Democrats seem to think that the issue — which carries life-or-death stakes — is too divisive to address.
By Schuyler Mitchell ,
PublishedAugust 30, 2024
Democratic presidential nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris celebrates with her family onstage after accepting the party's nomination on Day 4 of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center on August 22, 2024, in Chicago, Illinois.
Kent Nishimura - Pool / Getty Images; Edited: Truthout
Idon’t want to mince words: Transgender people in the United States are facing an existential threat. You’ve likely heard the numbers, but they are disturbing enough to bear repeating. In 2024 alone, Republicans have introduced more than 640 bills targeting the civil rights of trans people, with four months of the year left to go. It’s a record-breaking amount of anti-trans legislation, and it’s the fifth year in a row that particular record has been broken. Anti-LGBTQ+ violence has also reached record highs, with attacks based on gender identity increasing a staggering 33 percent from 2021 to 2022. This year, for the first time in its 40-year history, the Human Rights Campaign declared a national state of emergency for LGBTQ+ Americans.
But in a stunning abdication of moral responsibility, Democrats made little mention of trans rights during this year’s Democratic National Convention (DNC). Trans people were mentioned in just two speeches, and neither speaker received prime-time speaking slots. For the first time since 2012, the DNC did not feature any trans speakers.
This glaring absence has extremely high stakes. While Republicans have focused much of their ire on trans women in sports and gender-affirming health care for trans youth, they have also made it clear that their aims are far-reaching — they would like to see trans people eradicated from public life. In a campaign video released last year, Donald Trump decried gender-affirming care as an act of child abuse and pledged to instruct “every federal agency to cease programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.”
Just this week, a federal appeals court cleared the way for Florida to enforce a ban on puberty blockers and hormones for trans youth (surgeries, which are rare for minors, were already banned). But the law also restricts care for trans adults by effectively banning telehealth treatment, barring all nurse practitioners from prescribing gender affirming care and requiring providers to fill out new, lengthy consent forms. An analysis by journalist Erin Reed found that the Florida law impacts up to 80 percent of care for trans adults, in addition to the total ban on gender-affirming care for trans children.
Democratic leaders, however, seem to think that the issue — which carries life-or-death significance for the 1.6 million trans people in the United States — is too divisive to address. A recent BBC article listed “identity politics” as one of three things the Democrats avoided during the DNC, casting “transgender issues” as a “hot-button social topic” that was excluded from the programming.
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“If you look at who was featured in the prime-time slots, it’s middle-of-the-road people,” Melissa Michelson, a professor of political science at Menlo College, told NBC News. “It’s people who are going to appeal to that chunk of swing voters in the Sunbelt, in the Rustbelt, those swing states, and transgender rights are not a high priority issue for those voters and not the way they’re going to decide their vote.”
Such a cynical approach is egregious on its face: The ability of trans people to live safe, happy and healthy lives is, of course, a fundamental human right — including for the hundreds of thousands of trans people in the Sunbelt and Rust Belt states — and not just a “hot-button” political talking point.
The idea that trans rights are wildly unpopular is also not true. A poll conducted last year by The 19th and SurveyMonkey found that only 17 percent of the public want politicians to focus on restricting gender-affirming care. More than half of adults acknowledge that trans people face a great deal or fair amount of discrimination in this country, polling from Pew Research found.
Such discrimination was, after all, on full display at the Republican National Convention in July, where main stage speakers peddled misinformation and took plenty of jabs at the trans community.
“They promise normalcy and gave us transgender visibility day on Easter Sunday,” claimed far right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia). Transgender Day of Visibility, which happened to fall on Easter Sunday this year, has been celebrated on March 31 since 2009. Meanwhile, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) lambasted trans rights as a “fringe agenda” and baselessly claimed that LGBTQ+ education in schools was promoting “the sexualization and indoctrination of our children.”
The official Republican National Committee platform takes a similar approach. It pledges to end “gender indoctrination” and cut federal funding “for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.”
Despite the inflammatory rhetoric, this far right agenda isn’t actually very popular. Forty-four percent of adults surveyed by The 19th and SurveyMonkey didn’t think trans issues should be a legislative focus at all. In light of this, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Gov. Tim Walz could choose to expand their embrace of the term “weird” as a campaign insult to focus on Republicans’ assault on trans rights — it is weird, after all, that Trump and his allies have become obsessed with intruding on the private lives of trans people.
