Project 2025 Paints Dystopian Future for LGBTQ+ Americans
A conversation with Erin Reed, trans journalist, activist, and influencer
Today is the last day of Pride month, and if you’ve ever wondered why Pride month is still necessary, just go read Project 2025 for yourself.
In it, the ultra right-wing authors paint a dystopian future for queer Americans.
I spoke to Erin Reed, a trans journalist, activist, and influencer. Full disclosure, Erin is a personal friend of mine. She began dating my friend Zooey Zephyr before Zooey served her first term in the Montana State House. Later, Erin stood by Zooey’s side as Republican legislators booted Zooey from the House floor for defending trans youth against a bill that would make it impossible for them to access the health care they needed.
“If you pass this bill, then I hope when you bow your heads a night, you see the blood on your hands,” Zooey said, her voice unwavering.
I took Erin and Zooey’s engagement photos a couple of months ago, and I’m just going to stop and include those here because there is nothing better than seeing two fierce women who are putting so much good in the world in love. Scroll to the bottom for Erin and Zooey’s romantic engagement story.
In Project 2025, conservatives want love and authenticity like Zooey and Erin’s to disappear. Project 2025 is a guidebook to undo many hard-won civil rights advances for vulnerable groups, but it targets LGBTQ+ Americans perhaps most aggressively.
It attacks gender-affirming care for youth, calling it mutilation. It puts barriers around queer individuals’ abilities to participate in activities with their peers like competitive sports. It censors what information they can access about themselves from public libraries and schools. It criminalizes teachers and mentors who affirm them.
During a recent rally, Trump said, “On Day 1, I will sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing Critical Race Theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content onto our children.”
Most young people haven’t known a world without Trumpism. A person who was 9 in 2015 when Trump first came onto the political scene is 18 this November. They’ll be voting in their first election this year. They might not understand that these sudden authoritarian attacks on their personhood are not normal or that safety and bodily autonomy is available to them. They can’t imagine a world where they are able to do what they want with their lives and bodies. For 50 years, the right to have an abortion was protected in the United States before Trump followed through with the promise he made to evangelicals to put three justices on the Supreme Court who would overturn Roe.
Project 2025 takes us back to a time when queer people had to hide who they were or be met with ostracism, financial instability, criminalization and violence. Those times birthed Stonewall and Pride and were evidence of queer resilience, but just because most of us survived them and came out more empowered, doesn’t mean we should have to go back to living in them.
I’ll take stability and autonomy over resilience please.
“Project 2025, if it ever came into being, would set us back decades,” Erin says. “They would use laws called ‘three articles of clothing’ laws that would say you had to be wearing three articles of clothing that match your assigned sex at birth at all times. If not, you could be arrested.”
At the same time, Erin says, Project 2025 takes the United States into uncharted territory, erasing all of the checks on the office of the president that were established by our nation’s founders. We have a democracy. Donald Trump and Project 2025 want to make it a dictatorship.
“We see an office of the president that can investigate and jail its political opponents, that can fire anyone who doesn’t want to comply with a discriminatory regulation or who doesn’t want to do exactly what the president says they need to do.”
Project 2025 will:
Ban all DEI programs through all federal departments and force states to abandon them as well
Outlaw gender-affirming care for minors
Eliminate all trans health care for service members
Criminalize physicians, teachers, coaches, and librarians who support trans youth
Force people to wear clothes and present themselves as their sex assigned at birth
Take federal funding from schools and programs that allow young people to socially transition
Remove civil rights protections for queer couples
Allow adoption and foster care agencies to discriminate against LGBTQ+ folks
Remove a parents’ right to make health care decisions for their own child
Make it more difficult for a queer couple to walk down the street holding hands or living life as two people in love
Do you need something to regulate your nervous system after that? Here’s more engagement photos:
If you want to know what it’s like to live under the authoritarian regime Project 2025 has planned for all of us, I’ll tell you about Zooey and Erin’s engagement. It’s long, but I promise it has a happy ending.
When the school my kids attend tried to get rid of the Gay Straight Alliance, a bunch of parents got together to fight it. We were joined by the ACLU, the Human Rights Council, and other anti-discrimination organizations, but the school board gave us a fight. We spent the majority of the summer in 2021 meeting with lawyers, publishing letters to the editor, and attending school board meetings. Ultimately, we won because, duh. Schools can’t allow some extracurricular clubs like Fellowship of Christian Athletes, but not others based on some people’s narrow view of Christianity.
But the damage had been done. Months of seeing the conflict play out in local news segments demoralized the students who were part of the club. The students felt they weren’t wanted and didn’t belong — the exact opposite of the goal of the GSA. The club shrank in size to only a few students at the start of the school year. As parents, we decided to throw a Queer Prom to give the students a place to be their authentic selves. We invited kids from nearby schools and even hosted an Adult Night to help fundraise for the Teen Night. What we thought was going to be a tiny event with maybe only 50 or so students became a huge party with over 850 attendees between adult and teen night.
Queer Prom is now a staple in my community and something everyone looks forward to.
Days before Queer Prom in 2023, Zooey called me to ask if she could propose to her girlfriend at the event. I’d only met Erin once before, but I had seen how they supported each other during everything Zooey had been through at the legislature. Republican lawmakers had done everything they could think of to silence Zooey, and we both felt like Queer Prom was the perfect place to show everyone that their love was not going to be shoved back into the closet.
Those of us on the Queer Prom committee decided to get Zooey to the stage by crowning her Prom Queen to honor her work as a trans legislator. That gave Zooey the platform she needed to publicly declare her love for Erin and get down on one knee to propose. My eyes filled with tears, making it hard to record the beautiful moment on my phone. I’m so glad my friend David was there with his camera!
The room erupted in cheers — everyone celebrating love, friendship, authenticity, and inclusion.
Project 2025 makes a love like Erin and Zooey’s a crime. We have to see that it’s defeated.
Onward, Democracy Defenders!
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