Hateful History Repeated: The Transmissist ‘Project 2025’ Manifesto

Kelley Winters, Ph.D.
2023 September 06

A cabal of over fifty hate groups and right-wing extremist organizations, led by the Heritage Foundation, published a manifesto of bigoted demands for Trump or any other GOP president in 2025. These include eradication of Trans and Gender Diverse lives from U.S. society and rollback of civil rights for all marginalized classes. History assures us that Trump will follow their instructions to the letter if brought back to power by election or by violent sedition.

In 2014, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) passed a “Resolution on Transgender Identity.” It was a list of demands for persecution and erasure of Transgender and Gender Diverse (TGD) human beings from American society, and it was directed to aspiring GOP presidential candidates who would need the support of the southern evangelical base to have a chance at the primary nomination. As the largest, wealthiest, and most politically virulent Protestant denomination in the U.S., the SBC has long been an essential gatekeeper to this political base in conservative politics (Winters, 2023). These demands were codified in 2015 by the Family Research Council, long designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (2023). Key points were adopted by the GOP platform the following year. Trump was among the first primary candidates to embrace the SBC mandate to gin up malice and fear to cast TGD people as a scapegoat class. The southern theo-extremist base rewarded him with a path to the White House. This tragic history is repeating itself in the runup to the 2024 presidential election, but at a much, much larger scale. Constitutional separation of powers and fundamental human rights of all LGBTQ2IA people, birthing people, and racial minorities in the U.S. are at stake.

In April, 2023, the hyper-conservative Heritage Foundation self-published the ninth edition of its Mandate for Leadership series, Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise (Heritage, 2023A). It is a greatly-expanded manifesto of denial of civil rights for a wide variety of marginalized classes in the U.S., and it particularly targets TGD youth and adults. While earlier versions were published after national elections to influence policies of new and reelected Republican administrations or congressional sessions, this “Mandate” was released early in the presidential campaign season (Heritage, 2023B) to influence the party platform and the election itself. Public awareness about the 2025 “Mandate” has grown since it was reported by Lisa Mascaro of the Associated Press on August 29 (Mascaro/AP, 2023).

The 2025 “Mandate” document has more than 900 pages and was written by 34 authors and two editors, with an advisory board of 54 extreme conservative organizations (a number of them, SPLC-designated hate groups), and 277 volunteer contributors. Authors of the Heritage Foundation 2025 “Mandate” include Peter Navarro, a Trump-appointee criminally [updated] convicted for contempt of Congress on Sept. 7, following the House January 6 committee’s investigation (CNN, 2023), and Trump-appointee Ken Cuccinelli, who famously fought to criminalize same sex relationships as a Virginia State Senator. As Trump’s Director of the HHS Office for Civil Rights, co-author Roger Severino reversed earlier policies under the Affordable Care Act that had prohibited TGD exclusion from health care (NPR, 2020).

The scope of malice and bigotry in the 2025 “Mandate” threatens virtually every marginalized class in American society:

The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists. (pp. 4-5)

However, the authors of this manifesto are particularly obsessed with hate speech and defamation that would criminalize and eradicate virtually all aspects of TGD life in the U.S.:

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. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered. (p. 5)

The parallels between the 2025 “Mandate” and the 2014 SBC resolutions, to mark TGD people as the primary scapegoat class in extremist right-wing politics, are prominent:

RESOLVED, That we oppose efforts to alter one’s bodily identity (e.g., cross-sex hormone therapy, gender reassignment surgery) to refashion it to conform with one’s perceived gender identity; and be it further
RESOLVED, That we continue to oppose steadfastly all efforts by any governing official or body to validate transgender identity as morally praiseworthy (Isaiah 5:20); and be it further
RESOLVED, That we oppose all cultural efforts to validate claims to transgender identity… (SBC, 2014)

The following list indexes specific topics of oppression and disinformation, targeting TGD dignity, human rights, and health care in the Heritage Foundation 2025 “Mandate”:

• Trans erasure and criminalization pp4-5.
• abolish the Gender Policy Council p62.
• purge TGD service members pp103-104.
• USAID erasure: p259.
• science censorship p284.
• civil rights exclusion p322.
• nonbinary erasure with Office of Civil Rights p. 332.
• reverse Title IX protections, spread disinformation p333.
• reverse Title IX protections and force outing p334.
• Littmanian falsehoods, “social contagion,” and hate legislation pp345-346.
• compulsory misgendering and deadnaming in schools p346.
• gut HIPPA to out TGD youth to intolerant parents p358.
• purge/censor gender diversity information from federal agencies p358.
• erasure, exclusion within HHS/CDC p456.
• weaponization of faux science within NIH, promotion of desistance myth p462.
• ban Medicare coverage of affirming surgical care within DMS p474.
• allow LGBTQ2IA discrimination in foster care and adoption policies pp477-478.
• fund and prioritize anti-LGBTQ2IA religious indoctination pp481-482.
• defund affirming care under Ryan White programs within HRSA p485.
• mandate erasure and disinformation by the HHS Secretary p489.
• hate mandates for the The Assistant Secretary for Health pp489-490.
• reversal of Title IX protections within the Office of Civil Rights pp495-496.
• tear down state civil rights protections within DOJ p553.
• eliminate Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs within DOL pp582-583.
• restrict application of Bostock and Title VII protections p584.
• enforce binary essentialism p585.
• protect religious discrimination against LGBTQ2IA people pp585-586.
• raise barriers to enforcement of workplace discrimination p586.
• rescind affirming health care within VA p644.

