What Trump Means For: LGBT Rights

More discrimination, fewer protections, and classifying librarians as sex offenders.

Welcome to “What Trump Means For,” a multi-part series I’ll be publishing over the next several weeks as the 2024 election creeps closer. I’ll break down what Donald Trump and his current and probable future teams have said about how they will govern and exactly what they will do while in office. If Trump wins, he may not accomplish everything he pledges to do. But he will no doubt do a lot — and it’s worth taking seriously what he says and plans.

When it comes to rights for LGBT people, Donald Trump has been pretty quiet, at least far as the LGB as it concerned. On trans rights, he and members of his team have been much more aggressive (and much more demeaning). A key thing to understand about conservatives and LGBT rights is that much of the hostility to gay and lesbian rights stems from the same kind of traditional-values misogyny that animates their opposition to abortion: They believe that there is only one acceptable way not just of forming a family, but of being a person in the world, and what’s acceptable is fundamentally determined by one’s sex. Their whole vision of an ideal nuclear family is one that fundamentally hinges on hierarchy, with a man in charge and a woman as his helpmeet, with reproduction as her primary obligation. This model extends beyond the home front — it’s also why you see men dominating conservative politics and conservative religious institutions and conservative organizations. The idea that men are natural leaders seems to seep into every area of conservative life.

LGBT people, by their very existence, challenge this idea that men and women are made by God as fundamentally unequal but naturally complementary.

Here are few of the things Trump and his likely future team have suggested they will do:

• Prosecute librarians, educators, and other adults who recognize the existence of trans people and make them register as sex offenders. I wish this were a joke, but here is exactly what Project 2025 says about librarians who include on their shelves literature that recognizes that trans and gender-nonconforming people exist: “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.” It’s hard to overstate how terrifying this proposal is: Whatever some right-wing bigoted prude decides is “pornographic” — a list that in recent years has included Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and kidnapping survivor Jaycee Dugard’s memoir A Stolen Life — could become criminal to stock on library shelves. And books about gender identity are among the most controversial.