Julia was traveling to a friend’s home in St. Petersburg, Florida, next time when a police officer pulled them over for a cracked headlight. Jules was curious if the agent saw their little, anti-Republican governor sticker. Ron DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” act — and anxiously handed over their driver’s certificate. The 26-year-old EMT in education had legally changed their status documents’ sex to an M in 2019 but their image also showed how Jules appeared at the beginning of their medical transition, someone without a heavy black mustache and more baby-faced.
The official returned Jules’ driver’s certificate without any notice of their image. However, the agent did criticize Jules, who had recently relocated to a new residence, for never having their current target on their identification.
When Jules, who is using a pseudonym out of fear of harassment, went to their local Department of Motor Vehicles in November to release their target, employees told them there was no record of their identity marker release and that they could not get a substitute ID with their new handle and keep the M at the same time.
Jules, who is nonbinary and transracial, said, “I seem to think that they lost my paperwork.” “The person sitting across from me at the time was pretty much like, ‘Any point going forward, any other time you change this ID, we’re going to have to put an F on it. I thought, ‘Damn, wow.’”
Jules claims the same thing occurred when they unsuccessfully obtained a new ID in January. Then, on Jan. The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles quietly released a memo on January 31. It stated that residents could no longer update or change their gender on state driver’s licenses but could still receive replacement licenses for any name or address changes.
“Misrepresenting one’s gender, understood as sex, on a driver license constitutes fraud … and subjects an offender to criminal and civil penalties, including cancellation, suspension, or revocation of his or her driver license,” the memo read.
Transgender Floridians like Jules are now unsure of what to do: They worry about being denied the right to obtain a replacement ID with a real gender marker, and they worry about what will happen if they are pulled over again with a license with other false information.
The memo isn’t a formal law, rule or policy, advocates told HuffPost, which means it may be enforced at different department locations around the state. However, despite the absence of a law, many trans Floridians are prohibited from updating the gender marker on their licenses, according to Quinn Diaz, a public policy associate at the LGBTQ+ rights group Equality Florida. People can still update their gender marker on newly issued licenses if they have already done so on other documents such as a passport or birth certificate.
In an emailed statement, Molly Best, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, wrote that expanding the Department’s authority to issue replacement licenses based on one’s internal sense of gender or sex identification is against the law and does not contribute to improving the security and reliability of Florida issued licenses and identification cards. “The security, reliability, and accuracy of government-issued credentials is paramount.”
Florida’s DHSMV rolled out the memo while the state legislature was still deliberating over HB 1639, a bill that would have narrowly defined sex by one’s genitalia at birth and also barred transgender people from updating their IDs.
According to Diaz, bill sponsors began making arguments for passing HB 1639 because it would bring the state into compliance with its current DHSMV operations. “They were saying the bill was necessary because of the memo that was released by the agency days earlier in a unilateral overreach of its delegated authority. We are going to see that again because it is so frustrating.”
On April 15, 2023, Julis poses for a portrait at their home in Pinellas Park, Florida. Octavio Jones for HuffPost
In the end, the bill and nearly two other anti-LGBTQ bills were rejected by state lawmakers this spring. But the memo, Diaz said, is an example of the larger trend across Florida state agencies — many of which are stacked with DeSantis appointees who are sympathetic to his anti-trans agenda — creating policies or unofficial guidance that will help pave the way for other anti-trans legislation down the line.
Florida has served as a testing ground for the broader conservative movement’s efforts to push some of the most stringent anti-LGBTQ policies, including those that prohibit transgender and sexuality from being discussed in public spaces.
“The right wing was using Florida as a petri dish for what would be possible across the country should they gain power in Washington, D.C., again,” said Brandon Wolf, the press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign. We should believe them, I believe. It is a road map to making America a place like Florida, and allowing the federal government to do much of what we’ve seen governors like DeSantis and [Texas Gov. Abbott travels across the nation, Greg.”