I hope this list is helpful to future scholarship on this disgraceful chapter of U.S. history. This text is specific to TGD oppression and barely scratches the surface of threats to racial minorities, cis-LGB people, child-bearing people, immigrant families and individuals, and democracy itself that are contained in this unconscionable “mandate” of hate.

Reference Links:

(CNN, 2023) https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/06/politics/peter-navarro-contempt-trial/index.html

(Mascaro/AP, 2023) https://apnews.com/article/election-2024-conservatives-trump-heritage-857eb794e505f1c6710eb03fd5b58981

(NPR, 2020) https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/06/12/868073068/transgender-health-protections-reversed-by-trump-administration

(SPLC, 2023) https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/family-research-council

(Winters, 2023) https://transpolicyreform.wordpress.com/2023/03/21/history-to-be-remembered-the-transmissist-sbc-resolution-of-2014/

References with Content Warning:

The following references contain material that in the author’s opinion may be ideologically biased, in opposition to affirming medical care, civil rights, equality, or participation in human society for Transgender and Gender Diverse people. This content may trigger trauma in TGD readers or those who care about TGD lives. Indirect links are provided to a safe archive of this content that does not directly monetize or benefit hate groups.

(Heritage, 2023A) https://web.archive.org/web/20230824043807/https://www.project2025.org/policy/
Full document: https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

(Heritage, 2023B) https://web.archive.org/web/20230828002527/https://www.heritage.org/press/project-2025-publishes-comprehensive-policy-guide-mandate-leadership-the-conservative-promise

(SBC, 2014) https://web.archive.org/web/20201221154518/https://www.sbc.net/resource-library/resolutions/on-transgender-identity/

Copyright © 2022 Kelley Winters

History to be Remembered: The Transmissist SBC Resolution of 2014

Kelley Winters, Ph.D.
2023 March

How did the U.S. theo-confederacy (including religious right and southern evangelical extremism, white nationalism, GOP and MAGA trumpism) choose Transgender and Gender Diverse people as their hated scapegoat class for political gain?

The answer lies in the very same central institution that promoted the horrors of slavery and the treason of confederacy in the antebellum South. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) was founded in 1845 by southern slaveholders (including, sadly, some monstrous Appalachian kin of mine) to provide a religious justification for their atrocity. Today, it is the largest Protestant and second-largest Christian denomination in the United States and remains the most politically virulent, in opposition to minority human rights. The reported combined total assets of SBC entities were $2.66 billion in 2021 (Baptist News Global, 20220824).

In the run up to the GOP primary for the 2016 presidential election, the SBC published Resolution 2250, “On Transgender Identity,” in June, 2014. This political manifesto condemned non-birth-assigned gender identites and expressions, all forms of affirming medical care, and legal recognition and cultural acceptance of TGD people in our authentic genders. The SBC resolution falsely stereotyped gender diversity as psychopathology (“human fallenness…psychological manifestations as gender identity confusion”) and promoted religious gender-conversion treatments (in terms of “hope of the redemption of our bodies in Christ” and “as they repent and believe in Christ”).

SBC Resolution 2250 served as literal marching orders for prospective GOP presidential candidates in 2016. It was the list of demands, the price of admission, for any GOP candidate seeking endorsement by the SBC and its enormous sphere of conservative influence and access to financial resources. One candidate, trump, was quickest to jump to the SBC’s demands for persecution of TGD people and communities. He was rewarded with the loyalty of the southern-centered evangelical political base, who were led to believe that his conquest of the White House was divinely mandated.

The SBC hate-resolution of 2014 was expanded and clarified by the Family Research Council (a part of the “Focus on the Family” cabal of hate groups founded by James Dobson in 2015) and codified in the GOP platform in 2016. In the post-trump years, the U.S. theo-confederacy has doubled down, over and again, on its campaign of lies about TGD people and our health care and its blitzkrieg of transmissist legislation and litigation.

Content Warning: the text of this linked document of tragic historical consequence is highly offensive and has promoted nearly a decade of systemic hate and discrimination against TGD people. I avoid providing direct links to web sites of hate-biased organizations, so I have included a safe link to an archived copy of SBC Resolution 2250 on the reputable Wayback Machine-Internet Archive site.

Southern Baptist Convention. (2014) On Transgender Identity, Resolution 2250, Baltimore, MD. https://web.archive.org/web/20201221154518/https://www.sbc.net/resource-library/resolutions/on-transgender-identity/

Note about the graphic image: The Southern Baptist Convention did not repudiate the confederate flag until recently in its history, June 2016, and under intense public pressure. Up to that point, the SBC referred to this deplorable symbol as a “sign of solidarity of the whole Body of Christ.” We can’t make this stuff up.

Copyright © 2023 Kelley Winters