Nevertheless, the Supreme Court is now set to hear oral arguments later this year on laws banning gender-affirming care for trans youth. The decision by the conservative supermajority, expected in June 2025, could have dire consequences for trans protections across the country.
Democrats should be laying out a vision for how they could approach restoring health care to trans youth in states where it has been blocked. The party should be publicly and proudly reaffirming its commitment to protecting the rights of all trans people and continuing the fight to expand federal protections for the LGBTQ+ community. But the DNC’s neglect of trans rights is also an important reminder of the importance of grassroots efforts and mutual aid: As the legislative attacks on trans people continue, we must work to keep each other and our communities safe.
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license. See further guidelines here.
Schuyler Mitchell is a writer, editor and fact-checker from North Carolina, currently based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in The Intercept, The Baffler, Labor Notes, Los Angeles Magazine, and elsewhere. Find her on X: @schuy_ler
Project 2025’s Anti-Trans Agenda Would Endanger Families Across the US
The vision for Trump’s second term would seek to expand draconian anti-trans policies, particularly targeting children.
By Orion Rummler ,
PublishedAugust 31, 2024
And that’s when her problems started. Carver said the school administration reprimanded the teacher, telling her that she had broken state law by talking about gender and doing it in a way that infringed on the political choices of the boys’ families. The teacher became terrified of the prospect of losing her job and torn about what to do. If she tried to save the student from being bullied, she could endanger her own child by losing access to her income and their health insurance.
“She was trembling by the end of the story,” Carver said.
Kentucky teachers want to do the right thing, but they are “desperately scared,” he said. They are exhausted and afraid of repercussions if they speak out. Some have chosen to leave Kentucky, including the state’s previous education commissioner, Jason Glass, who decided to resign last September instead of enforcing the state’s new law.
After watching what has happened in his own state, Carver was not surprised to hear that conservative forces are pushing a vision and version of the country where trans-affirming teachers could be labeled as sex offenders.
As he sees it, war has been declared on LGBTQ+ people — and the idea of protecting children is a linchpin for that war.
“What they want is a very clearly defined society in which straight White men are on top, men earn money and women are subservient,” Carver said. That society is built on strict definitions of marriage, family, femininity and masculinity — a binary lens that excludes many Americans and creates a divisive narrative that ascribes value to people based on gender.
This vision is articulated in a 920-page policy blueprint known as Project 2025. Created by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in the nation’s capital, it lays out a far-right Christian vision for Donald Trump’s second term in the White House if he wins in November and draws on the same harmful rhetoric that states have written into anti-transgender legislation.
Though these laws target LGBTQ+ communities, advocates say that their reach and harm impact all families because of the exclusionary version of country they embrace.
“No one fits the very narrow view of what a person is supposed to be under Project 2025,” Carver said.
Project 2025 equates being transgender — or adopting “transgender ideology” — to pornography and declares that it should be outlawed. Under this plan, the federal government would enforce sex discrimination laws on the “biological binary meaning of sex,” and educators and public librarians who spread the concept of being transgender would be registered as sex offenders. The plan says that children should be “raised by their biological fathers and mothers who conceive them,” unless those biological parents are found unfit by a court.
These ideas have drawn national attention for their far-reaching scope, but they didn’t appear out of thin air. They all have roots in anti-LGBTQ+ state legislation that conservative lobbying groups and think tanks have supported for years, like the law that took effect in Kentucky. Contributors to Project 2025 include senior staff from Alliance Defending Freedom, whose lawyers have helped write anti-transgender legislation in a number of states and defended those laws in court. Members of the conservative groups Family Research Council and the American Principles Project, which have similarly pushed anti-LGBTQ+ bills and anti-trans rhetoric, have served on the Project 2025 advisory board.
“The content of Project 2025 has been the goal of the people pushing anti-LGBTQ legislation at the state level and across the country. It’s been their goal all along,” said Logan Casey, director of policy research at the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit think tank that tracks LGBTQ+ legislation.
Democrats have pointed to Project 2025 as evidence of a Republican party gone off the rails. The project’s director, who once had a role in the Trump administration, recently stepped down after Trump and his campaign publicly disavowed Project 2025. Despite the Trump campaign’s insistence that Project 2025 does not speak for the former president, many of Trump’s own proposals align with those laid out by the Heritage Foundation, as The Washington Post reported. This includes policies targeting LGBTQ+ Americans.
