Project 2025: Anticipating the Attempts to Roll Back the Rights of Transgender People (Part I)

The 119^th Congress has been sworn in, the inauguration is around the corner, and we have a pretty good idea of what legislators in DC will try to legislatively accomplish to roll back the rights of transgender people. Legislative initiatives are only one part of the puzzle, though—a more flexible, wider-ranging, and quicker lever towards those ends sits in the Executive Branch agencies which administer the laws.

Project 2025 lays bare the strategies the incoming administration (via those agencies) will likely take to roll back the rights of their transgender constituents.

As with everything I write, all of this information is designed to equip our folks to better fight back in the political arena. It’s a lot. It can be overwhelming. By providing (what I hope is) a level-headed analysis of what’s coming, though, I lend my voice to the efforts of the transgender community to organize, strategize, and survive.

In this post, I’ll cover the transgender-related provisions from Project 2025 concerning the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Gender Policy Council, and the Department of Health and Human Services. I’ll get to the Departments of Defense, Education, Labor, and State later this week.

Project 2025

Without wasting time on the particulars of its origin and development, Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership is an 887-page tome from the Heritage Foundation describing its vision for reshaping the federal government. There’s also a 180-day Playbook for it out there somewhere that we, the general public, do not have access to—describing what the first six months of the incoming administration should do to accomplish their goals.

I’ve read through the Mandate for things that will affect the transgender community—so that you don’t have to. I mean, you can if you want. The link is right there.

Honestly, though, the rhetoric is gratuitously awful.

Here is what they’re calling for…Part I.

CDC—Data Collection

In the government, if you cannot measure a problem, it doesn’t exist. Metrics are life. Project 2025’s authors recognize this:

The CDC should immediately end its collection of data on gender identity

CDC collects data on everything from disease (e.g., HIV) to violent deaths to youth risk behavior, and countless subjects in between. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), parent agency to CDC, has done extraordinary work via administrative actions to capture Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) data—going so far as to develop a comprehensive action plan for it during the Biden administration.

This action plan grew from the Recommendations on the Best Practices for the Collection of [SOGI] Data on Federal Statistical Surveys, part of the work resulting from Executive Order 14075: Advancing Equality for [LGBTQI] Individuals, issued in June 2022.

These invaluable data collection initiatives are at grave risk of immediate repeal and revocation in the early days of the administration, as is EO 14075. The risk extends anywhere such efforts are underway across the whole of the federal government.

Gender Policy Council

Executive Order 14020 established the White House Gender Policy Council, which has among its stated goals to

establish and pursue a comprehensive approach to ensure that the Federal Government is working to advance equal rights and opportunities, regardless of gender or gender identity, in advancing domestic and foreign policy — including by promoting workplace diversity, fairness, and inclusion across the Federal workforce and military.

You can review some of the work of the GPC at this link.

As you might imagine, Project 2025 wants nothing of this sort to exist, and proposes not only its abolition but also the undoing of its work:

The President should immediately revoke Executive Order 14020 and every policy, including subregulatory guidance documents, produced on behalf of or related to the establishment or promotion of the Gender Policy Council and its subsidiary issues. Abolishing the Gender Policy Council would eliminate central promotion of abortion (“health services”); comprehensive sexuality education (“education”); and the new woke gender ideology, which has as a principal tenet “gender affirming care” and “sex-change” surgeries on minors. In addition to eliminating the council, developing new structures and positions will have the dual effect of demonstrating that promoting life and strengthening the family is a priority while also facilitating more seamless coordination and consistency across the U.S. government.

Health and Human Services

There are a lot of people out there who know a lot more than I do about the nuances of HHS policy and how it affects marginalized communities. Seek out good sources. Read what they have to say.

As for Project 2025, they really don’t like the nondiscrimination rules/regulations that have been put in place in recent years, calling for the repeal of the following:

• NonDiscrimination in Health Programs and Activities, 89 Fed. Reg. 37,522 (2024) (Final Rule)

  • Provides broad prohibitions on discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, among other items (it’s 159 pages long).

  • These protections were previously gutted by a Trump administration regulation issued in the waning days of his first administration.

  • Look for there to be legislative action on this as well. It would be a much (?) faster way on undoing the regulation. In the last Congress, there were multiple bills filed to repeal the Final Rule (HJR 160, SJR 90).

• HHS Letter Re: Using Ryan White Funding for Gender-Affirming Care (2021)

  • This guidance encouraged recipients to utilize Ryan White funding for the purposes of gender-affirming care, where appropriate.

• Health and Human Services Grant Regulation, 81 Fed. Reg. 89,393 (2016) (Final Rule), which provides the following protections in HHS programs (think Foster Care, for one):

Sec. 75.300 Statutory and national policy requirements.

(c) It is a public policy requirement of HHS that no person otherwise eligible will be excluded from participation in, denied the benefits of, or subjected to discrimination in the administration of HHS programs and services based on non-merit factors such as age, disability, sex, race, color, national origin, religion, gender identity, or sexual orientation. Recipients must comply with this public policy requirement in the administration of programs supported by HHS awards.

(d) In accordance with the Supreme Court decisions in United States v. Windsor and in Obergefell v. Hodges, all recipients must treat as valid the marriages of same-sex couples. This does not apply to registered domestic partnerships, civil unions or similar formal relationships recognized under state law as something other than a marriage.

In addition, Project 2025 wants to scale back the impact of the Bostock decision by having HHS’s Office of Civil Rights take the following actions:

OCR should return its enforcement of sex discrimination to the statutory framework of Section 1557 [the nondiscrimination section of the Affordable Care Act] and Title IX. Specifically, it should:

1. Remove all guidance issued under the Biden Administration concerning sexual orientation and gender identity under Section 1557, particularly the May 2021 announcement of enforcement and March 2022 statement threatening states that protect minors from genital mutilation.

2. Issue a general statement of policy specifying that it will not enforce any prohibition on sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination in the Section 1557 regulation and that it will prioritize compliance with the First Amendment, RFRA, and federal conscience laws in any case implicating those claims. DOJ should commit to defending these actions aggressively against inevitable court challenges, including under cases such as Heckler v. Chaney.

3. Issue a proposed rule to restore the Trump regulations under Section 1557, explicitly interpreting the law not to include sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination based on the textual approach to male and female biology taken by Congress in the ACA, the need to recognize biological distinctions as part of the sound practice of health care, and the need to ensure protections of medical judgment and conscience.

Stay tuned for more as the week continues, maybe even with a mercifully brief explainer of the process for repealing federal regulations, if the mood strikes.

Build Community. Be strategic. We’re all in this together.