What Does Project 2025 Mean for Queer and Chosen Families?

The Mandate for Leadership promulgated by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 contains a wide variety of proposals to damage the ability of queer and trans individuals and families to exist in society. It urges governmental bodies from the Department of Justice, Health and Human Services, and the EEOC to destroy existing protections for LGBTQIA+ people, including through defunding and deconstructing their various initiatives towards equity and through strengthening “religious freedom” protections for individuals, corporations, agencies, and states that seek to discriminate against our communities.

As Audre Lorde wrote, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” The policies proposed in Project 2025 will not only affect our community members because of their membership in this community, but also in ways that are complex and deeply entangled. The criminalization of trans identity impacts people in chosen families, who are disproportionately trans. The attacks on access to reproductive healthcare impact people in chosen families, who need reproductive healthcare. The destruction of labor and employment protections and consequent dramatic shift of power and money to bosses impacts people in chosen families, who are also workers. The gutting of climate policies and consequent skyrocketing frequency and severity of climate catastrophe impacts people in chosen families, who also live in vulnerable cities and towns, below the water line and in earthquake and hurricane zones, and in the impact zones of power plants and fracking endeavors. 

Conversely, when Project 2025’s mandate states that “family policies and programs under President Biden’s HHS are fraught with agenda items focusing on ‘LGBTQ+ equity’.… These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families,” it does not only impact people who live in chosen families, but any person whose family life for any reason deviates from the hegemonically imposed norm of the heterosexual, married, nuclear family – a model that, while being framed as “traditional” and “natural,” celebrates its 100th birthday this year. Any person in a blended family, a step-family, a multi-generational family, any person who has aging parents or a disabled loved one they may need to care for in home, any person whose co-parent has left them in financial precarity – all of these people will also bear the brunt of the policies intended to invisibilize and destroy queer, trans, and chosen families.

These policies intend to remove any protections at the federal level and empower any entity to prioritize the heterosexual nuclear family over any other family form. While anti-LGBTQIA+ policies and policies intended to constrict liberatory family building have significant overlap, little focus has yet been directed at the specific ways in which Project 2025 would harm queer, trans, and chosen families in particular. 

Project 2025 identifies as one if its core missions to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children” (p.3), arguing that “the next conservative President must get to work pursuing the true priority of politics—the well-being of the American family…It’s time for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family…Every threat to family stability must be confronted.” (p.4)

These “threats to family stability” as described in the document include: the existence of single parents, threats to the tax-exempt status of churches and charities, gender equity, reproductive health and rights, the organization of educational systems around any priority other than parental rights, the accessibility of gender affirming care, and all social media. Obviously the vast majority of these “threats” have nothing to do with actual families except to the extent that the supported autonomy of individuals to deviate from Christofascist norms is a threat to the larger plan; however, several of the proposed policies will impact families in material ways. 

“Adoption Reform” (p.477)

Project 2025 proposes that adoption agencies are hindered in their mission by the “fear of litigation” and threats to federal funding imposed by anti-discrimination regulation, and that the needs of children would be better served by allowing adoption agencies to refuse to place them with queer, trans, or unmarried adoptive parents. It argues for prioritizing the ability of Christian adoption agencies to operate without regulation with regard to what children they will place, what types of families they will place them with; by rolling back nondiscrimination regulations in HHS and ACF, they intend to impose the “religious belief [of the private religious corporations] that every child should have a married mother and father.”

Obviously, narrowing the pool of potential adoptive parents would not result in fewer children on the waiting list to be adopted. It is clear, therefore, that the intent of this policy is not to maximize the placement of children with adoptive families, but to ensure that children can only be placed with adoptive families that conform to the Christian hegemonic model of heterosexual, marital nuclear family.

Child Support Enforcement (p.479)

Project 2025’s Health and Human Services section poses the problem of children in poverty and identifies single motherhood as the cause, and support for non-custodial fathers as the solution. Rather than addressing enforcement, the proposal directs that “child support in the United states should strengthen marriage as the norm, restore broken homes, and encourage unmarried couples to commit to marriage.” The policies, if enacted, would “restore broken homes” by disincentivizing divorce and make it more difficult for custodial parents to receive child support. This would be intentionally coercive, particularly to mothers & gestating parents, to marry or remain married to the biological parent of their child for financial support, regardless of their personal choice or intimate partner violence, and would lead to a devastating rise in intimate partner violence. 

Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (p.480)

The Administration for Children and Families has a program that provides funding to organizations and schools to offer relationship skills classes and domestic violence prevention workshops to married couples, unmarried and cohabitating couples, co-parenting and non-cohabitating couples, and high school students. While a portion of HMRE funding currently goes to education intended to “increase commitment to marriage (as relevant),” Project 2025 proposes that that should be the primary focus of the program, and that child welfare and child abuse prevention funding, as well as family planning clinic funding, should all be redirected to “marriage education” and “marriage resources.” 

Project 2025 reiterates its commitment to ensuring that all Christian organizations should be able to receive HMRE funding without “scrutiny or pressure to conform to nonreligious definitions of marriage.” While prioritizing marriage over every other form of family, this proposal also ensures that any organization or agency that wants to define “marriage” as only heterosexual is able to do so without consequences. 

Definition of Marriage (p.481)

In all of these sections, the throughline is absolutely unambiguous: supporting “families” means supporting marriage, and supporting marriage means supporting heterosexual marriage. Page 481 of the document argues for a “biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family” and argues that “all other family forms [besides heterosexual marriage] involve higher levels of instability (the average length of same-sex marriages is half that of heterosexual marriages); financial stress or poverty; and poor behavioral, psychological, or educational outcomes. For the sake of child well-being, programs should affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father.”

This definition certainly excludes queer and trans families, but it also excludes the more than half of American families who are not heterosexually married, but who are otherwise living in the diverse range of structures that make the multiplicity of family so worth celebrating. 

The “subsidizing of single motherhood” is shorthand for policies that do not condition social support on marriage; anywhere these documents bemoan the “subsidizing of single motherhood,” it should be read as “the free proliferation of family diversity in society.”

The two primary arms of the enforcement of these policies are the direction of funds towards “marriage education” and the strengthening of religious exemptions to allow discrimination without fear of consequence. These arms are being set up to work in concert with each other to simultaneously drive existing queer, trans, and chosen families into the closet and remove us from public life, and to impose a cultural model of family on the next generation to make it harder for them to even imagine family liberation. 

The redirection of so much funding to the cultural insistence on heterosexual marriage, the financial disincentives to divorce, and the persistent protection of individuals, corporations, agencies, and states in their ability to discriminate on the basis of family structure together make Project 2025 a grim landscape for chosen families. As advocates over the past few years have seen thrilling success in the legal recognition of chosen families, including multi-partner domestic partnerships, third-parent adoptions, recognition and codification of parental rights of de facto parents, and many more advances, the proposals in Project 2025 paint a picture of decades of regression, retreat into the closet, and loss of protections.

People who live in chosen families do not live single-issue lives. We are queer people, trans people, disabled people, workers, indigent people, people in urban and rural areas, people who need trans-affirming and reproductive healthcare, but at the end of the day, we are people trying to pay our bills, find joy where we can, and take care of our loved ones. We are people whose lives and families are under threat from a rising wave of right-wing Christofascist authoritarianism, and we need to be well-informed and well-resourced in order to take action to protect ourselves and each other. At the Chosen Family Law Center, we hope that this information will empower you, and our whole team is fired up and ready to fight by your side.

Written by Chosen Family Law Center's Senior Legal Director Andy Izenson, September 2024