Now that J.D. Vance and Donald Trump have been officially announced as the Republican presidential tickets for 2024, LGBTQ+ activists are raising concerns about the potential consequences of a second Trump administration for the rights of the queer and trans community. Trump is campaigning on a strikingly similar program, known as “Agenda47,” despite his attempts to disassociate himself from the far-right Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” plan to solidify conservative control.
In late 2022, the Trump campaign began developing “Agenda47” into a 20-point program that is described in a number of videos on the campaign’s website.
The majority of the component points address common Trump scapegoats: One of Trump’s top concerns, for instance, is ending the “migrant assault,” in part through a large-scale immigration drive. With 2 “Agenda47” plans that expressly target transgender individuals, Trump has pledged to “prevent men out of women’s sports” and take revenge on “radical gender ideology” in educational institutions.
In recent times, Republicans have jumped at the chance to use transgender athletes as a split issue, claiming that trans women are biologically more athletic than cis women (despite the lack of data to support such accusations).
In a message from February 2023, Trump declared that should he be elected, he would rewrite Title IX, the federal anti-discrimination statute, to completely forbid trans women from engaging in women’s sports, and he would urge Congress to enact legislation to support this reading. Even though throughout his administration, President Joe Biden instituted new trans-inclusive guidelines for interpreting Title IX, these guidelines only apply to trans students in the context of academics and are currently on hold while a federal court case is pending.
However, Trump’s anti-trans intentions do not stop at sports. In a declaration from February 2023, he said that he would work toward a federal definition of “gender” that should only include “male and female” as biologically assigned.