Running in 2024, Donald Trump and JD Vance made attacking LGBTQ+ people a central feature of their campaign. The then-candidates and their loyalists spent millions targeting the community.
Trump lied to crowds, “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation,” suggesting they had undergone gender reassignment surgery.
The less-than-one-term Ohio Senator JD Vance echoed the same claims on the campaign trail, as the pair promised to reform the military to exclude transgender soldiers.
Since taking office, the Trump administration has taken many steps to banish LGBTQ+ people, particularly transgender people, from the military, civil service, and ultimately public life.
Enter Project 2025
There are undoubtedly clear parallels with the president’s actions against LGBTQ+ people in public service and the proposals of the goals of Project 2025, a 920-page blueprint for authoritarianism in the US. Spearheaded by the powerful and extreme far-right Heritage Foundation, it’s becoming a reality, affecting Americans and people around the globe.
Project 2025’s stated purpose is to create an “ideal” America that would see women, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, people of color, and others deprived of their hard-won constitutional rights and the erosion of environmental and education protections. It also advocates for a frightening centralization of power in the executive branch, something Trump is keen to achieve.
Read GPAHE’s full analysis of Project 2025 and the groups behind it.
The first 10 months of the presidency has been an almost mirror image of the objectives of Project 2025, particularly when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights.
Project 2025 includes in its recommendations the narrowing of enforcement and outright removal of protections instituted for people based on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI). Trump’s administration has used executive orders rolling back these exact protections for federal employees.
Removing Protections for Civil Servants
Trump has been whittling away at protections for transgender people since the earliest days of his second term. On January 20, 2025, his first day officially in office, the White House issued Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”
Claiming that policies supporting transgender people have had a “corrosive impact” on the “validity of the entire American system,” the EO made the idea that there are only two genders, male and female, the official policy of the United States.
“‘Gender ideology’ replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true,” the order read.
Just one in a flurry of EOs to come out of the White House during the first weeks of Trump’s presidency, others included “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing” was signed by the president on January 20.
The order stripped the government of any program or positions focused on DEI, giving agencies strict timelines to eliminate any mention of these programs from their websites and submit “reduction in force” plans for the thousands that would lose their jobs as a result. Another EO, signed on January 21, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” revoked four other executive orders and a presidential memorandum from previous administrations. This includes revoking Executive Order 11246, which aimed to institute the equal opportunity employment “for all qualified persons” in the government, and prohibited hiring discrimination for government positions based on “discrimination in employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin.”
Trump’s order accused the government of promoting “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences” for hiring and called any efforts towards diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as “undermin[ing] our national unity” and “illegal.” The order also gave 120 days for the Attorney General and the Office of Management and Budget to submit a report “containing recommendations for enforcing Federal civil-rights laws and taking other appropriate measures to encourage the private sector to end illegal discrimination…including DEI.”
Following the issuing of the orders, confusion of how to comply rattled through the various agencies of the government. Web pages were pulled down in a massive indiscriminate sweep. Research by NPR found specific words and phrases also being removed from websites, including in a passage from a letter written to governors by the Biden administration about supporting school health services. The phrase “…those who have faced previous discrimination in the health care system, including children and youth of color, immigrant children, children with disabilities, and those who are LGBTQ+” was removed from a 2022 letter from President Joe Biden’s Secretary of Health and Human Services and Secretary of Education to governors.
Other passages and words were specifically edited to remove mentions of transgender people, for example, clipping the acronym LGBTQ down to LGB. This includes mentions of the Stonewall Riots, a pivotal moment in 1969 that launched the LGBTQ+ rights movement. Similarly, the National Park Service edited, then deleted, an article written by historian Wendy Rouse titled “The Very Queer History of the Suffragist Movement.”
The spread continued as a section on “how to change sex identification” was deleted from the Social Security Administration’s website. A report by 404 Media found that the Department of Labor and State Department had also removed mentions of gender identity from their public web pages.
Ultimately, these changes have restricted workplace protections for LGBTQ+ people, women, and more in the federal government, protections that have taken decades to achieve and codify.
War is Peace
Undoubtedly, the largest impact of the White House’s campaign against transgender people has been in the military, as Trump and Secretary of Defense, re-dubbed the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, have made removing “woke” from the service a priority.
In a September 2025, speech at a Quantico, Virginia, base, to which Hegseth called the US military’s senior generals from around the world, Hegseth promised that the military was going to preserve peace by preparing for war. His almost 45 minute speech focused on his plans to reform the internal “culture” of the US military, and end what he dubbed “the war on warriors.”
Accusing the military of becoming the “woke department,” he took aim at women, “fat generals,” and transgender people in particular.
“This administration has done a great deal from day one to remove the social justice, politically correct, and toxic ideological garbage that had infected our department, to rip out the politics. No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship. No more division, distraction or gender delusions. No more debris,” he told the quiet crowd of senior officers.
