What is coming in the next four years when it comes to combating the Christian nationalist attack on LGBTQIA-plus rights? Luckily for our ability to organize against another year of escalating political attacks, there has been a clearly published manifesto of what the Christian nationalist movement intends to do with the next conservative administration: Project 2025.
This behemoth of a document created by the Heritage Foundation covers a systematic plan to overhaul the federal government, installing conservative Christian policies across every aspect of American life. While Trump, as a candidate, tried to distance himself from this agenda, his campaign promises and rhetoric say otherwise. Not to mention that many down-ballot elections play just as large of a role. Between Project 2025, President-elect Trump’s direct statements, recent legislation trends and pure data, we can read the tea leaves with relative confidence and plan accordingly.
Consider this a fair warning: This blog is intended to provide a thousand-foot view of everything we need to look at. And don’t worry — you’ll also continue to see me write more in-depth on these topics in the coming months.
So buckle up, grab a snack and let’s get into it.
Nondiscrimination protections
If you were to ask me what the two most critical areas to organize around in the next four years are, I would say nondiscrimination protections and health care. The theocratic movement has already invested heavily in these areas, and there is some significant precedent to allow these trends to continue.
Project 2025 calls for the removal of terms like “sexual orientation,” “gender identity,” “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” and “gender” from all federal rules, regulations, contracts, grants and legislation. The document also calls for the federal government to roll back the landmark Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County, which extended Title VII’s workplace sex discrimination protections to protect against anti-trans discrimination. A repeal would place the health and economic security of transgender people at risk, as well as set the stage to roll back protections for cisgender women who do not conform to particular standards of femininity. Furthering this risk are the calls to rescind all federal regulations prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics, as well as to redefine sex discrimination to only refer to the “biological binary” of male and female as assigned at birth.
In state legislatures across the country we have already seen an exponential growth in proposed bills and passage of laws seeking to redefine terms like “sex discrimination” and “gender” in order to actively define transgender people out of the law. This trend will likely continue, as religion-inspired extremist groups and politicians become emboldened in coming years.
Given recent events, I want to pause for a moment and explain what lawyers are actually talking about when we are discussing sex discrimination. To bring it down to its absolute most basic level, sex discrimination analysis asks if the thing that determined the outcome was a person’s sex assigned at birth. In Bostock, the court noted that the action that led to the employees being terminated was only considered a problem because of the person’s assigned sex at birth. The only determining factor, for the purposes of discrimination, was birth sex. That same basic construction is used for nondiscrimination protections on the basis of sexual orientation. You cannot discriminate against a man for marrying a man when women who marry men are not discriminated against. There are complications and exceptions to this, but on the 100-level, that is what we are discussing.
Those who want to overturn Bostock by adding this new legislative definition of “sex discrimination” want to explicitly exclude trans people from anti-discrimination protections. It has nothing to do with “defending science.” And we know this because despite what some legal scholars will claim, we also do not look purely at the text of any given law to determine its meaning, we also look at the intent of the legislative body when they passed the law. Many of these bills are named the “Women’s Bill of Rights,” a title chosen in specific reference to the idea that “woman” exclusively equals “assigned female at birth.” The recorded statements on the floor of legislatures, alongside public statements given by lawmakers, all inform how law gets interpreted. President-elect Trump even outright said at a recent Turning Point USA event at the end of December that: “It will be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female” and that “we are going to end the transgender lunacy.”
Beyond pure sex discrimination, I am also predicting that we will see the idea of characterizing religious-based discrimination as “speech” as opposed to “free exercise” continue to pop up.
Many of you may recall the 303 Creative case, in which the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a religious business owner seeking a preemptive exemption to Colorado’s anti-discrimination law so that she would be able to discriminate against same-sex couples looking to hire someone to design a wedding website. While the business owner’s objection was in fact a religious one, she recharacterized it as not wanting to be compelled to put her name on speech she disagreed with. We’re also seeing this tactic show up in attempts to undermine bans on conversion therapy — more on that in a moment.
