President-elect Donald Trump speaks at 2024 AmericaFest in Phoenix, Arizona. Credit: Flickr/Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Donald Trump will assume the presidency of the United States on Jan. 20 as the winner of a campaign where he placed a great deal of policy initiative on discriminatory and eliminationist measures against LGBTQ people. Until now, the far-right had been forced to wage its anti-LGBTQ campaign at the state level, but Trump’s election has elevated that program to the national stage, and he has packed his administration with figures committed to an extreme capitalist, imperialist agenda.
Their intention is unmistakable: the extreme-right wants to restore the “right” to persecute and discriminate against every oppressed group in order to divide the working class and ram through their program to make the ultra-rich even wealthier.
The schematic for their program is called Project 2025, and it is all the “quiet parts” of America’s horrific past and present said out loud. Trump spent much of the election campaign denying his connections to Project 2025 with a nod and a wink, but many of the prospective advisors and cabinet members he has announced since the election are prominent creators and supporters of Project 2025, making any distinction between the two at this point meaningless.
Blueprint for a far-right takeover
Project 2025 is a creation of the Heritage Foundation. This right-wing think tank put forth a 900-page-long list of recommendations for changes across the breadth of U.S. national politics. These range from government restructuring to specific laws, rule interpretations, and even the appointment of judges, which together amount to the most strenuously conservative set of economic, social and political policies since the Ronald Reagan regime of the 1980s.
“The next conservative president must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets,” the document says. The revoking of the few hard-won civil rights victories by the LGBTQ community and the imposition of a host of new restrictions is a cornerstone of this effort. Consistent with the far-right’s anti-LGBTQ attacks in recent years, the hammer is set to fall the hardest on transgender people, the most marginalized part of the LGBTQ community.
‘We are going to stop the transgender lunacy’
“With a stroke of my pen on day one, we are going to stop the transgender lunacy,” Trump told a cheering audience at a conference for young conservatives in Arizona in December.
Trump then pledged to issue executive orders to ban gender-affirming medical care for transgender children, to ban trans people from the U.S. military, to issue a nationwide ban on trans girls and women playing on sports teams of their gender, and to “get transgender out” of K-12 schools, likely referring to banning teachers from discussing anything related to LGBTQ people. Trump also said it would become “the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female.”
These are all longstanding goals of the far-right’s years-long campaign against trans rights and are also stated goals of Project 2025.
Trump’s campaign and the Project 2025 authors have also made clear they will not stand in the way of the intense state-level attacks on LGBTQ rights, which last year totaled more than 530 discriminatory bills. Before the 2025 legislative session even began, more than 120 new bills had already been pre-filed. These bills have targeted trans people’s most basic rights, including the right to access necessary and life-saving health care, to have their identities legally recognized, to practice their culture, to engage in sport at all levels, and even to access public spaces like bathrooms. Trump’s plan would extend those attacks to the federal level, meaning even so-called “safe” states controlled by Democrats would be affected by the bans and restrictions to come.
While Project 2025 does not explicitly call for banning same-gender marriages, it does say they should be relegated to second-class status and calls for propaganda pushing the importance of heterosexual, “biblically-based” marriages as the foundation of American society. In addition, two U.S. Supreme Court justices have publicly stated they are seeking a case to overturn the court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized marriage equality nationwide.
The Project also repeatedly equates trans people and drag performances with pornography, claiming the existence of trans people and drag performers in public spaces is equivalent to exposing children to sexual content. This has many transgender advocates fearing that they could try to label both groups as sex offenders, criminalizing the existence of trans and gender-nonconforming people and banning them from any place where children might be present.
In addition, Project 2025 calls for “deleting” terms like “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” as well as “abortion,” “reproductive health,” “reproductive rights,” and numerous other terms, from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” In addition to legalizing many forms of discrimination across U.S. society, this would effectively erase LGBTQ people from any kind of federal protection or, indeed, even recognition that we exist.
Using populism to hide a trans healthcare ban
In a campaign statement released in January 2023, Trump promised even more attacks on LGBTQ rights, signaling that he intends to extend healthcare bans to transgender adults too. This, he said, would take the form of ordering the Justice Department to “investigate Big Pharma and the big hospital networks” for allowing trans people to use hormone replacement therapy medications to transition, “which are in no way licensed or approved for this use,” he said.
This is a shameless use of people’s rightful anger at the capitalist healthcare industry’s profiteering to sneak through a devastating attack on transgender people. Due to decades of systemic neglect of trans people’s most basic medical needs, the medications used to enable trans people to medically transition to their correct gender presentation are often not made for that purpose, but repurposed from other similar uses for cisgender (that is, non-transgender) people. Through a medical practice called “informed consent,” in which they are informed of the effects of the medication prior to starting treatment and regularly check-in with their health care professional to ensure they are satisfied with the changes they are experiencing, trans people are still able to get this life-saving treatment.
Like all healthcare, gender-affirming care like surgery and hormone therapy should be a human right guaranteed to everyone who needs it!
