Hey so about Project 2025

Please vote?

Oh, friends.

Shortly after Halloween, we will learn a lot about what America believes about itself.

If you subscribe to this newsletter, I assume we agree broadly on some of the basic political questions that this year’s presidential election will answer. Are women people? Are trans and nonbinary people people? Are immigrants people? Are people who aren’t Christian people?

A year ago, if you had told me “What counts as porn?” would be on the federal ballot, even I would probably have said that’s pretty extreme. But a year ago, I had not heard of Project 2025.

I don’t know why the Right decided to publish this for all of us to read, but I’m guessing they expected that (1.) the people who agree with them would be thrilled to see it laid out and (2.) the people who don’t agree with them would be so shocked they would never believe it was real or that it could ever really happen. And I can understand why the Right would think we’d refuse to believe they’d really go through with what they’ve published—plenty of people didn’t think they’d overturn Roe, but HERE WE ARE.

By now, there are lots of resources summarizing the utterly grotesque nature of Project 2025. Here are a few:

• EducateUS offers quick explainer of Project 2025’s plans for sex education and what we can do about it (PDF)

• Ms. Magazine covers some of the truly unhinged language about marriage and gender

• GLAAD summarizes even more of the dangerous plans around gender, sexual orientation, and birth control. YES THEY ARE COMING FOR BIRTH CONTROL.

• Dani Faith Leonard
  ’s Adult Sex Ed newsletter about the “p*rn” definition

• Dasia Sade’s 27 minute YouTube video about it. And also this follow up. (She’s a roller skating youtuber but like wow a lot. These two videos are worth an hour of your life.)

And here’s the paragraph I’m going to focus on:

“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”

This is on page 2, if you’re looking for it.

Page 2. Out of 887.

If it sounds vague, that’s deliberate, so let me clarify. “Transgender ideology” means trans and nonbinary people, the people who support them, and the books and other media that welcome them. So, like, everyone reading this. What they mean by “sexualization of children” is too bonkers to explain briefly (see page 475 for details), but basically it also means exposing children to… equal protection under the law, even if they’re pregnant or LGBTQIA2+. Honestly.

What Project 2025 says is that I, as an educator who includes trans and nonbinary people, am a purveyor of porn (by their bananas definition) and should be registered as a sex offender and imprisoned, as should the booksellers and librarians who “distribute” my books.

LIBRARIANS.

It sounds crazy, right? I sound crazy. Trust me, I feel crazy. But again, a lot of people thought they’d never overturn Roe simply because the vast majority of Americans didn’t want them to, so don’t go believing they won’t actually do this.

It’s real. They mean it. A lot of Project 2025’s agenda is already happening at local and state levels. The only way to stop it at the federal level is… to vote for Kamala Harris.

Pause. As a sex educator, there’s only one piece of prescriptive advice I ever give, and that’s to find a lube that works for you. Literally anyone who has any kind of sex can benefit from adding a good lube to their sex life. Even if the closest you get to sex is a massage, the right oil can make a real difference.

I’m not giving prescriptive advice here, either. I am saying that, while voting for Kamala Harris is not so universally good for everyone’s sex life as finding the right lube, it might be a not-very-distant second. Sex education and the inclusion of trans people create a world where everyone has greater bodily autonomy, which makes it easier for all people to want, like, or have sex (or not) on their own terms. Which is why rightwing wackos want less of it.

Some of you are stoked to vote! Please share that energy with every voter you know. Talk to people about Project 2025. Share this or any of the resources above.

Some of you aren’t sure voting is worth the trouble, and this is me saying it’s worth it. Your vote protects the very idea of sex education and the humanity of women and all LGBTQIA2+ people.

Some of you have legitimate reasons to sit this one out, and I get that. All I ask is that you assess those legitimate reasons in the context of what would happen if Trump wins. It sucks that I’m like, “Vote AGAINST Project 2025, regardless of what that means you have to vote FOR,” but like… it turns me into a pornographer and librarians into sex offenders, not to mention all the other appalling shit you’ll see in the links above.