“It is a big escalation of attempts that we’ve seen on the state level, and they’re trying to find ways to nationalize this and to continue to take this to the extreme,” said Julie Millican, the vice president of progressive research group Media Matters. Republicans have been most effective at implementing anti-LGBTQ+ state legislation in schools, she said, in part by framing the issue around “parental rights.”
To Carver, requiring that educators who spread “transgender ideology” are classified as sex offenders would impact all families and students, if anything because of the simple fact that broad policies with unclear language and enforcement risk impacting everyone. In the face of such a vague policy, teachers would back away from any topic that might be tangentially related to “transgender ideology,” he said.
“The real effect is that you’re going to have teachers in the classroom who start maintaining these hyper-rigid forms of gender that are being enforced on everyone,” he said. “Even if you are the politically conservative family that has a boy who’s a little sensitive, you’re going to start seeing that boy criticized in class for his sensitivity.”
States have tried — and failed — to define “male” and “female” based on reproductive organs and to base definitions of “mother” and “father” on rigid views of gender defined by “biological sex.” In many ways, these attempts were early previews for Project 2025 proposals, drawing on the same narrow definition of sex that underlines the majority of anti-trans state policy.
For example, in Missouri, a failed state law introduced this year would have placed teachers and school counselors on the sex offender registry for providing any support to a child regarding their social transition. When someone socially transitions, they start using a new name and new pronouns, or they might change outfits or hairstyles to better match their gender expression or identity. Although this is a standard part of gender transition for many transgender people, cisgender people also express themselves in similar ways as they explore their own identities.
Under Project 2025, narrow definitions of sex and parenthood would become the official stance of the federal government.
The plan states that policies supporting single mothers and LGBTQ+ equity should be replaced with those “that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families,” the authors write — and it lays out specific ideas of how American families should have kids. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate with ties to the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin D. Roberts, has shared similar views publicly.
A year before he was elected to represent Ohio in the U.S. Senate, Vance suggested that parents should have a greater ability to use their voice in the country’s democracy than people without kids, by being able to cast more votes. During his campaign, he also pledged to oppose federal protections for same-sex married couples.
It’s a vision that dovetails into a Project 2025 proposal to ban three-parent embryo research. (Mitochondrial replacement therapy, a controversial procedure that treats infertility via a three-parent embryo when conventional in vitro fertilization has failed, is already effectively banned in the United States due to FDA requirements, but is legal in the United Kingdom and a few other countries). Although the document does not suggest restricting IVF, it does suggest that adults trying to conceive or have children in alternative ways would be subject to higher scrutiny by the federal government.
“In the context of current and emerging reproductive technologies, HHS policies,” write the authors, using the abbreviation for the federal Department of Health and Human Services, “should never place the desires of adults over the right of children to be raised by the biological fathers and mothers who conceive them.”
At least 17 states have laws in place that protect parents who have children through in vitro fertilization or through the use of egg or sperm donors, regardless of their marital status, according to the Movement Advancement Project. These laws ensure that such parents are legally recognized. Casey sees Project 2025 as a threat to these protections for same-sex couples and heterosexual couples who rely on assisted reproductive technology.
“I think it’s not only a threat to assisted reproduction statutes, I think it’s a threat to marriage equality itself, to basically any pathway to parental recognition for people who are not in Project 2025’s vision of a heterosexual, nuclear, married family,” Casey said. “So it’s not just about LGBTQ+ people.”
As Project 2025 purports to protect families, it also lays out familiar anti-trans policies in an effort to protect children from being exposed to LGBTQ+ people. This playbook that has been carried out in states as politicians portray gender-affirming care as the mutilation and forced sterilization of children. This kind of anti-trans rhetoric is an entry point to restrict freedoms elsewhere, Millican said. It capitalizes on a lack of public knowledge about trans people in order to garner support for the government restricting what kind of medical care people can have.
Part of that effort to limit children’s exposure to LGBTQ+ identities has been taking place online. Within the last several years, at least two states, Florida and Iowa, removed online content geared towards the safety of LGBTQ+ and transgender students with little to no explanation.
