With the election just days away, the specter of a second Trump administration looms over the LGBTQ+ community. While Trump’s maniacal vision for what makes America great again is bad enough, the possibility of implementing the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for autocracy, Project 2025, is even worse.

The 900-page manifesto, conjured up by nearly 150 former Trump administration officials, would mandate a “biblically-based” definition of marriage and family; rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics; outlaw explicit adult images and imprison their producers and distributors; and classify school librarians who resist book bans as registered sex offenders.

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Furthermore, the plan would ban abortifacient drugs; expel transgender service members from the military; ban the Pride flag at U.S embassies; and excise “the noxious tenets of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology'” from curricula “in every public school in the country” and remove all mentions of gender- and sexual variant people from federal agency texts… and so much more.

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With that in mind, LGBTQ Nation spoke with Marie-Amélie George, a professor of law at Wake Forest University and a queer legal scholar and historian whose work focuses on the American LGBTQ rights movement, to ask what a positive, queer alternative to Project 2025 might look like — and if it’s already here.

LGBTQ Nation: The Biden administration has gone a long way toward building what could be called “a queer Project 2025.” In fact, you could make an argument that there already is a one, built over many years with work left to be done. Project 2025 could be seen as a response, in many ways, to the queer version already under construction. What are some of the things Biden has done, and that a Harris administration could do, to further that vision?

Prof. Marie-Amélie George: I love the idea of building an affirmative vision for what the future should look like, as opposed to being on the defensive and responding.

As for the existence of a Queer Project 2025, I really like that framework. Advocates have always had an affirmative vision for the community’s rights, and they may have had to play defense throughout the years, but the affirmative agenda has remained present and essential to their work.

I think Harris will be hamstrung in much the same way as the Biden administration, by the fact that Congress will probably be split, right? So there’s only so much that a particular president can do. We focus on presidential elections, but I wish there was as much attention to electing senators and congresspeople because a lot of these things would require legislation to pass. And it used to be that administrative agencies could take things up, but with the recent decisions from the Supreme Court, that is less possible.

So I do think that legislatively, Harris could propose and encourage the enactment of all sorts of laws that would provide funding for inclusive curricula, provide funding to support gender-affirming care, so that insurance companies would have to cover gender-affirming care, so that federal health insurance programs — Medicare, Medicaid — would have to do it. More support for trans inmates. The DOJ [Department of Justice] could certainly consider best practices for how to deal with the over-representation of queer people in the criminal justice system.

Right now, the federal government incentivizes abstinence-only education by providing huge funding for it. It could provide equal funding, if not more, to support queer-inclusive curricula and curricula that teach students that queer people exist, that they are part of society and that they need to be respected. That would have a huge effect.

The Biden administration issued guidelines interpreting Title IX to include sexual orientation and gender identity within its ambit, and that certainly helped push the needle along. What Congress could do would be to enact the Equality Act and enshrine queer rights into federal law. That would certainly be a positive step forward.

What are some of the Supreme Court decisions that have helped build the foundation for a Queer Project 2025?

What’s really interesting is that the Supreme Court decisions I talk about post-dated all of these state and local changes on the ground. It was about the fact that people had already created families, and the marriage laws harmed the households that states had decided to protect with their custody standards, with their adoption laws, with their educational policies.

[The Supreme Court] overwhelmingly tends to track public opinion, as opposed to coming out ahead of it. They sometimes go against it, and their decisions can have a huge effect on the ground that changes how people think. But often they are not at the forefront of change.

I think it is wonderful that Congress enacted the Respect for Marriage Act [but] I don’t think it solves all of the questions around marriage equality. But it is really striking that Congress enacted the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 and then when marriage equality seemed to be on the table, after the Dobbs decision, they enacted a law protecting it. That tells you that some of the attacks from the right on queer rights just don’t have the same resonance that they used to.

What do you think accounts for that?

Time and experience. One of the great triumphs of the marriage equality movement is that it made Americans much more familiar with same-sex couples than they ever had been before. And there are lots of criticisms of the marriage equality movement, some of which I share: They depicted a very specific vision of queer life, one centered around middle-class domesticity, and so it made a segment of the queer population seem more familiar to many Americans than ever before. But that had an effect. There is much stronger support for marriage equality than there was before the movement started, before its educational campaign started.

But while one of the great successes of the marriage equality movement was familiarizing Americans with a certain subset of the queer community, there certainly needs to be that same campaign for other parts of the queer community, and having support for that would go a really long way to improving the backdrop on which the fight for rights happens.

Who are some of the groups within the community that need that support?

Certainly trans individuals, nonbinary individuals, pansexual, bisexual. Really, the marriage equality movement was focused on gender-conforming queer couples, same-sex couples, and the queer community is much broader than that.

One of the ironies of Project 2025 is that it’s the product of the freedoms that liberalism grants to people with different points of view, but its implementation would take away those very freedoms of thought by imposing a “unitary executive” on the United States — in other words, a dictatorship. How do we guard against authoritarianism while maintaining a liberal democracy?

I think one of the things about our system that helps check against that is the fact that we have many systems in place to balance out the different branches of government, and a federalist system that balances state powers with federal government. Sometimes that is good for liberals and progressives, sometimes that is good for conservatives. But it is the fact that it creates equilibrium that keeps the democracy going.

The far-right has managed to co-mingle the issues that inspired the Black Lives Matter movement with transgender rights, drag, pronouns, critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) into a toxic “anti-woke” agenda. Should the left take some responsibility for asking for too much too soon, or is the backlash part of an inevitable ebb and flow?

I think backlash is a constant, right? Whenever any group pushes for change, there is going to be a response. That has been true historically, certainly in legal rights’ battles, and sometimes we see the friction between groups that have allied together.

So, when suffragists allied with abolitionists, there was friction between them about whether one side was pushing too far, too fast, and one was leaving the other behind. Sometimes it’s friction within groups in terms of strategy. So, in the Civil Rights movement, there was an incredible amount of friction over whether it was important to emphasize middle-class respectability or the fundamental dignity of all human beings, or the more radical claim for Black Power, or a bid just for equality.

When you look back, it’s sort of crazy to think that people would once debate whether African-Americans deserved the same respect and rights as white Americans. So times change because people push on the boundaries, and there is always a response. But that doesn’t mean that pushing on the boundaries is wrong. Now, it might be that the strategies, the tactics, might not be efficient or might not be effective, and it’s worth reevaluating that over time, but it certainly can’t be the case that you have to not challenge the status quo when something is wrong.

We saw Bud Light get together with Dylan Mulvaney, and the massive backlash that followed, albeit a product in large part of manufactured outage on the right. Is visibility and acceptance just a matter of coming up with more and more Dylan Mulvaneys over time and getting them out there?

I’m reminded of, sometime in the ’90s, ABC aired thirtysomething, and there was a brief pan to a same-sex couple in bed, and they lost millions of dollars in advertising, but within a few years, there were regular gay characters on major sitcoms. So yes, backlash happens, and it means that others might move more slowly, but I do think that it opens the door to other change that can happen.

So Hollywood is an ally in that effort, as well.

So, it’s interesting, because, yes, the media matters a lot, but a lot of the change that happened on the ground for the LGBTQ+ community in general came from people just becoming more familiar with their neighbors, their colleagues, etc. It’s a challenge, particularly for the trans community, as a smaller percentage of the U.S. population, but I don’t want to discount the importance of personal contact.

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