Is it persuasive to talk about why they’re going so hard against sex education, reproductive freedom, and LGBTQIA2+ people? It’s because a rigid, patriarchal gender binary is the foundation of every autocracy, dictatorship, and fascist state around the globe and across history. Project 2025 sounds crazy, right? But it’s not crazy, it makes perfect sense when you recognize it as progress toward a Christian White Nationalist state.

Part of my perspective as a sex educator is that I am in favor of harm reduction—I’m not about abstinence from potentially risky behaviors, I’m about choosing behaviors that reduce the risk of unwanted consequences. Needle exchange and condom use and birth control are all harm reduction strategies. Voting for Kamala reduces the risk of the unwanted consequence of white nationalism ensconced in federal policy in ways it would take generations to undo. Voting for Kamala might even, potentially, open an opportunity to reduce the white nationalism already deeply rooted in the federal government, since, once somebody is in office, we get to protest and let them know what we want from them; change happens that way, even under dire circumstances.

Some of you are considering voting for a third party; I also get that. Voting for a Democrat can feel like choosing an all-inclusive vacation where part of what’s included is a nice beach but also part of the vacation is Squid Game. Nobody wants to choose Squid Game, no matter how nice the beach is.

And. The reality of this moment is that come January either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will become president. Part Squid Game or… 100% Squid Game that aims its guns at anyone who isn’t a white, cisgender, straight, Christian man with biological children and a job (but not a job as a librarian?). Whatever way you feel about VP Harris and/or the Democrats, it is only under Trump that I and everyone who works for the wellbeing of LGBTQIA2+ people could be considered pornographers and sex offenders. Never has it been less true that “there’s no real difference between the two major parties.”

I know people are always telling you to vote third party in local and state elections or “wait ‘til next time, this time is so important,” and I bet it’s pretty frustrating to hear me say it, too. But this time, it’s Kamala and the “more-of-the-same” of the Democrats (and maybe it’s “more-of-the-Squid-Game”)… or Project 2025 and official policy that supporting trans people is pornographic and sex educators are sex offenders. Don’t just take my word for it, read it for yourself or check out the links above. It’s real and it’s bad and you can stop it.

Look, the Right went ahead and said the quiet part out loud. I think the Right trusts us to either fail to appreciate their vagary (like Vox did) or to dismiss it as too extreme to be real (like Politico did). I think they also trust us to do that “purity” thing we do of only voting if the candidate is untainted by the problems of mainstream politics. And I think they trust us to welcome Trump’s obvious lie that it has nothing to do with him, so we can tell ourselves he won’t actually make being trans or doing sex education illegal.

That lie? That lie (video) is for Trump supporters who think Project 2025 is batshit and for liberals and progressives and leftists who would love to maintain their political purity without hurting the people who would be hurt by Project 2025.

So this is my pitch: If you would vote YES for trans people, sex education, birth control, and/or librarians, vote for Kamala.

Even if you live in a “safe state.” Even if you live in a state that has no hope of going to the Democrats. The vote has to be embarrassing to the Republicans, so unambiguous, so humiliating that we minimize the risk of violence, legal challenges, and “discourse” that gives the Right any opportunity to make it sound like Project 2025 is anything like mainstream American opinion, in the wake of the election.

By no means am I telling you what to do; I’m just offering my point of view and making a pitch. And by no means am I suggesting that voting is “all we have.” We have lots of ways to create change, and voting shouldn’t be all we do. But voting itself is the only thing that can prevent Project 2025 from becoming the active policy of the federal government.

So if you’re eligible to vote in the U.S. election, I hope you’ll vote. Register and make a plan.

Thanks for considering it.

PS: Kate Manne offers insights and tools to help us all support democracy by fighting misogynoir – which might also be a good check to see if any of the rhetoric you hear (or use???) against Kamala Harris is actually just racism, sexism or both.

PPS: On Thursday, August 29 at 12pm Eastern Jaclyn Friedman of EducateUs, Rosalie Wong of SWEEP NJ and Alison Macklin of SIECUS are having a conversation on Sex Ed in a Censored Nation, hosted by our awesome friends at the Woodhull Freedom Foundation. Registration is free - please join in!

Onward!

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