Not waiting for Trump
The extreme right hasn’t waited for Trump to take office to launch their anti-trans offensive. U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace has led the charge in pushing for a federal bathroom ban in response to the election of Delaware Democratic Representative-Elect Sarah McBride in November. McBride is the first transgender person to be elected to a federal office and was sworn in on Jan. 3.
In the weeks since the election, Mace successfully pressured then-House Speaker Mike Johnson to ban trans people from using bathrooms of their gender in the U.S. Capitol Building and associated office buildings. She has also introduced a bill that would extend that ban to all federal property in the entire country. That would include federal office buildings, museums, military bases, parks, and potentially even schools and colleges that receive federal funds, among other locations. In Washington, D.C., the national capital city and a popular haven for LGBTQ people with a large queer community, federal property is nearly one-third of the city, severely limiting the places LGBTQ people can go for any length of time.
Bathroom bans require trans people to use the bathroom of the gender they were assigned at birth, rather than the gender they identify as. This means each trans person is automatically “outed” when they have to use a public bathroom. Anti-trans bigots like Mace claim trans women could secretly be male rapists disguising themselves as women to harass and assault women in women’s-only spaces. But the truth is that such incidents are virtually unknown and that bathroom bans are more likely to result in transgender women getting assaulted for going into men’s bathrooms, while less feminine cisgender women get harassed for using women’s rooms.
Biden signs anti-trans bill
Yet the most recent attack has come from the other side of the aisle. After Republicans added a passage to the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act that banned transgender service members and their family members from receiving healthcare from the U.S. military, a number of House and Senate Democrats voted for the bill along with anti-trans MAGA Republicans.
President Joe Biden, who told trans people upon taking office in 2021 that “your President has your back,” chose to sign the bill into law rather than veto it and press for legislators to remove the discrimination. For Biden, giving $895 billion to the U.S. military to carry out its imperialist agenda of bombing countries around the globe was more important than keeping his promise to protect the rights of transgender Americans. This was the first federal law discriminating against LGBTQ people in almost 30 years.
Billionaires profit from hate and division
For most LGBTQ Americans, history has taught us the truth of the quote by Julius Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania: “The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.”
In the two months since the November 2024 election, Democrats have shown how uninterested they are in defending LGBTQ rights. Many senior figures have blamed presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s loss on the party’s defense of trans rights, and Biden signing the NDAA is a fitting capstone to four years of pretending to support trans people while doing almost nothing to stop the avalanche of state-level attacks and yielding to the far-right on key trans issues.
Whether it’s Republicans’ bare-faced attacks or Democrats’ lip-service obstructions, LGBTQ people know that any gains we have made have come through continuous struggle and community-building independent of state capitals or Capitol Hill.
Cisgender and transgender people alike must understand that these attacks are against the entire working class, not just trans people. If the boss can discriminate against a trans person, fire them at will, deny them healthcare, or pay them less than their cisgender coworker, then he can do it to any other worker, too. If a landlord can evict a trans person or deny them housing due to their transness, they can deny anybody a roof over their head. These things are universal human rights that no business person or bigot should be able to deny to anyone.
But it’s essential that we understand why the extreme right is going after trans rights, too. The evangelical Christian church’s moral outrage machine is key to maintaining momentum for an all-out attack on the gains made by Black people against Jim Crow in the 1960s and against the labor movement’s wins since the 1930s. Any gain made against LGBTQ rights, or abortion access, or whatever target they choose next, gives them a better position from which to launch this attack, which imperils the entire working class.
When our rights are eviscerated and our communities divided against one another, then the billionaires will finally be able to do what they want: make profits hand-over-fist, with the working class unable to defend themselves.
We fight back!
That’s why we have to fight back and meet the Trump administration with a united front of resistance on day one of his administration, but like the far-right forces pushing this hateful agenda, our class isn’t waiting for Jan. 20, either. In late November, members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation joined fellow Ohioans outside the state capitol in rejecting Senate Bill 104, a bathroom bill which Governor Mike DeWine signed into law.
Early last year, Ohio Republicans pushed through a devastating ban on trans student athletes and on transgender youth receiving gender-affirming medical care, the harshest seen so far. In an online forum hosted afterward by the social media site X, state lawmakers from Ohio and Michigan plotted what one of them called the “endgame”: banning transition care at any age, not just for children.
“We have to take one bite at a time, do it incrementally,” stated Ohio State Rep. Gary Click, the author of the trans youth healthcare ban.
Across the country, trans and LGBTQ groups are planning protests for Trump’s Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, and forming support networks to meet the emergency needs our community will face in the coming months and years. Trans people are acting with justifiable fear and anger. Many are scrambling to find how they’ll get health care and housing under such an extreme right-wing regime, others are updating public documents with their correct name and gender while it’s still legal to do so. Some are packing up what they can to move to the “safer blue states” and getting documents together to flee an unsafe state or leave the U.S. altogether.
But we know there can be no safety for trans people, or for any working or oppressed person, while U.S. capitalist imperialism reigns supreme. Only a socialist society, in which the U.S. war machine is dismantled and the needs of the people and planet are put ahead of profits, can anyone be safe from the far-right agenda encapsulated in programs like Project 2025.