According to a nearly 1,000-page document that lists objectives and recommendations for a conservative president, the reality that is currently unfolding in Florida today is only a microcosm of what the United States might look like. The “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” better known as Project 2025, draws upon many of the current state-level anti-LGBTQ+ laws and policies and expands them to the national stage by any means necessary.
The worst of everything we have seen, in my opinion
Authored by former Trump officials and dozens of right-wing organizations including the Heritage Foundation, nearly every page of Project 2025 details policies that would impact LGBTQ+ people — and there’s a particular focus on transgender people. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, laments the “corruption” of the nation under the leadership of the ruling and cultural elite whose children “suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.”
Many of the suggestions in the document could be implemented by Trump on his first day in the office through a series of executive orders, such as banning transgender members from the military and removing veteran health care policies that promote gender equality and abortion. The document also calls for policies to redefine sex as “biological sex,” which not only effectively erases the legal recognition and protection of transgender people but goes against modern science.
Bostock v. is also suggested in Project 2025, with a recommendation to roll back. Clayton County, the Supreme Court decision that protects LGBTQ+ people from employment discrimination; halting efforts to promote gender-affirming care for minors across the country; reinterpreting Title IX to permit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity; and giving the state the right to control education, as well as abolishing the Department of Education.”
The project’s agenda includes a number of suggestions that are specifically directed at LGBTQ+ people.
Per Project 2025, a second Trump administration would erase the legal recognition of transgender identity — and go as far as to delete any mention of terms including gender identity, sexual orientation, diversity and abortion from every “federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation to exist. The administration would halt the collection of gender identity data and forbid transgender students from using a name or pronoun that is not compatible with what is listed on their birth certificates without the written consent of their parents.
“Donald Trump… lacks any authentic points of view of his own. He has no coherent policy, he has no coherent vision for this country. However, he surrounds himself with people who impart ideas to him.”
– Professor at Georgia State University, Anthony Michael Kreis
The conservative manifesto illustrates a vast agenda to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children. Former Trump HHS director Roger Severino, who wrote many of Trump’s anti-trans health policies, urges the incoming HHS secretary to proudly state that married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure in a chapter about the Department of Health and Human Services.”
HuffPost contacted the Trump campaign for comment regarding Project 2025’s recommendations for LGBTQ+ Americans. However, there is reason to believe that Trump would closely follow the document’s recommendations if he wins a second term this fall, as he adopted 64% of the recommendations the Heritage Foundation laid out in 2016.
Donald Trump is an empty cannon. He doesn’t have any real viewpoints of his own. According to Anthony Michael Kreis, a professor of constitutional law at Georgia State University, “he has no coherent policy or vision for this country.” “But he surrounds himself with people who tell him things he likes to hear. In fact, they are the ones to whom the real responsibility is delegated.”
LGBTQ+ people have been the targets of a coordinated right-wing legislative attack over the past three years that has resulted in restrictions on access to healthcare, sports, and public spaces, and has also resulted in a rise in anti-LGBTQ violence.
“[Project 2025] is both a run-of-the-mill vision for a Republican or anti-LGBT administration, plus the worst of everything we’ve seen in the states and an escalation of all of that,” said Chase Strangio, a lawyer and deputy director of ACLU’s transgender justice project.
In essence, conservatives refer to trans people as a threat to society’s well-being, which is a terrifying idea, according to Strangio. “When you’re dealing with any sort of government that is modeling itself after fascist government, you don’t want to be the group of people that is scapegoated into taking the blame for society’s problems.”
Strangio pointed to how Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has been targeting and surveilling transgender people over the last few years. Paxton has requested a lot of information about transgender people, from looking into families who seek gender-affirming care for their children for abuse to looking into data on transgender people who have changed their gender on their licenses. Paxton tried to obtain even more information on transgender Texans after the state legislature banned gender-affirming care for minors, including asking for private medical records of young Texans seeking care in states like Georgia and Washington.
According to legal experts, Project 2025 aims to make the nation look like it did in the 1960s and 1970s, when Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign responded to a burgeoning gay liberation movement by branding gay people as child predators.
