By Susan Dunlap

Posted September 26, 2024

 

Project 2025 would, if implemented, reverse decades of advances in LGBTQ rights and jeopardize access to gender-affirming healthcare.

 

The conservative policy agenda, Project 2025, lays out an agenda for the executive branch, should former President Donald Trump retake the White House in November. Put together by the Heritage Foundation, the document provides a plan to reshape the executive branch to consolidate power. The authors, including members of Trump’s administration, wrote into the document a promotion of heteronormative families, the promotion of a heteronormative “father” and says that it views LGBTQ equity as penalizing marriage, disincentivizing work and subsidizing single motherhood. On its first page, Project 2025 equates the LGBTQ community with pornography.

 

Jack Teter, the regional director of governmental affairs for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, said the document calls on the U.S. Health and Human Services Department “to be very clear that trans people don’t exist.” He said it asserts that men and women have biological realities and that men and women are the natural family structure.

 

“This is bad and it intersects with the obsession of controlling people’s private lives,” Teter said.

 

Marshall Martínez, executive director of Equality New Mexico, told NM Political Report that the document is written with a construct based entirely on gender stereotypes and sexism.

 

“It means, at the very base level, that every family is expected to have a mother and father and that queer people can’t have families. We aren’t supposed to exist,” Martínez said.

 

Teter said the tone of the document when contemplating transgender individuals is “sneering.”

 

“It’s very clear in its derision of trans people and gender-affirming healthcare,” Teter said.

 

The document would require the U.S. Health and Human Services to redefine the word “sex” to exclude from its current definition gender identity and sexual orientation.

 

This is bad and it intersects with the obsession of controlling people’s private lives.”
Jack Teter, Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains

 

One way the document would promote its heteronormative family agenda is through mandating that clinics that receive Title X funding would be required to provide information about the importance of marriage and to make marriage referrals.

 

It also mandates that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention end all gender identity data collection. Martínez said that New México, currently by executive order, is collecting voluntary data on the LGBTQ community on state forms but without the CDC’s data collection, New México would have nothing to compare to itself to understand where there are gaps and where New México can be a model for the LGBTQ community.

 

Gender-affirming healthcare

 

Teter said gender-affirming healthcare means many things, from finding a provider to look at a sore throat who “doesn’t make you feel weird” to a transgender individual seeking hormonal therapies or other forms of care. He said that the science says that transgender individuals should be allowed to transition.

 

 

“Not being able to live a self-determined life is deadly,” he said.

Jazmyn Taitingfong, reproductive rights and gender equity attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of New México, said in an email that Project 2025, if implemented, “would gut access to essential healthcare like…gender-affirming care.”

 

Noreen Farrell, executive director of Equal Rights Advocates, a nonprofit based in California, said Project 2025 aims to “really curb access to gender-affirming care for trans and nonbinary folks.”

 

“It would limit the ability to provide any gender-affirming related care, impact lots of safety care providers, hospitals, recipients of the funding stream,” Teter said.

 

Another way the plan would impact gender-affirming care would be through promoting what many call “junk science” through the National Institutes of Health. The document requires NIH to fund studies into short-term and long-term “negative effects” of gender-affirming care, including puberty blockers, hormonal therapies and surgery.

 

Martínez said that the authors of Project 2025 “don’t care about science.”

 

“The proof is that the mandate is starting from a place of confirmation bias. It is instructing a federal agency to assume that gender-affirming healthcare is harmful and they must prove how and why. That’s their starting point. They’re assuming there is something wrong with trans people and affirming who they are is a dangerous thing,” Martinez said.

 

Teter said ordering the NIH to “change what the science says is political propaganda.”

 

“Bad science and bad medicine can kill people,” he said.

 

Medicaid

 

Martínez said another particularly frightening aspect of Project 2025, should it become federal policy, is that it calls for significant cuts in Medicaid. He said that most transgender individuals receive their gender-affirming healthcare from the University of New México in the Albuquerque metropolitan area.

 

“But will UNM have money to maintain those providers if they have to cut a whole bunch of services from their budget if they lose federal funding [through direct Medicaid funding to hospitals]? This is where it becomes a real danger to queer and trans people. It would be harmful across the board but especially in gender-affirming care,” Martínez said.