Anti-discrimination laws are critical for protecting a secular democracy. In our current cultural moment, these laws and their neutral application play a critical role in preventing Christian nationalists from creating a second underclass of citizens consisting of anyone who lives their lives in a way that they disagree with. Anti-discrimination laws are also at the core of protecting basic human dignity. No person should have to worry about being turned away from a business, employment opportunity, housing situation, school or other publicly accessible resource for no reason other than who they are. Whether that be gender, sexuality, race, religion (or lack thereof), disability, national origin or genetic history, everyone in this country should have the same fundamental right to the dignity of existence.
Health care
Moving on to one of the other major areas of concern: health care protections. Project 2025 and those aligned with it do not shy away from this issue. We will continue to see attempts to eliminate access to gender-affirming care for both youths and adults. Looking at other trends and public rhetoric, I think there is also a strong likelihood that we will see attacks on access to sexual health care on religious grounds, in particular access to the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS.
Medical privacy rights are in more danger than ever, with Project 2025 and other conservative groups calling for government officials and other organizations to more easily obtain access to private medical information, such as the names and addresses of people who have sought out gender-affirming and reproductive care. This closely mirrors attempts by conservative attorneys general to access lists of transgender patients in various hospital systems, such as the Vanderbilt Hospital system, which acquiesced to a request for transgender patient information in 2022. Access to these records will make it easier for the government to prosecute people who seek out certain types of health care as they continue to criminalize actions that fall outside of the theocratic norm, including reproductive, sexual health and end-of-life care. This could also result in even higher rates of discrimination and violence for transgender people, as these lists could potentially be published, publicly outing people who would not typically disclose their transgender status.
In addition to the goals stated in Project 2025, we can also assume that current trends in restrictions on LGBTQIA-plus health care will continue. Half of states have already banned or significantly restricted access to best-practice transgender care for minors, and some have also moved on to restricting access to gender-affirming care for adults as well. We will see the Supreme Court rule on the issue of gender-affirming care for minors this summer (read my analysis of the case here). When it comes to restrictions for adults, rather than outright bans like we’re seeing for youths, we’re seeing what I call “the abortion playbook,” which I’ll be covering in my next blog. Restricting public funds from going toward gender-affirming care has already popped up in some states, along with restrictions on receiving care via telemedicine, stringent waiting periods beyond what is medically recommended, and coercive “informed consent” requirements are all once again making an appearance as methods of preventing access to theologically unpopular health care. Restrictions on interstate travel to receive health care and “aiding and abetting” laws will also likely continue to explode in popularity, as evidenced by Tennessee’s recent move to make it a Class C felony to take a minor across state lines to receive gender-affirming care (which blows the mask right off of the “parental rights” argument).
We should not only be concerned on the state level, however. At the tail end of his administration, despite sweeping promises to veto harmful anti-trans legislation, President Biden signed a defense bill that, in key part for this conversation, banned access to gender-affirming care for the children of military service members. This is the first federal anti-LGBTQIA-plus bill to pass since the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 and comes at a moment when many Democrats and other liberals are moving away from trans rights as a form of electoral strategy (despite the significant data that shows that they should be doing the opposite.)
However, it’s not just gender-affirming care that we need to be worried about. We should be bracing ourselves for restrictions on access to treatments for HIV/AIDS, as evidenced by the attack on the ACA’s coverage mandate for the prophylactic medication PrEP in Braidwood Management v. Becerra. This case is essentially a repeat of the infamous Hobby Lobby case. It would allow religious employers to be exempted from the requirement that health insurance policies cover this medication because they believe that, like birth control, covering PrEP promotes behavior that violates their religious convictions. We will likely see PrEP also follow the abortion playbook, with bans on federal funds and exceptions to insurance coverage requirements making the medication increasingly inaccessible. I cannot emphasize enough how disastrous the potential consequences of reducing access to PrEP and other HIV/AIDS treatments could be. Without coverage for HIV/AIDS treatment, the United States would risk a repeat of the AIDS epidemic that wiped out an entire generation of gay men and trans women, the specter of which hangs over LGBTQIA-plus community spaces to this day.
