"Gender Ideology" is Real. It's the Foundation of Project 2025.

Right-wing extremists are forcing narrow, rigid, and archaic gender roles disconnected from social and biological reality onto American society. Their persecution of trans people is a smokescreen.

In early September, a Texas A&M dean and department head were removed from their positions after a viral video was posted showing a student disrupting a class over an infographic related to gender and sexuality. The aggrieved student claimed that the lesson violated her individual and religious beliefs, “and the law,”—and right on cue, right-wing pundits and state officials pounced on the opportunity to punish the university. The resulting uproar ended with the resignation of university president Mark Welsh and a board-ordered audit of thousands of courses to “make sure the course content matches the course description.”

So, what was this horrifying graphic that right-wing voices claimed violated “biological truth” and “promote transgender ideology?” An educational image designed back in 2014 to simply depict the growing scientific, research, and medical consensus on human sex categorization, gender, and sexuality.

A graphic of a purple unicorn depicting up-to-date scientific information on gender and sexuality, which can also be found at: https://transstudent.org/gender/

The mountain of science behind the Gender Unicorn is far too steep to sum up simply, from multiple fields spanning sociology to genetics to neuroscience to anthropology. But here’s a quick summary:

• “Biological sex” is socially constructed. While we typically think of karyotype (XX, XY, or others like XXY), genitalia, and reproductive organs as falling neatly into “boy” or “girl” at birth, this is untrue for around 2% of the population — roughly the same proportion of redheads, as it turns out. The fixation on a neat physical or “biological” divide at birth has historically resulted in invasive and traumatic surgeries for intersex children, children whose bodies do not resemble the “norm.”

• Gender identity, as well as sexual orientation, is influenced by a combination of biological (e.g., prenatal hormones, genetics) and social (early childhood environment) factors, with no one factor dominating. These same combination of factors may influence whether a person eventually identifies as a gender different from the gender assigned at birth, or transgender.

• Transgender identity is enduring, with a longitudinal study showing that 94% of transgender youth continued to identify as trans for several years. Remarkably, transgender healthcare has some of the lowest rates of regret out of all medical interventions, with less than 1% of all trans people expressing regret after gender-affirming surgery.

• Gender identity (one’s internal sense of their gender and what it means to them) and gender expression (the ways one externally performs of expresses their gender to others) are distinct from each other.

Frankly, I’ll go so far as to say that for some (short) period of time, trans identity was a non-issue in the context of society: it was between patients and their doctors. Transgender healthcare for minors was in close conversation with parents, and surgery was exceedingly rare: 0 cases for trans youth under twelve, and 0.02% of cases for trans youth between 15 and 17. Because of course: doctors overwhelmingly adhere to internationally recognized medical best practice.

That trans people were increasingly visible in society was a natural consequence of more people recognizing that trans people existed at all. That practices related to trans inclusion (like introducing oneself with personal pronouns) became more common was a natural consequence of those aiming to work with and serve all people recognizing that they ought to do so for trans people as well. That more people were coming out as trans was a natural consequence of more people feeling safe to come out as trans, not “indoctrination.”

A graph showing rates of left-handedness among Americans, by year of birth. It sharply rises from 1920 to 1960, plateauing at 12%.

The increase and subsequent plateau in left-handed people in the 1900s follows the same pattern. Far from an increase in “left-handed ideology” or “left-handed indoctrination,” what changed was simply a decrease in the societal stigma against being left-handed—and greater safety for people who had always been left-handed to identify as such.

Even so, with visibility on the rise, anti-trans discrimination in housing, health care, education, and workplaces was a key issue in the fight toward greater acceptance and understanding long before trans people became the bizarre obsession of right-wing extremists.

The current right-wing panic over trans people, beyond a cruel desire to reverse social progress, re-engineer stigma against trans people, and make existing in public society unsafe and unfeasible for trans people, has another purpose: to distract from the mass dismantling of women’s rights and the widespread installation of ultraconservative gender norms as the law of the land.

The Gender Ideology of Project 2025

i·de·ol·o·gy

/ˌidēˈäləjē,/

noun

1. a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.

Project 2025, the well-documented strategy being applied in real time by the second Trump Administration, outlines the core beliefs that this administration and the present-day Republican Party has adopted around gender.

“The next conservative Administration ... should remove all references, examples, definitions, photos, and language … that include the following terms: “gender,” “gender equality,” “gender equity,” “gender diverse individuals,” “gender aware,” “gender sensitive,” etc. It should also remove references to “abortion,” “reproductive health,” and “sexual and reproductive rights” and controversial sexual education materials.”

It calls on the Secretary of Health and Human Services to “proudly state that men and women are biological realities that are crucial to the advancement of life sciences and medical care and that married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure.”

“Rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.”

What these and so many other passages from Project 2025 make clear is that the gendered aims of the present-day Republican Party go far beyond transgender people to entirely remake gender relations in the U.S. Their ideology is simple, if repugnant:

• “Women belong in the home, not the workplace.” By rolling back abortion rights, worsening access to childcare, redirecting resources for family planning into “marriage education,” and legitimizing workplace discrimination, Republicans are dramatically worsening poverty (especially for single mothers, who are more likely to be Black or Latina), forcing women out of the workplace, and putting financial independence for women further out of reach. These are the very women who are increasingly being jailed for “pregnancy-related crimes” since the fall of Roe.

• “Political power belongs to men.” A recent repost by former television personality and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth reflects the creep of ultraconservative beliefs advocating for ending women’s right to vote into the mainstream. The SAVE Act, which passed the House but not yet the Senate, has been criticized by legal experts as suppressing the vote of married women (not to mention veterans, low-income voters, survivors of natural disasters, trans people, and everyone else without easy access to up-to-date formal documentation like passports and birth certificates, or who benefits from online or mail-in voting).

• “LGBTQ+ people do not, and should not, exist.” Through Executive Orders only recognizing two genders, removing workplace protections for transgender and nonbinary people in the federal workplace, state-level bills aiming to legally “erase” trans people from public life and strip access to healthcare for trans people, and increasingly calling for the Supreme Court to “reconsider” their ruling on gay marriage, the Republic Party aims to undo decades of local, state, federal, and case law precedent.