By Vida Poyner-Chillious
Howard University News Service
Project 2025, a conservative initiative to reshape federal government policies under a future Republican administration, includes proposed restrictions on the rights of LGBTQIA+ youth, regarding their mental and physical health.
“We are looking for a better understanding of the project because as the election is coming to a close, everything is very uncertain on who the president will be in November,” said Jade Vella, a 2022 alumna of Howard University and former member of CascadeHU, known as the oldest LGBTQ+ advocacy coalition at any HBCU.
The 900-page book “Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership – The Conservative Promise” proposes a rollback of protections that have been gradually expanded for LGBTQIA+ individuals, especially under the Biden administration. It describes the rollbacks primarily in Chapter 14, which focuses on reorganizing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Chapter 11, which calls for dismantling the U.S. Department of Education.
The reinterpretation of Title IX protections proposed in Project 2025 would revert to a traditional definition of sex as a biological factor to emphasize the distinctions between men and women, while promoting policies for “traditional family structures.”
The initiative would exclude gender identity from sex discrimination protections for LGBTQIA+ youth, particularly transgender and nonbinary individuals. Schools and teachers would no longer have the flexibility to use a student’s preferred name or pronouns without written consent from parents.
Grace Anthony, a second-grade teacher in New Jersey, says these ideas may cause tension in a classroom environment.
“I’ve worked in a lot of different schools across Union County with all levels, up to 12th grade, and one of a teacher’s unspoken jobs is to be able to protect — meaning even sometimes protecting students from other students,” Anthony said.
Students can be cruel, she notes, and public schools are often the setting where a child or young adult from sheltered homes experiences their first interactions with mean people.
“I always say my classroom is a ‘no mean zone,’” Anthony explains. “If a student wants to be addressed a certain way, they let me know on the first day and that’s the way they will be addressed in my class.”
In a political brief, the Fenway Institute of Fenway Health argues that research on the removal of proposed restrictions on gender-affirming care could cause mental and physical suffering for LGBTQIA+ youth ages 12 into early 20s. Project 2025 could exacerbate mental health challenges, especially in a population already vulnerable to depression and suicidal ideation, according to the brief titled “Project 2025’s Threat to LGBTQI+ Equality, Safety and Health, Racial and Gender Equity, and Sexual and Reproductive Health.”
“This could mean the loss of access to gender-affirming facilities, participation in sports aligned with their gender identity and potential erasure of their identity in the classroom unless supported by parents, likely leading to increased discrimination against transgender students in educational settings,” Vella adds.
ProPublica and Documented, two investigative news outlets, released private training videos from Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy for political appointees. Roger Severino, former director of the Office for Civil Rights during Donald Trump’s 2016 administration and author of Chapter 14 on Health and Human Services in Project 2025, appeared in a video published two months ago titled, “Passing New Regulations.”
“Regulations have the force and effect of law; it’s not what the founders imagined but it’s what we have now,” Severino said. “We are ruled not so much by a system of laws, but a system of bureaucratic regulations.”
In Project 2025, Severino calls for a return to “traditional family values,” promoting policies that favor heterosexual, nuclear family structures. He goes on to describe new policies about how LGBTQIA+ families will be penalized for nontraditional family configurations, such as single-parent households or same-sex families.
Voters of Tomorrow, which represents Generation Z, breaks down the policies in each chapter in a guide to Project 2025 on its website. VOT includes a section titled “Trump’s Project 2025 on LGBTQ+ and Gender.”
“According to Project 2025,” VOT shares, “an incoming conservative administration will reverse the Biden Administration’s focus on ‘LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work and penalizing marriage and replace such policies with those encouraging marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood and nuclear families.”
However, Erica Anderson, a 42-year-old bank accountant who grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, believes that nontraditional family structures are also healthy.
“Growing up, one of my best friends had two dads, and she was always happy,” Anderson recalled. “She was abandoned by her biological mother and ended up being adopted by them a week after being in CPS custody, and she always feels very blessed that they saved her.”
According to a study from the National Library of Medicine: “Children raised in same-sex parent families fare just as well as children raised in different-sex parent families across a wide spectrum of child well-being measures: academic performance, cognitive development, social development, psychological health, early sexual activity and substance abuse.”
Vella shares her fear for her queer friends and family and the fight that could begin if their rights are taken away under Project 2025.
“Opening students up to harmful stereotypes in schools can build more barriers to equal access for queer and transgender students and possible harm and danger to their lives.”
Vida Poyner-Chillious is a reporter for HUNewsService.com. Her article is from a three-part series titled “Inside Project 2025.”