Attacks on nontraditional ways of having children, such as surrogacy, IVF and donor insemination impact not only LGBTQIA-plus couples but should also be recognized as being at risk for everyone, especially in states that are targeting other pathways to bodily autonomy like abortion, birth control and gender-affirming care. These are major pathways for same-sex couples to have children. When taken in conjunction with the various ways LGBTQIA-plus individuals have been restricted from being adoptive or foster parents, they are being targeted in no small part as a way to limit the privilege of having children to legally married heterosexual couples who meet the conservative Christian standard of parenthood.
Additionally, we will need to keep a close eye on the expansion of religious health care exemptions, especially as religious hospital systems, particularly Catholic hospital systems, continue to expand throughout the United States. I covered this in detail with citations in a previous post a little over a year ago, so I will only summarize the key points here.
Nearly one in six acute care hospital beds in the United States are in Catholic hospitals, and many people, especially in rural areas, have little to no practical access to secular health care systems. Religious health care exemptions are nothing new, and while they have been primarily focused on exempting hospital systems from providing certain types of reproductive and end-of-life care, the Catholic Church historically has also utilized these exemptions from providing HIV/AIDS care and prevention. Now that transgender people are the popular political punching bag, we’re seeing the Catholic Church explicitly target gender-affirming care in its political and theological actions. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops took aim at transgender health care last year despite opposition from its own medical advisors. Much like the improper influence the bishops have exerted on reproductive rights over the years, they are putting much of their political weight behind preventing access to gender-affirming care across the nation.
The last major health care trend to keep an eye on will be the legality and application of conversion therapy, in both the same-sex and transgender contexts. At the time of writing, 28 states have full or partial bans on conversion therapy for minors, 18 states have no law or policy regarding conversion therapy, three states have preliminary injunctions preventing the enforcement of a conversion therapy ban, and my home state of Indiana has gone as far as prohibiting local level bans on conversion therapy. The Christian nationalist movement has long been the largest proponent of conversion therapy in the United States, sometimes referred to as “ex-gay,” “reparative” or “gender exploration” therapy. Most recently, conversion therapists have tried to claim that because their primary mode of “therapy” is talk therapy, their practice is protected speech and, therefore, cannot be banned under the First Amendment. Thankfully, the Supreme Court has refused to hear this type of case, denying cert to a case out of Washington state in December 2023.
“Gender exploration” therapy, which opponents sometimes refer to as “anything but trans” therapy, is about to come to the forefront, however.
In November 2023 reporters from Mother Jones attended the annual conference for the “Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity,” an association for conversion therapy practitioners that describes itself as a “professional and scientific organization” with “Judeo-Christian values” focused on promoting and defending the practice of conversion therapy. One of the biggest talking points of this conference? Transgender youth. The mainstream standard of care for youths questioning their gender identity has been the affirming model, which encourages developmentally appropriate exploration through outward presentation, pronouns and names, with measured use of medical interventions such as puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy when deemed appropriate by the child’s care team and family. The “Alliance” and other conversion therapy proponents, however, advocate for therapeutic methods that seek to convince children that they are merely “confused” and bring them back in line with the gender identity that aligns with their sex assigned at birth. This approach to transgender youth in particular is going to continue to be a trend, especially as state legislatures begin to revisit and refine bans on gender-affirming care. I believe it will be highly likely that states will follow in Nebraska’s footsteps, where patients under the age of 19 are required to attend a set amount of hours of therapy that “does not merely affirm” their gender identity — in other words, not just offering conversion therapy as an option, but making it a requirement for all families, regardless of religious or political beliefs.
I should take a moment to reemphasize that the science behind best practices in trans health care is clear. Gender-affirming care, as we understand it now, has been in use for a century and has a lower regret rate than both hip replacements and Harry Potter tattoos. Puberty blockers have been in use for decades, and there are already high standards in place for informed consent for all gender-affirming procedures. The attack on gender-affirming care is an attempt to eliminate transgender people that fundamentally misunderstand transness on its most basic level because a culturally Christian worldview demands a strict gender binary with no room for nuance or complexity.
The government should not be involved in determining what someone does with their own body, and it certainly should not be requiring patients to engage in a religious form of “therapy” that is connected with worse mental health outcomes, including an increased risk of suicide. From LGBTQIA-plus care to reproductive care and beyond, health care surveillance is a real and present danger in the coming years that we need to be prepared for.