 

Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham spoke to NM Political Report about the potential for Project 2025 to cut federal funding for healthcare, both reproductive healthcare and gender-affirming care, as a way to force states, like New México, to align with the policies.

 

She said New México would fare better than many states because of its endowment funds that come from the state’s extractive industries. She said that money could be redirected. But redistributing funds from the Land Grant Permanent Fund would require a constitutional amendment. She mentioned other state funds, like the tax severance fund, which the legislature could tap without going to the voters.

 

Lujan Grisham said that the federal debt caused by the plan’s call to cut taxes for corporations and billionaires, plus the growing federal deficit, would mean the federal government, and the states, would have to “stop spending money on social security, veterans, reproductive rights, child care and education.” She said it would impact “any protections on freedoms,” including the LGBTQ community, as well as others.

 

“It is literally ripping apart the social fabric of this country,” she said.

 

She called it a “complete abandonment of the federal government’s responsibility to anybody.” She said it’s important for everyone to know “what’s at stake.”

 

“I do want people to know that states like ours have done a lot and elected individuals in both parties intend to protect these freedoms,” she said.

 

Defunding Planned Parenthood and other abortion clinics

 

Martínez said Project 2025’s call to defund Planned Parenthood and other abortion clinics would also have an enormous impact on the LGBTQ community. Martínez said Planned Parenthood was the first place he found a provider who didn’t flinch when he said he is gay.

 

“I’ve never seen a healthcare provider who was as welcoming to me as Planned Parenthood,” Martínez said.

 

But in addition, Martínez said that the HIV epidemic is not over. He said reproductive healthcare providers in New Mexico are the largest providers of HIV prevention medication, as well as Sexually Transmitted Infection treatment and prevention. He said that in a state that already has a significant provider shortage, the potential loss of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains clinics and other reproductive healthcare clinics would mean even fewer providers shouldering an even larger patient need to provide these types of care.

 

Teter said defunding Planned Parenthood would have enormous impacts on reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare as Planned Parenthood is one of the largest providers of family planning services.

 

“They don’t care whether we live or die. I don’t know what to say,” Teter said.

 

Education

 

The document calls for public schools to excise any discussion of the LGBTQ community from curricula.

 

Taitingfong said in her email that the plan would “censor books in our schools, threatening our children’s right to learn.”

 

Project 2025 would reverse Title IX gains. The Biden administration recently implemented new rules to Title IX that expand protections for LGBTQ individuals, but a court order is prohibiting some educational institutions in New México from implementing the rules.

 

Martinez said rolling back Title IX gains to prohibit discrimination in educational settings on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation “opens the door for educational systems to reinforce those pretty terrible stereotypes.”

 

“And build up more barriers that prevent queer and trans people from having equal access,” Martínez said.

 

Adoption

 

Project 2025 would also reverse HHS policies intended to prevent discrimination against same-sex couples who want to adopt or foster children.

 

Martínez said the U.S. Census Bureau found in 2020 that same-sex couples are three times more likely to adopt children than opposite sex couples.

 

“What could possibly be the beneficial outcome of taking away the opportunity for those three times more likely to say yes to that venture out of the equation?” Martínez asked.

 

Martínez said that there is a subtext to this discourse, which is that the heteronormative family structure promoted in Project 2025 must also be white and Christian and “engaged in the local community in a way that this moral police deems appropriate.” He said it is harmful to LGBTQ individuals because it “delegitimatizes our contribution to society and family structures.”

 

 

“But it’s even more dangerous for the kids who need a home,” he said.

 

Martínez said one outcome of such federal policy and mandates is that it encourages violence toward the LGBTQ community. He said an FBI report showed that in states where same-sex marriage was banned, hate crimes increased.

 

“When we say to all of society, queer people shouldn’t have families, we say they are not worthy. It’s a dog whistle to say, ‘if you hurt them, it won’t be that big of a deal.’ We’ve seen the way violence increases in communities when that conversation happens,” he said.

 

 

Susan Dunlap is a Reproductive Justice Reporter for New Mexico Political Report. This story was originally published by New Mexico Political Report.