, those changes applied to trans students in all areas except athletics (and are currently blocked pending litigation in federal court).

But Trump’s anti-trans plans aren’t limited to sports. His February 2023 proclamation stated that he would seek a federal definition of “gender” that is restricted to only “male and female” as assigned at birth. Trump also vowed to ban gender-affirming care for trans youth, falsely labeling such medical care “mutilation” and “mutation” and promising to terminate trans-affirming doctors from Medicare and Medicaid. In his Agenda47 video, Trump falsely claimed that trans people and gender dysphoria did not exist “until the radical left invented it just a few years ago.” He also accused pharmaceutical companies of pushing hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and surgeries for profit, but provided no evidence of such a conspiracy. “Under my leadership, this madness will end,” Trump concluded in the video.

Much of Agenda47’s anti-trans language dovetails with Trump’s anti-teacher and anti-education positions, representing a series of attacks not just on queer and trans students, but on teachers and educators who do not adhere to the Republican party line. At various points, Agenda47 describes schools as “indoctrinating” students with “Marxism,” “critical race theory,” and “gender ideology.” Trump’s solutions to the imagined problem would include monetary rewards for schools who strip K-12 teachers of their tenure; a federal “Parents Bill of Rights,” likely with similar language to anti-LGBTQ+ state bills of the same name; a Red Scare-like hunt for “the radicals who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education”; and a new teacher certification board to ensure educators “embrace patriotic values.” Trump is also heavily courting conservatives who homeschool their children, a longtime Republican pet project that has rapidly gained ground in recent years. The Trump team has insisted that their candidate has nothing to do with the now-infamous Project 2025, despite its breathless ambition towards “institutionalizing Trumpism” (and Trump’s close ties with its architects). But Agenda47’s policy items are near-indistinguishable from Project 2025’s, making the difference largely a matter of branding. As Ms. magazine noted, Project 2025 also seeks an end to federal protections for trans people at any level, diametrically opposes Biden’s reinterpretation of Title IX, and would establish a “male/female” gender binary on the federal level, even prohibiting school officials and educators from using a trans student’s pronouns. Where the Heritage Foundation-organized document differs from Trump’s anti-LGBTQ+ platform, it is in its discussion of marriage: While Trump avoids the topic of gay marriage, Project 2025 confidently states that “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure.”

The policy agendas of both Agenda 47 and Project 2025 regarding LGBTQ+ (and especially trans rights) are major concern, should Donald Trump get back into office.

While there is significant overlap between Heritage’s Project 2025 and Trump’s Agenda 47, both have slightly different priorities regarding the LGBTQ+ issue, whereas A47 deemphasizes opposition to marriage equality and P2025 embraces it.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Orion Rummler at The 19th:

LGBTQ+ advocates are gearing up for a possible second Trump administration by planning future litigation, deepening relationships in Congress and mobilizing voters.  If former president Donald Trump is re-elected, advocacy groups expect him to enact anti-LGBTQ+ policies that are more far-reaching and extreme than those he put in place during his first term — based on his campaign promises and policies suggested by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has shaped the GOP’s agenda for decades.  Trump is focused specifically on rolling back transgender rights, as he detailed in a campaign video last year. His proposals would terminate Medicare and Medicaid funding for hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to trans youth, attempt to charge teachers with sex discrimination for affirming students’ gender identities and order federal agencies to “cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.” Trump also pledged to ask Congress to halt the use of federal funds to promote or pay for gender-affirming care, without distinguishing between care for adults or minors.  

Some of these policies mimic state anti-LGBTQ+ laws, which frequently run into enforcement issues as state agencies tasked with monitoring school bathrooms and classrooms are unable to find consistent ways to carry out restrictive laws. Several of Trump’s proposed anti-trans policies would also require congressional approval. However, as a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union details, even if Trump gains the presidency without Republicans taking power in Congress, he would be able to take action against LGBTQ+ rights on his own — and has said that he plans to.  “We’ve seen over the last several years a militant effort in red states by the government to discriminate against trans folks, in particular, and the broader LGBTQ community, and even to go so far as to try to deny trans people’s existence,” said Mike Zamore, national director of policy and governmental affairs at the ACLU. “The danger in the Trump administration is seeing the federal government using its massive reach and resources to do something similar on a national scale.” 