Military service
Thirteen years after the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and only three years since the lifting of the first Trump administration’s ban on transgender service members, we are going to see a return of policies that tell LGBTQIA-plus individuals that they are inherently unfit for military service. Assuming this effort follows the format suggested in Project 2025, this will start with a purging of transgender people from the military, followed by HIV-positive service members, and then finally out gay, lesbian and bisexual service members.
The number of LGBTQIA-plus service members is difficult to estimate for a few reasons. First and foremost, the Department of Defense has not been the most thorough in tracking that data, so estimates have to be made primarily through external surveys. One such example includes a 2014 survey from the Williams Institute at UCLA, which estimated the number of trans service members at the time to be around 15,000.
This lack of precise data should not prevent us, however, from being concerned about the steps being taken to remove LGBTQIA-plus people from the military and what it means in the context of state/church separation. In a country that, at least very generally, views military service as the highest form of patriotism (conceptually this is arguable, but that does not take away from that being the predominant cultural messaging), who we allow to serve tells us a lot about who the government believes is worthy of respect. There are some conditions that may legitimately preclude someone from military service, due to the real, actual physical demands. But being gay or trans is not one of them. For as long as humans have had militaries, there have been gay and trans soldiers who have done their jobs and done their jobs well. The U.S. military has not self-destructed since the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the lifting of the trans service ban, and has no signs of doing so any time soon. Banning LGBTQIA-plus people from service is pure morality signaling, telling a group of people who are otherwise perfectly fit to serve that they are inherently unworthy.
When you view this in context with the call in many conservative circles to once again prohibit women from serving in combat roles, the Christo-facism of it all becomes crystal clear. Fascist movements always depend on hierarchies — that’s one of the key defining features. By painting women as too weak to be able to serve in combat, the military sends the cultural message that they are “lesser” than their male counterparts, because they are given no opportunity to earn their place on the basis of ability. The assumption becomes that that ability cannot possibly exist because of something inherent to womanhood. The same underlying logic applies when talking about bans on the basis of sexual orientation or transgender status. Gender deviance, including “aggressive” women and same-sex attraction, is in the eyes of many conservative Christian denominations, the worst sin imaginable and, at best a moral illness in need of eradication. If a military is a reflection of its culture’s views on morality and honor, which I think it is, then steps to reinforce gender stereotypes and hierarchies in our armed forces are a troubling sign, regardless of your opinion on the current role of the U.S. military writ large.
Education
The final major area of concern is education, which, while it overlaps with some of these other areas of concern, particularly anti-discrimination protections, I am still going to cover as its own separate topic.
The rights of LGBTQIA-plus students and educators are going to be at the forefront of this battle, as evidenced by the House rules package for the upcoming Congress. Among other anti-trans legislative priorities is a major move to amend Title IX to ensure that transgender students will not be covered by its anti-discrimination protections. The application of Title IX, which covers discrimination in schools, to the issues faced by transgender students has been a legal grey area for some time, particularly in the post-Bostock era. Frequently, Title IX is interpreted parallel to the interpretation of Title VII, which covers workplace discrimination, and under the Biden administration has been interpreted as a matter of policy to cover transgender students. These protections are very fragile, however, and a formal amendment to Title IX will be extremely difficult to undo. In the meantime, transgender students will be put at risk of physical and emotional harm, from being forced into unsafe bathroom situations, to being subjected to sex-based dress codes to being barred from playing sports with their peers, and more generally being legally categorized as a deviant “other” undeserving of the full protection of the law. Since I’ve already written at length about the complications surrounding sex discrimination laws, I will leave this point only with a note that we should be particularly concerned about the safety of trans youth, who have become punching bags in a political fight that they wield very little power in.
