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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.