Project 2025 Can't Erase Queer Joy
What a Trans Wedding Taught Me About Radical Acceptance and Love
Three years ago, on the eve of Transgender Day of Remembrance, a 22-year-old man walked into a bar in Colorado Springs and opened fire, killing five people and injuring 25 others.
Club Q had been open for two decades and for a while served as the only LGBTQ+ hangout in Colorado Springs, the state’s second most-populous city. Queer folks went there to have drinks, watch drag shows, dance, and socialize.
What drove the shooter to indiscriminately obliterate dancing strangers? Was it vengeance or self defense? A crime of passion? Was it about money, greed, or fame? No. The Club Q shooting was about elimination. The point was erasure. Armed with an AR-style rifle and a 60-round drum magazine, the shooter set out to eliminate queer joy and replace it with terror.
But violence isn’t always bullets and blood. Some of it is verbal, mental, or emotional.
That is the type of violence against the trans community that is spelled out in Project 2025.
“The noxious tenets of … “gender ideology” should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children, who are being taught to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women.”
Project 2025, Page 5
Project 2025 will enforce state-sanctioned erasure of queer visibility by:
Banning all DEI programs through all federal departments and force states to abandon them as well
Outlawing gender-affirming care for minors
Eliminating all trans health care for military service members
Criminalizing physicians, teachers, coaches, and librarians who support trans youth
Forcing people to wear clothes and present themselves as their sex assigned at birth
Taking federal funding from schools and programs that allow young people to socially transition
Removing civil rights protections for queer couples
Allowing adoption and foster care agencies to discriminate against LGBTQ+ folks
Removing a parent’s right to make health care decisions for their own child
Growing up in Evangelicalism, I saw erasure of queerness couched as love. Don't believe me? Okay. If you go to church, let me ask you some questions: Tell me how many LGBTQ+ individuals go to your church. Are they married? Do they have families? Are they visible? Do they serve in leadership roles? Are they allowed to just be there, accepted and unchanged? Are their perspectives and life experiences pursued? Are they valued? Wanted?
See, that’s my point. Most evangelical churches have engaged in social erasure of trans lives.
Social erasure looks like:
A church community threatening to exile a church member if they don’t “repent” of the queerness.
A friend group using social pressure to force an LGBTQ+ person into celibacy.
Telling a child they must wear gendered clothes or engage in gendered activities instead of liking what they like.
A queer teen attempting suicide because they were bullied.
A couple who can’t walk down the street holding hands for fear of violence.
If a friend confided to me their spouse treats them the way conservatives treat LGBTQ+ people, I would call that what it is: gaslighting, toxicity, and abuse. Why should any of us give a pass to religious institutions that are supposed to be about abundant grace and generosity?
And why should any of us accept it from our lawmakers?
In the summer of 2021, I decided I wouldn’t accept it. When my local school board tried to ban the Gay Straight Alliance, a bunch of parents got together to fight the ban. We collaborated with the ACLU, the Human Rights Council, and other anti-discrimination organizations. We met with lawyers, published letters to the editor, and attended school board meetings, where some proponents of the ban showed up armed. While we won the battle, 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 ostracized and isolated — the exact opposite of the goal of the GSA.
So parents 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.
During Queer Prom last year, my friend Zooey Zephyr, Montana’s first trans lawmaker, dropped to her knee and proposed to girlfriend Erin Reed, a journalist who covers legislative attacks on trans Americans. Both women have fought for equality and justice. Both women have been attacked in the most dreadful, appalling, dehumanizing ways by some of the worst people conservatives have platformed: Matt Walsh, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Chaya Raichik.
Yet their bravery is as relentless as their love for each other.
Two nights ago, I got to witness the next chapter of their love story. Their wedding took place in the same venue as Queer Prom — a large white barn-looking building with a high roofline and wooden rafters. When we were there for Queer Prom, the room was decorated to look like a big tent to go along with the circus theme.
But for their wedding, it was draped in soft shades of lilac and lit by twinkling candles. The tables were drenched rich purple and navy linen. Purple roses and cream-colored hydrangeas spilled over the sides of large glass jars for the center pieces. The room was transformed into a lavender haze just like we have been transformed by Zooey and Erin’s grit and grace.
When the officiant — GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis — invited Erin to say her vows, Erin said, “Each day you uncover new corners of my soul, making more room for love than I ever thought possible. To put the infinity of that into words feels impossible, but I’ll try.” She went on to describe the gentle music of Zooey’s voice, the fierceness of her advocacy for trans youth, and the way she fit into Erin’s life as if she’d always been there. Zooey sobbed and gasped, visibly moved.
Nothing can suppress a monumental love like that. Not Project 2025. Not internet idiots who cheated on their high school science tests but still think they have the authority to speak about someone else’s biology. Not the darkest forms of hatred.
Come what may, let’s continue to fight and wrap our arms around the hurting and make a fist against those who are doing the hurting. Let us continue to find each other and connect and start little tiny revolutions everywhere, so that someday we will be so big and so loud that they won't be able to ignore us or block us or erase us.
Onward, Democracy Defenders!
I love this, Tiffany. In our congregation, to answer your question, our moderator (president) is an LGBTQ person. Trans people are in our choir. Trans people attend. Families of LGBTQ couples are in Sunday School. We have had LBGTQ ministers--at least 4 in my years attending. We have a rainbow flag out front. When it's stolen, we replace it. Every worship service starts with"...is an open an affirming church." We are on the journey, learning as we go.
I adore Erin & Zooey! Erin in the Morning is in my top 3 on Substack! I’m so elated they found each other and are creating a future together ❤️