Don’t Say Gay/Trans laws are almost certainly going to have another go-around as claims that LGBTQIA-plus lives are somehow inherently pornographic continue to circle. Banning books that contain LGBTQIA-plus representation, alongside the representation of other marginalized groups, will be a hot topic in the next four years, and I fully anticipate that we will start to see these bans move out from local-level school and library boards to state and federal level bans. Teachers are also going to face even more difficulties surrounding what they can say in the classroom, ranging from off-handedly mentioning a same-sex partner to intervening on behalf of an LGBTQIA-plus student who might be facing religiously motivated bullying, to having to weigh the risks of putting a student in danger versus violating laws that mandate outing students to their parents. Meanwhile, I predict that there will be an increased push in legislation to ensure that teachers who oppose respecting their transgender students, particularly if it is on a religious basis, will be protected from any disciplinary measures at the cost of the student’s well-being. We’ve already seen mixed opinions in federal courts on this topic at both the K-12 and collegiate levels, so like it or not, we need to be prepared for the inevitability that in some way, shape or form, we will be receiving legal clarity on what the rules are and how exactly we need to fight sooner rather than later.
Lastly, while not an area that is exclusive to education, I am also going to place drag/performance/art bans in this category, as they’re primarily justified by the claim that all drag is “inappropriate for children” using the same logic informing book bans and other educational bans. While these bans have not fared well in courts due to being overly broad, I think we will see revised versions of these bans continue as lawmakers attempt to figure out other methods of restricting performances and art that they dislike or find distasteful. It’s important to keep in mind that drag is an incredibly broad art form that has as many styles and genres as there are performers. Not all drag is sexual, and in fact the overwhelming majority of performers are extremely mindful not to perform overtly sexualized routines for audiences where children are present.
Defining drag is incredibly difficult to do without potentially banning everything from transgender people giving any type of speech or performance, to traditional stagings of Shakespeare, to your neighborhood community theater production of “Newsies Jr.,” where it’s all girls because there aren’t enough boys to fill the cast. Under some of these laws, even my fifth-grade Tony-worthy performance as “the innkeeper” in my parish nativity musical would have been considered “drag.” This difficulty will not be a deterrent for many lawmakers, however, whose ultimate goal is to push gender nonconformity out of the public sphere completely.
The good news
If you’ve survived this blog through page eight of my Google doc, congratulations! You’ve made it to the part where we get to talk about the good things happening and what you can do about all of this other than screaming into the endless void.
Certainly, we will see more and more progressive states pass sanctuary laws and otherwise codify protections for LGBTQIA-plus communities in the next four years, particularly as federal protections become more and more fragile. Many experts, including myself, will tell you that right now the big game is going to be at the state and local level, which, while it has not always been the traditional game plan, does mean that it is far easier for everyday people to get involved.
Particularly if you are in a conservative state, now is the time to get involved in the political system, and really, it’s not as difficult or scary as you might think.
If you are worried about not knowing what’s happening in your state, or who to contact about it, check out the FFRF Action Fund website. The Action Fund team does an incredible job of not only tracking what bills are happening and where but organizing action alerts on key pieces of legislation and drafting talking points to make it easier for regular citizens to engage in the process. Go and talk to your state legislators, they want to hear from you and are often far more accessible than you might think. I also cannot emphasize enough how important it is to show up to your local government meetings, especially school and library boards, and make both your presence and your voice known. By speaking up, your neighbors will have the opportunity to see that their community’s “way of life” is a lot more diverse than they think. If you’re eligible, I also always encourage you to consider running for office, especially at the local level! Think back to what your ballot looked like back in November, or even during your last primary election. How many races were uncontested? How many incumbents in your area have been elected unchallenged for years, maybe even decades? Running for office takes work, but it’s a lot more accessible than you think, and in the internet era, there are a ton of resources to assist new candidates. You can be the vote against Christian nationalism; you just have to take the first step.
I am not oblivious to the risk that comes with challenging these types of laws, because I personally face it every single day. But if more people don’t take that risk, these laws will pass, unopposed, with the veneer of false majority rule.
I want to round off this absolute behemoth of a blog with a message of hope because I think we could all use a little bit of optimism right about now. The next four years and beyond are going to be a difficult fight, but I truly and sincerely believe that we can win, so long as we don’t give into apathy and fatalism. Every day we choose to believe that and act accordingly is another day closer to ending this fraught chapter of American history. November was not the end of this fight, but the beginning, and I think we have every tool we need to get through this and be better on the other side. So let’s get to work.
Disclaimer: The views in this column are of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