Project 2025 calls for the closure of telecommunications and technology firms that spread the concept of being transgender. To Casey, the proposal to restrict online information about trans identity is related to the federal Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). Major national LGBTQ+ rights groups now support the revised legislation, but when it was first introduced, the Heritage Foundation appeared to endorse the bill in a commentary piece falsely claiming that big tech turns children trans.
Last year, two West Virginia bills aimed to protect minors from “indecent displays of a sexually explicit nature” — including “transgender exposure.” The bills failed to pass in 2023 and again this year. Many other states have tried to ban drag performances in the name of protecting children from sexually explicit content, but West Virginia stands out for making the effects of its proposed law on transgender people especially clear. Now, Project 2025 declares that “transgender ideology” should be labeled as pornography and outlawed.
In Kentucky, Carver, who advises the American Federation of Teachers on the needs of LGBTQ+ educators and students, has seen how anti-LGBTQ+ laws that pledge to protect children from harm actually enable it. The story he heard from the fellow teacher at the Pride event is one example of how the state has instituted bullying as a formal policy.
Teachers in his state are terrified, he said — and looking for answers in situations that have become impossible to navigate.
“There is no easy way out of this other than better laws. There’s no easy way out of this other than protections for teachers, who try to keep students safe,” he said.
Orion Rummler is a reporter for the breaking news team at The 19th. He previously anchored live news coverage at Axios, including the January 6 Capitol attack, the coronavirus and the 2020 election. He also researched “Axios on HBO” stories on former President Donald Trump and expanded the outlet’s LGBTQ+ coverage.
An activist holds a poster as hundreds of activists, allies and members of the transgender community gather at Dr. Wilbert McIntyre Park in Old Strathcona,
in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
Artur Widak / NurPhoto via Getty Images
Did you know that Truthout is a nonprofit and independently funded by readers like you? If you value what we do, please support our work with a donation.
This story was originally published by The 19th.
Willie Carver has been a teacher in Kentucky since 2007, now working with college students. For over two years, he has worked with the American Federation of Teachers’ National LGBTQ+ Task Force, an advocacy arm of the influential labor union created to counter the rise and repression brought by anti-LGBTQ+ laws.
One of the country’s most draconian anti-trans measures became law in Carver’s home state last March. The law has required teachers to put politics before the wellbeing of their own students and reshaped how students see and treat each other. It bans them from being taught about gender identity or sexual orientation, using restrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity and learning about human sexuality. The law also made gender-affirming care illegal for trans youth.
In October, after the new school semester started, Carver noticed a woman staring at him as he walked off stage at a Pride event in rural Kentucky after talking about issues faced by LGBTQ+ educators and students. He could tell she needed to talk.
“Her voice was shaky,” he recalled. “She cried as she spoke to me.”
The woman, a fourth-grade teacher, told Carver about one of her students, a boy who was being bullied because he has two moms. His tormentors — two boys about the same age — lobbed slurs at him and chased him around. The teacher intervened, saying to all her students, “In this classroom, all families get treated with respect.”
Did you know that Truthout is a nonprofit and independently funded by readers like you? If you value what we do, please support our work with a donation.
This story was originally published by The 19th.
Willie Carver has been a teacher in Kentucky since 2007, now working with college students. For over two years, he has worked with the American Federation of Teachers’ National LGBTQ+ Task Force, an advocacy arm of the influential labor union created to counter the rise and repression brought by anti-LGBTQ+ laws.
One of the country’s most draconian anti-trans measures became law in Carver’s home state last March. The law has required teachers to put politics before the wellbeing of their own students and reshaped how students see and treat each other. It bans them from being taught about gender identity or sexual orientation, using restrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity and learning about human sexuality. The law also made gender-affirming care illegal for trans youth.
In October, after the new school semester started, Carver noticed a woman staring at him as he walked off stage at a Pride event in rural Kentucky after talking about issues faced by LGBTQ+ educators and students. He could tell she needed to talk.
“Her voice was shaky,” he recalled. “She cried as she spoke to me.”
The woman, a fourth-grade teacher, told Carver about one of her students, a boy who was being bullied because he has two moms. His tormentors — two boys about the same age — lobbed slurs at him and chased him around. The teacher intervened, saying to all her students, “In this classroom, all families get treated with respect.”
And that’s when her problems started. Carver said the school administration reprimanded the teacher, telling her that she had broken state law by talking about gender and doing it in a way that infringed on the political choices of the boys’ families. The teacher became terrified of the prospect of losing her job and torn about what to do. If she tried to save the student from being bullied, she could endanger her own child by losing access to her income and their health insurance.
