I want to start with a fact that the people who pretend Project 2025 was never the plan would prefer you not connect to anything else. Since January 2025, the U.S. Department of Education has been cut to a fraction of its former size. The Office for Civil Rights, the unit responsible for, among other things, enforcing Title IX protections against discrimination on the basis of sex, has had its regional investigative capacity gutted, leaving a skeleton crew to handle a national caseload.
You can read this as a budget story. The administration would like you to read it as a budget story. The honest reading is that the office tasked with protecting students from sex-based discrimination in federally funded schools has been dismantled to roughly the size of a regional bank’s compliance team, in fifteen months, on purpose.
That is one bullet point in the education chapter of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page governing blueprint. There are dozens more. The Center for American Progress warned, before the election, that the plan’s education agenda would make schools less safe for all students. Much of it has since been implemented, some of it faster than the document itself proposed. The pieces still pending are mostly waiting on a friendly Supreme Court decision, because the court calendar takes longer than the administrative one.
Here is what the campaign told you would not happen, that has happened, and what it means for queer kids in American schools.
1. The Title IX gender-identity rollback
The Biden-era 2024 Title IX rules, which had clarified that the law’s prohibition on sex discrimination covers discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, consistent with the Supreme Court’s Bostock decision, were rescinded in 2025. The replacement rule redefines “sex” as “biological sex assigned at birth” for all Title IX purposes.
The practical effect in the school building: a trans kid who is misgendered by a teacher, denied access to a bathroom, or pressured out of a sport now has no Title IX claim. Their school district is, in fact, federally required to discriminate against them in order to remain in compliance. The same rule strips protections for students harassed on the basis of sexual orientation.
The states with active anti-trans statutes love this rule. The states without them now have an administration that will withhold federal funding from districts that try to do better than the federal floor. That is the new federal floor: you may discriminate, and we will defend the discrimination in court.
2. The “parental rights” national framework
Chapter 11 of Project 2025 proposed a national parental-rights framework that would, in practice, require schools to disclose a student’s social transition or sexuality to their parents on request, even when the student is a minor who has explicitly asked the school not to. The executive order implementing the federal version of this dropped in March 2025. Districts that fail to comply lose Title I funding.
The kid this rule is written about is the high-school sophomore who came out to her counselor because she could not come out at home. The rule outs her to her parents. The rule does not consider what happens next. The research on forced outing is unambiguous: the Williams Institute at UCLA Law found that policies forcing schools to disclose a student’s gender identity against their wishes raise the risk of family rejection, abuse, and suicide attempts. The administration declined to comment on that research.
3. The voucher push
The administration’s federal voucher proposal, modeled on the Project 2025 blueprint, passed the House in November and is presently with the Senate. It would create a federal tax-credit scholarship program, effectively a national voucher, that, critically, includes no anti-discrimination requirements for participating schools. A religious school that refuses to admit a gay student, or that expels a student whose parents are same-sex, would be eligible.
This is not a hypothetical concern. Voucher programs in seven states currently fund schools whose enrollment policies explicitly exclude LGBTQ+ students or children of LGBTQ+ families. The federal version would scale that to every state. Public dollars to schools that turn queer kids away at the door.
4. The library and curriculum compliance regime
Section 11.4 of the Project 2025 chapter called for federal funding conditioned on “removal of pornographic materials” from school libraries, with “pornographic” defined elastically enough to include any book depicting LGBTQ+ characters or themes. The implementing guidance, released in May 2025, skipped the exact language and got there anyway, achieving roughly the same effect through a definitional change to “obscene material” under Title IV funding criteria.
What this looks like in practice: a district that wants to keep its Title IV funding now has an incentive to pre-emptively pull anything that might be flagged in a complaint. Districts are doing this. The American Library Association has documented record numbers of attempted book removals, concentrated overwhelmingly on titles by and about LGBTQ+ people and people of color.
5. The mental-health drawdown
The 2022-era school-counselor grants, passed in the bipartisan response to the Uvalde shooting, were not renewed in the 2026 federal budget. The CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health was zeroed out in the same package. The federal funding stream that previously supported about a third of school-based mental-health programming for LGBTQ+ youth is, as of the new fiscal year, gone.
I include this one because it does not get reported as an LGBTQ+ story. It gets reported, when it gets reported, as a budget story or a public-health story. It is also an LGBTQ+ story. According to The Trevor Project’s 2025 national survey, LGBTQ+ young people remain at sharply elevated risk for suicide, a risk driven by how they’re mistreated, not by who they are, and the same research shows that one accepting adult and an affirming school measurably lower that risk. School-based counseling is exactly that intervention. The funding that paid for it has been cut.
What is left for the kids who are still in the building
The kid is still in the building. The kid is going to school on Monday. The teacher who used to be able to say something useful is now operating in a state where saying something useful might get her sued. The counselor who used to be able to keep a confidence is now required to break it. The library that used to have a copy of the book is missing the book. The bathroom that used to be the one she could use without a confrontation is now the subject of a federal directive.
And the kid still has to make it through the day.
I do not have a neat ending for this piece because the policy environment does not have a neat ending. The administration has roughly two and a half years left of unrestricted runway. The states with the most aggressive anti-LGBTQ+ legislative agendas have legislatures that are not up for serious electoral challenge until 2028. The federal courts have been reshaped enough that most relief will come slowly, if at all.
What I can tell you is that the queer adults in this country have been here before. We have built underground networks for medication access. We have built parallel libraries. We have built mutual-aid funds for the families that need to move states. We will do all of it again.
The kid in the building still needs to know there is a door on the other side. That part has not changed. The door is harder to see right now. We are the people who have to make sure she can find it.
That is the job.