I’m giving a talk this afternoon at this Town Hall to raise awareness about something called “Project 2025,” and why it matters for you, and all of us. The event is being held at the LGBTQ Center of New York, and so the intended audience is queer. I decided to dash off this quick post to help me gather my thoughts, and to compile all the references I’ll have to breeze by in the short seven minutes I’ve got to summarize thirty years of research. Let’s fucking go!
In case you haven’t heard, Project 2025 is the dystopian nightmare that the far right’s Heritage Foundation has cooked up for all of us if they win in 2024. (If you want to read the 920-page PDF, you can do that here.)
So, what all’s in it? Some friends have been going through the whole thing and I’d recommend you read their chapter-by-chapter summary, here.
Did you know that the first self-help books for couples were written by proponents of the eugenics movement? You know the eugenicists, that ostensibly scientific project intended to encourage reproduction among the white middle class, while discouraging or preventing population growth among people of color and the poor, the theory that gave rise to the Third Reich? Yeah, that eugenics. Popularized first in the U.S., then exported to Germany.
This tension between straight men and straight women persists to this day, and is ameliorated by what Jane Ward calls the “marriage repair industry,” which includes things like books and workshops, as well as classes that teach men to become “pick up artists.” (More about this in her excellent The Tragedy of Heterosexuality.)
How is this relevant to Project 2025? It’s baked into who they imagine are the “families” they are protecting. The idea of the “family” has always been a white supremacist project, one that those on the far right have been explicitly stating for decades. Here’s just one example, from my first book, that illustrates how the far right thinks about the family:
One of the many proposals in Project 2025 is to remove children from the homes of single mothers. You read that correctly. Single mothers. Because, you see, a cis man is what makes a collection of individuals in a household into a “family.” In fact, this is listed as “PROMISE #1: RESTORE THE FAMILY AS THE CENTERPIECE OF AMERICAN LIFE AND PROTECT OUR CHILDREN.”
This is a playbook that’s been around since (at least) the 1990s, when Dan Quayle, then Vice President, went off in a speech about Murphy Brown, a fictional sitcom character who had a fictional baby on television, who he described as heralding “the breakdown of the family structure, personal responsibility, and social order.”
Take away #1 for how we fight back: We are for expanding kinship. We want to love more! We’re *against* the old, patriarchal, white ideas about the family. We’re *against* restricting who we can care for based on government rules.
Part of what we, queer people and our movements, have done is to move the gender conversation out of the “family” and the far right is trying to smoosh it back into the family, along with all the ideological dreck we’ve inherited about families.
My second, and related point is that the far right is trying to scare us about GENDER. ooh, scary! The far right has always been concerned about gender (along with race), and to the extent that we think of the far right only in RACIST terms is, in part, a failure of our collective, intersectional imagination to be able to consider race, class, gender and sexuality at the same time. Here are just a couple of brief examples from my work on this.
When I spent time at the “Women’s Forum” - tag line “sugar and spice and everything nice” - at Stormfront, a long-running white supremacist portal for my second book, I eavesdropped on conversations that could have been held at a white, liberal, feminist meeting. The women there talked about their general disdain for, yet need for, men, they talked about their belief in equal pay for equal work, and they supported abortion rights (but worried that the white people were having too many abortions while racialized Others weren’t having enough). These women also conceded their support for some gay and lesbian rights, as long as those gays could uphold white nationalism. This led me to conclude that:
“Without an explicit challenge to racism, white feminism is easily grafted onto white supremacy and useful for arguing for equality for white women, and possibly for white gays and lesbians, within a white supremacist context.”
A couple of decades on, and I’ve been paying more attention to the role that we, those of us who are gendered femme and raised-white, play in continuing the system of white supremacy. In the opening of that recent book, I wrote:
“Nice white ladies, and our protection, are fundamental to American culture. And this fact is destroying all of us.”
This strategy of shoving their political agenda under the skirts of white women is at the core of Project 2025’s nefarious intent. In their blueprint, one of their stated goals is to “REFOCUS GENDER EQUALITY ON WOMEN, CHILDREN, AND FAMILIES.” You see what they’re doing, yes? The drafters of the Project 2025 blueprint want to steal our beautiful gender expressions and contain our gorgeous, joyful sexuality through which we have liberated ourselves and shove us back into the death cult of the white, nuclear family.
Take away #2: We embrace a vision of gender that includes everyone’s bodily autonomy. We are *against* old, white, narrow, patriarchal notions that rely on the subjugation of people based on their gender.
My third point is that TERF’s are part of the global rise of the far right. In case you haven’t followed this acronym or the controversy it describes closely, you may have heard that J.K. Rowling has been taking heat for some of her transphobic remarks. This may seem unrelated but it definitely is. Rowling is what is referred to as a “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” (TERF), and she believes that only cisgender (assigned at birth) women are women. We, as a collective of queer people, have moved some of the way toward a truly trans-inclusive movement since those early days when Sylvia Rivera and Marsha Pay-It-No-Mind Johnson tried to tell us, and the TERF’s are an unfortunate, if predictable, bit of backlash. In a special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly from last year, several scholars detail the many ways that the trans-exclusionary movement is linked to settler colonialism.
Project 2025 is very much dedicated to destroying the lives of our trans siblings, and we must stop it. The only way that I see to do that is by joining our struggle, as queer people fighting back against tyranny, with other struggles around the world.
Take away #3 for how we fight back: Our struggles for liberation are linked. Everyone for everyone. We are *against* old ways of divide-and-conquer that try to separate our struggles and turn us against each other.
I’ll close by saying that there is lots of awful happening now, that’s true. And, it is also true that we are powerful when we stand together. I will always bet on queer people to find a fierce, creative, glitter-and-sequined-covered, spectacular solution to whatever we’re up against. Project 2025 doesn’t stand a chance.