“She was trembling by the end of the story,” Carver said.
Kentucky teachers want to do the right thing, but they are “desperately scared,” he said. They are exhausted and afraid of repercussions if they speak out. Some have chosen to leave Kentucky, including the state’s previous education commissioner, Jason Glass, who decided to resign last September instead of enforcing the state’s new law.
After watching what has happened in his own state, Carver was not surprised to hear that conservative forces are pushing a vision and version of the country where trans-affirming teachers could be labeled as sex offenders.
As he sees it, war has been declared on LGBTQ+ people — and the idea of protecting children is a linchpin for that war.
“What they want is a very clearly defined society in which straight White men are on top, men earn money and women are subservient,” Carver said. That society is built on strict definitions of marriage, family, femininity and masculinity — a binary lens that excludes many Americans and creates a divisive narrative that ascribes value to people based on gender.
This vision is articulated in a 920-page policy blueprint known as Project 2025. Created by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in the nation’s capital, it lays out a far-right Christian vision for Donald Trump’s second term in the White House if he wins in November and draws on the same harmful rhetoric that states have written into anti-transgender legislation.
Though these laws target LGBTQ+ communities, advocates say that their reach and harm impact all families because of the exclusionary version of country they embrace.
“No one fits the very narrow view of what a person is supposed to be under Project 2025,” Carver said.
Project 2025 equates being transgender — or adopting “transgender ideology” — to pornography and declares that it should be outlawed. Under this plan, the federal government would enforce sex discrimination laws on the “biological binary meaning of sex,” and educators and public librarians who spread the concept of being transgender would be registered as sex offenders. The plan says that children should be “raised by their biological fathers and mothers who conceive them,” unless those biological parents are found unfit by a court.
These ideas have drawn national attention for their far-reaching scope, but they didn’t appear out of thin air. They all have roots in anti-LGBTQ+ state legislation that conservative lobbying groups and think tanks have supported for years, like the law that took effect in Kentucky. Contributors to Project 2025 include senior staff from Alliance Defending Freedom, whose lawyers have helped write anti-transgender legislation in a number of states and defended those laws in court. Members of the conservative groups Family Research Council and the American Principles Project, which have similarly pushed anti-LGBTQ+ bills and anti-trans rhetoric, have served on the Project 2025 advisory board.
“The content of Project 2025 has been the goal of the people pushing anti-LGBTQ legislation at the state level and across the country. It’s been their goal all along,” said Logan Casey, director of policy research at the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit think tank that tracks LGBTQ+ legislation.
Democrats have pointed to Project 2025 as evidence of a Republican party gone off the rails. The project’s director, who once had a role in the Trump administration, recently stepped down after Trump and his campaign publicly disavowed Project 2025. Despite the Trump campaign’s insistence that Project 2025 does not speak for the former president, many of Trump’s own proposals align with those laid out by the Heritage Foundation, as The Washington Post reported. This includes policies targeting LGBTQ+ Americans.
“It is a big escalation of attempts that we’ve seen on the state level, and they’re trying to find ways to nationalize this and to continue to take this to the extreme,” said Julie Millican, the vice president of progressive research group Media Matters. Republicans have been most effective at implementing anti-LGBTQ+ state legislation in schools, she said, in part by framing the issue around “parental rights.”
To Carver, requiring that educators who spread “transgender ideology” are classified as sex offenders would impact all families and students, if anything because of the simple fact that broad policies with unclear language and enforcement risk impacting everyone. In the face of such a vague policy, teachers would back away from any topic that might be tangentially related to “transgender ideology,” he said.
“The real effect is that you’re going to have teachers in the classroom who start maintaining these hyper-rigid forms of gender that are being enforced on everyone,” he said. “Even if you are the politically conservative family that has a boy who’s a little sensitive, you’re going to start seeing that boy criticized in class for his sensitivity.”
States have tried — and failed — to define “male” and “female” based on reproductive organs and to base definitions of “mother” and “father” on rigid views of gender defined by “biological sex.” In many ways, these attempts were early previews for Project 2025 proposals, drawing on the same narrow definition of sex that underlines the majority of anti-trans state policy.
