With Donald Trump and J.D. Vance now confirmed as the official 2024 Republican presidential ticket, LGBTQ+ advocates are sounding the alarm about what a prospective second Trump administration might mean for queer and trans rights. Although Trump has attempted to distance himself from the far-right Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” plan to consolidate conservative rule, the former president is running on a remarkably similar platform of his own, dubbed “Agenda47.”
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.”
Trump has a long history of making bold policy claims that he cannot ultimately fulfill, but the combined promises of Project 2025 and “Agenda47” have sown fear among LGBTQ+ people across the U.S. — and further emboldened the former president’s most extreme fanbase. A new report from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) last week indicated a surge in support for Project 2025 and its aims among far-right militia groups including the Proud Boys and Patriot Front, with researchers documenting a 1,425% increase in usage of the phrase “Project 2025” on its monitored channels since June 30.
“All the attention has set off a surge of interest in Project 2025 on unmoderated platforms where white supremacists congregate,” GPAHE researchers warned.
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