“As I’ve said before and will say again, we are done with that shit. I’ve made it my mission to uproot the obvious distractions that made us less capable and less lethal.”
Hegseth has since ordered all military personnel to watch the speech.
While the speech is worrying, it is far from the first step in the administration’s march to purge transgender people from the military.
During his first term as president in 2017, Trump issued a ban on new transgender soldiers and moved to kick existing ones out of the military. This position was partially reversed by the courts, allowing transgender soldiers already serving to keep their jobs.
In January 2025, Executive Order 14183, “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” the president’s pen was aimed squarely at transgender soldiers, removing their ability to serve and falsely castigating them as dishonorable.
“Consistent with the military mission and longstanding DoD policy, expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service,” the order read. “Beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”
By February 2025, a memo from the Pentagon ordered that all content related to critical race theory, “gender ideology, and identity based programs” including any content that focuses on “immutable characteristics, such as race, ethnicity or sex” be removed from DoD digital content.
This includes a list of 596 books that were banned from Defense Department schools that provide education to the children of military members. These books include titles written by LGBTQ+ authors and discuss topics like race in America.
Removals extend into US law enforcement as well.
Reports indicate that one individual was removed from an FBI agent trainee program in the Los Angeles field office for having a rainbow Pride flag in their previous work area. The individual had been a longtime civilian employee of the agency who had won awards for their service.
ABC News reported that a letter signed by FBI Director Kash Patel read, “I have determined you exercised poor judgment with an inappropriate display of political signage in your work area during your previous assignment at the Los Angeles Field Office…your employment with the Federal Bureau of Investigation is hereby terminated.”
Similarly, a Yosemite National Park ranger was fired after hanging the white, pink, and blue transgender flag from the iconic El Capitan rock face. In May 2025, the ranger, Shannon “SJ” Joslin, in a group of seven climbers, hung a 66-foot wide flag on the rock wall. They reported taking it down about two hours later. In August 2025, park officials said they were working with the justice department to pursue possible administrative action and criminal charges against the climbers, which included two other rangers, according to the Associated Press.
Punishment is the Policy
The Trump administration has also shown to be reactive to public events that can be used to stoke anger against transgender people. This includes the shooting in Minnesota at a Catholic children’s school, where Robin Westman opened fire through church windows during the opening mass of the year. Two children died and Westman took their own life in the parking lot as police arrived. Westman had transitioned from male to female while still a minor, a fact used by Republicans and the far-right to demonize transgender people as dangerous. The Annunciation shooter’s transgender identity, as well as the tangential connection between conservative leader Charlie Kirk’s killer—Tyler James Robinson’s roommate and alleged romantic partner at the time of the shooting is transgender—has been seized upon to further demonize transgender people.
The Oversight Project, another branch of the Heritage Foundation, released a brief explaining the concept of what they called “ Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism” (TIVE).
This included a petition asking the FBI to designate TIVE as a recognized form of terrorism, claiming “in recent years, TIVE has played a role in the majority of mass shootings at schools,” a blatant lie.
Co-opting the language of terrorism studies and terrorist designations used by governments (terms like racially motivated violent extremism), the designation sought to push the false notion that transgender people are violent and “transgender ideology,” whatever that is, is violent. In reality, around 0.1 per cent of mass shooters over the past decade are transgender. A February 2025 study by the Williams Institute found that LGBT people in the US are five times more likely to be the victim of a violent crime than non-LGBT people.
Similarly, these events are used to promote arbitrary bans on owning firearms for transgender people. Reports from The Daily Wire quote unnamed Department of Justice officials who were looking to ban “mentally ill individuals suffering from gender dysphoria” from owning firearms.
With no link between mass shooting and gender-affirming care, the move is a thinly veiled attempt to deny rights afforded to other Americans from transgender people, one that seems to be part of a larger playbook followed by the administration.
The attacks against LGBTQ+ people inside and outside the government have continued unabated. Trump’s administration has withheld $1.25 million in funding from 20 projects related to the LGBTQ+ community and other underrepresented groups.
In education, the US Supreme Court ruled in June 2025, that parents could opt out of their children being read books that were inclusive of LGBTQ+ people. Other books are being removed from school and public libraries after being labeled as sexually explicit, often simply for having LGBTQ+ characters. In October 2025, New York schools announced a lawsuit against the Department of Education after $47 million in funding was withdrawn due to the schools guidelines supporting transgender students.
Access to medical care is also being restricted. Letters sent by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to hospitals that provide transgender care services to children, demanded data on their quality standards and finances.
A battle plan for a multi-front culture war, there is an effort to erase LGBTQ+ people, particularly those who are transgender, from the public service and the public memory’s telling of American history.