For example, in Missouri, a failed state law introduced this year would have placed teachers and school counselors on the sex offender registry for providing any support to a child regarding their social transition. When someone socially transitions, they start using a new name and new pronouns, or they might change outfits or hairstyles to better match their gender expression or identity. Although this is a standard part of gender transition for many transgender people, cisgender people also express themselves in similar ways as they explore their own identities.
Under Project 2025, narrow definitions of sex and parenthood would become the official stance of the federal government.
The plan states that policies supporting single mothers and LGBTQ+ equity should be replaced with those “that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families,” the authors write — and it lays out specific ideas of how American families should have kids. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate with ties to the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin D. Roberts, has shared similar views publicly.
A year before he was elected to represent Ohio in the U.S. Senate, Vance suggested that parents should have a greater ability to use their voice in the country’s democracy than people without kids, by being able to cast more votes. During his campaign, he also pledged to oppose federal protections for same-sex married couples.
It’s a vision that dovetails into a Project 2025 proposal to ban three-parent embryo research. (Mitochondrial replacement therapy, a controversial procedure that treats infertility via a three-parent embryo when conventional in vitro fertilization has failed, is already effectively banned in the United States due to FDA requirements, but is legal in the United Kingdom and a few other countries). Although the document does not suggest restricting IVF, it does suggest that adults trying to conceive or have children in alternative ways would be subject to higher scrutiny by the federal government.
“In the context of current and emerging reproductive technologies, HHS policies,” write the authors, using the abbreviation for the federal Department of Health and Human Services, “should never place the desires of adults over the right of children to be raised by the biological fathers and mothers who conceive them.”
At least 17 states have laws in place that protect parents who have children through in vitro fertilization or through the use of egg or sperm donors, regardless of their marital status, according to the Movement Advancement Project. These laws ensure that such parents are legally recognized. Casey sees Project 2025 as a threat to these protections for same-sex couples and heterosexual couples who rely on assisted reproductive technology.
“I think it’s not only a threat to assisted reproduction statutes, I think it’s a threat to marriage equality itself, to basically any pathway to parental recognition for people who are not in Project 2025’s vision of a heterosexual, nuclear, married family,” Casey said. “So it’s not just about LGBTQ+ people.”
As Project 2025 purports to protect families, it also lays out familiar anti-trans policies in an effort to protect children from being exposed to LGBTQ+ people. This playbook that has been carried out in states as politicians portray gender-affirming care as the mutilation and forced sterilization of children. This kind of anti-trans rhetoric is an entry point to restrict freedoms elsewhere, Millican said. It capitalizes on a lack of public knowledge about trans people in order to garner support for the government restricting what kind of medical care people can have.
Part of that effort to limit children’s exposure to LGBTQ+ identities has been taking place online. Within the last several years, at least two states, Florida and Iowa, removed online content geared towards the safety of LGBTQ+ and transgender students with little to no explanation.
Project 2025 calls for the closure of telecommunications and technology firms that spread the concept of being transgender. To Casey, the proposal to restrict online information about trans identity is related to the federal Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). Major national LGBTQ+ rights groups now support the revised legislation, but when it was first introduced, the Heritage Foundation appeared to endorse the bill in a commentary piece falsely claiming that big tech turns children trans.
Last year, two West Virginia bills aimed to protect minors from “indecent displays of a sexually explicit nature” — including “transgender exposure.” The bills failed to pass in 2023 and again this year. Many other states have tried to ban drag performances in the name of protecting children from sexually explicit content, but West Virginia stands out for making the effects of its proposed law on transgender people especially clear. Now, Project 2025 declares that “transgender ideology” should be labeled as pornography and outlawed.
In Kentucky, Carver, who advises the American Federation of Teachers on the needs of LGBTQ+ educators and students, has seen how anti-LGBTQ+ laws that pledge to protect children from harm actually enable it. The story he heard from the fellow teacher at the Pride event is one example of how the state has instituted bullying as a formal policy.
Teachers in his state are terrified, he said — and looking for answers in situations that have become impossible to navigate.
“There is no easy way out of this other than better laws. There’s no easy way out of this other than protections for teachers, who try to keep students safe,” he said.
Orion Rummler is a reporter for the breaking news team at The 19th. He previously anchored live news coverage at Axios, including the January 6 Capitol attack, the coronavirus and the 2020 election. He also researched “Axios on HBO” stories on former President Donald Trump and expanded the outlet’s LGBTQ+ coverage.