The federal government could use its civil rights enforcement capabilities to argue that institutions trying to protect LGBTQ+ rights are violating the rights of people with certain religious beliefs, Zamore said, or it could threaten to withhold funding from universities that receive federal money if they do not discriminate against transgender students. In the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a purported roadmap of executive actions that a future Republican president could take on various issues — including abortion access — several of the policy suggestions align with Trump’s promises to roll back LGBTQ+ rights. Project 2025 advocates for the deletion of the terms “sexual orientation and gender identity” from all federal rules and for prohibiting teachers from affirming trans students.  One of the more extreme proposals in Project 2025 equates the act of being transgender, or “transgender ideology,” to pornography, and declares that it should be outlawed. The conservative think tank recommends that educators and public librarians who spread the concept of being transgender should be registered as sex offenders, and that telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate the spread of ideas about transgender people should be shuttered. 

[...] If “a pro-equality opposition” controls either or both chambers of Congress in a second Trump administration, pro-LGBTQ+ members of Congress could still use the appropriations process to hinder Trump’s ability to enact anti-trans laws, the ACLU writes in its report. The appropriations process refers to how the House and Senate fund the federal government, which is often derailed by “riders” — provisions that dictate policy not directly related to the federal budget. 

Since many of the anti-LGBTQ+ policies proposed by Trump’s campaign or Project 2025 would violate the Constitution and federal law, the ACLU says that litigation would be a significant part of its response to a second Trump term. As the last few years have seen a dramatic increase of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and laws, the civil rights group has mounted dozens of consequential lawsuits against those policies — and at least a dozen on health care bans within the last year. During Trump’s first term, the ACLU took on the former president’s order to ban trans people from the military amid hundreds of other lawsuits against the former administration.  Although the ACLU is confident in its ability to fight anti-LGBTQ+ policies in court, and several judges appointed by Trump have actually granted wins for LGBTQ+ advocates, the organization says that the political atmosphere has still changed since Trump’s first term.

The 19th News reports on how a 2nd Trump Administration would make the first one look like a trans rights activist (even though Trump enacted harmful anti-trans policies during his term) by enacting proposals that would erase trans existence in public life.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Chris Geidner at Law Dork:

A little past 5:00 p.m. Friday — more than two weeks after the Biden administration’s new rule addressing sex discrimination under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 went into effect — the U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled on a Justice Department request to limit injunctions against enforcement of the rule during litigation. On a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court rejected DOJ’s request — keeping the rule completely blocked in 26 states and hundreds of schools in other states while litigation proceeds, despite the fact the almost all of the challenges only addressed three provisions of the lengthy rule that were aimed at providing protections for transgender students. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the dissent, in which she was joined by the two other Democratic appointees, Justices Elena Kagan and Kentanji Brown Jackson, and Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Republican appointee who wrote the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County that was relied on by the Education Department in crafting its Title IX rule. (In Bostock, the court held that the sex discrimination ban in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 includes a ban on sexual orientation discrimination and gender identity discrimination.)

As Sotomayor wrote for the dissenters, “Today … a majority of this Court leaves in place preliminary injunctions that bar the Government from enforcing the entire rule—including provisions that bear no apparent relationship to respondents’ alleged injuries. Those injunctions are overbroad.” That concern about overbroad injunctions led the court earlier this year to partially stay an injunction blocking Idaho’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for minors — allowing the state to enforce the ban against most people during the appeal. Neither Chief Justice John Roberts, who joined Gorsuch’s 2020 majority in Bostock, nor Justices Amy Coney Barrett or Brett Kavanaugh, who in other instances have criticized overly broad injunctions, were willing to provide the four dissenters with a fifth vote to allow some of the Title IX rule to go into effect while litigation continues.

Instead, they joined with the court’s two most extreme-right members, Justices Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, to allow the full rule to be blocked during litigation. In an unsigned, per curiam opinion, the court stated for the five that lower courts “concluded, at least at this preliminary stage, that the allegedly unlawful provisions are not readily severable from the remaining provisions.” Noting that “the burden is on the Government as applicant to show, among other things, a likelihood of success on its severability argument,” the unsigned opinion for the five concluded — with vague, inscrutable language1 — that the government did not meet that burden and, as such, did not get the partial stay it sought. The cases will now continue in the lower courts, with patchwork enforcement across the country.