“A lot of these hard-fought wins that LGBTQ people have secured for themselves are really hanging in the balance and are severely at risk of being diminished, if not abolished altogether,” Kreis said.
And advocates worry that any push to repeal LGBTQ+ rights would conflict with more general privacy laws and civil liberties for those who want to abort, immigrants, and people of color.
“It’s not just the rights that we think about as directly being related to LGBTQ people. According to Kreis, these other related rights are related to how we think about the constitutional law and the right to privacy. “As soon as you can disrupt those, as the Project wants to do, it really jeopardizes everybody because the rights are just inexplicably intertwined.”
A Disregard For Process
Legal experts and LGBTQ+ advocates from all walks of the aisle concur that if Trump were to win the presidency this fall, there would be few obstacles to preventing him from torching civil liberties for LGBTQ+ people.
“We’ve seen from Trump’s last administration that he’s not concerned with precedent or the rule of law,” said Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, the executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. If Trump is elected president next year, I believe there is every reason to worry that the administration will fail to acknowledge our humanity and follow all of [Project 2025’s] laws.”
And in general, Project 2025 suggests completely overriding the traditional roles of government. The document calls for the abolition of the administrative state — the authority of individual government agencies to draft and enforce their own rules outside of the legislative process — by dismantling entire departments within the federal government and replacing them with “an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives.”
With this kind of unchecked power, Kreis worries about the possibility of Trump gutting the procedures for creating rules and regulations within the federal health and education agencies which have previously established significant protections for LGBTQ+ people. Kreis envisions a nightmare scenario where a Trump administration has complete control over HHS regulations governing the distribution of medications like PrEP, an HIV prevention drug, and hormone replacement therapy.
“In some ways, it doesn’t really matter what [Trump] has the authority to do. More important factors are what he is willing to do and what a court will support.”
– Chase Strangio, deputy director of the transgender justice project at the ACLU
Trump attacked LGBTQ+ people during his presidency, often defying conventional presidential action. He introduced hostile policies in nearly every agency in the federal government, according to Heng-Lehtinen, and essentially made his ban on transgender people from serving in the military via a tweet.
The Trump administration also rarely paid much notice to the Administrative Procedure Act, a process to ensure that agencies follow certain standards for formal rulemaking and engage and inform the public about their actions, said Wolf of the Human Rights Campaign. For instance, Trump repeatedly attempted to revoke the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program despite facing overwhelming opposition from his team in court, and nearly two-thirds of those legal disputes claimed the administration had violated the APA.
“In some ways, it doesn’t really matter what [Trump] has the authority to do,” Strangio said. It is more about what he is willing to do and what a court will support.”
And the courts might be eager to support a lot. The Supreme Court has a conservative majority, thanks in large part to Trump, who also reshaped the federal judiciary by appointing more than 200 judges, 40% of whom demonstrated an anti-LGBTQ bias. If he wins in November, he might elect even more new federal judges. And if Republicans control Congress, he may have an especially easy time pushing through his agenda.
Heng-Lehtinen described Joe Biden as the “most pro-transgender president we’ve ever had,” but trans people in the country are still unknowing what the next election will mean for them and their fundamental rights.
Jules in their backyard in Florida. Octavio Jones for HuffPost
As well as being acutely aware of how stressful it is to live in a state with a constantly changing legal landscape, Julia is also aware of how dangerous it would be if state laws were implemented nationwide.
“What I’m witnessing, I think, is that fatigue is one of those things that has been killing people,” they said. There are many people I know who require their medications, and if it were simpler to get them, they would likely be taking them while still being alive. But there are so many barriers.”
Wolf, who until last fall worked as the press secretary for Equality Florida, said he has seen firsthand how a government can wear down individuals and families, and is terrified by what would happen if the rest of the country reflected Florida’s current reality.
Because it is blatantly an attempt to give trans and nonbinary people in this country an ultimatum, Wolf said, “The attack on the very rights for trans people to exist as themselves in this country is terrifying for me and heartbreaking for me.”
“Either you conform to this right-wing idea that there’s only one right way to be a human being or we will use everything at our disposal to push you out of society.”