SCOTUS voted 5-4 to block the Biden Administration’s Title IX changes while litigation continues.

See Also:

AP, via HuffPost: Supreme Court Keeps New Rules About Sex Discrimination In Education On Hold In Half The Country

[beauty-funny-trippy]

It's really helpful that they broke it down into different subjects, so you can check out the topics that concern you the most:

•Abortion •Anti-Trans Discrimination •Authoritarianism •Children •Christian Nationalism •Climate •Cronyism •Education •Environmental Protection Agency •Executive Orders •Extreme Weather •Health Care •Immigration •Internet Freedom •Libraries •Militarism •Police Abuse •School Lunch •Taxation •Teachers •Voting Matters •War on the Working Class

Some Samples:

Straight, White, Christian, Republican Men don't think we need Civil Rights Laws, so they're planning on dismantling the department in charge of enforcing those laws. What could possibly go wrong?

"Project 2025 is...a detailed plan to shut you up, and shut you out. —Don’t let it do either."

Link: Stop Project 2025 Comic

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ari Drennen at MMFA:

A New York Times article about the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s 2022 standards of care draws on emails released by a psychologist who has compared homosexuality to pedophilia and reportedly worked on behalf of an extreme anti-LGBTQ group.

The Times piece, which claims that the Biden administration lobbied to remove explicit age limits from the guidelines, does not provide sufficient context on the psychologist's background or his reported work for Alliance Defending Freedom, a Project 2025 partner.

The article also uses outdated data to fearmonger about rising numbers of trans youth and again includes misinformation about transition care from elected officials with no fact-checking.

The Times report quotes email excerpts filed in a legal challenge to Alabama's ban on gender-affirming care from WPATH officials describing their interactions with Sarah Boateng, who then served as chief of staff to Adm. Rachel Levine, assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services. Boateng argued at the time that listing specific age guidelines for transition surgeries would fuel more aggressive legislative efforts to ban them. 

The Times states that “the excerpts were filed by James Cantor,” whom the paper describes simply as “a psychologist and longstanding critic of gender treatments for minors.”

Cantor frequently presents himself as an expert on gender-affirming medicine and has reportedly been retained as an expert by the states in favor of West Virginia’s ban on sports participation and restrictions on health care in Texas, Florida, and Alabama.  In the Alabama trial at the center of the Times’ reporting, Cantor also appears to have worked on behalf of Project 2025 partner and extreme anti-LGBTQ organization the Alliance Defending Freedom – a detail excluded from the Times’ report.

[...]

Project 2025 is a comprehensive transition plan for the next GOP presidential administration. Its nearly 900-page policy book labels “the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children” as “pornography” that “should be outlawed” and states that “the people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.” The Alliance Defending Freedom, which also works to curtail access to abortion, is one of over 100 organizations that have endorsed the document, meant to serve as a blueprint for a second Trump administration.

Cantor has a troubling resume outside of his work alongside the Alliance Defending Freedom. He was previously removed from the state of Florida’s roster of “subject matter experts” on transition care after linking homosexuality to pedophilia and stating that sexual attraction to children is “not inherently wrong.” Cantor served as member of the advisory council for Prostagia, which has campaigned against bans on sex dolls resembling children and has hosted support groups for “minor attracted people” open to adults alongside people as young as 13. [...]

The Times also claims that “the numbers for all gender-related medical interventions for adolescents have been steadily rising as more young people seek such care.” But the data used to support this assertion ends in 2021, when many states began restricting or outlawing transition care, meaning those numbers may no longer be “rising.”  The article also includes statements from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott characterizing transition surgeries as “disfiguring” and “genital mutilation,” respectively, with no fact-checking, a repeat of a pattern previously noted by Media Matters and GLAAD. Activists opposing female genital mutilation also say that the harmful practice should not be “hijacked for purposes to target and discriminate against vulnerable youth.” The Times story was updated after publication to remove the detail that Marci Bowers, president of WPATH, is herself a transgender woman. While the current version of the story states that Levine is also a transgender woman, it makes no note of the gender identity of Cantor, DeSantis, or Abbott.

Once again, the New York Times fails to properly note the anti-trans extremism of the subjects being covered on gender-affirming care issues, this time in a story discussing James Cantor in which NYT omitted his ties to anti-LGBTQ+ extremist group Alliance Defending Freedom.