Susan Perabo

Because Project 2025 wants educators who provide LGBTQ+ books to students registered as sex offenders

The far right, as part of Project 2025, plans to redefine the word “pornography.”

Redefining words based on ideologies is always cause for alarm. In this case, the authors of Project 2025 seek to define “pornography” in schools as any material that includes characters who exist outside their narrow ideas of sexual and gender norms. Their definition is deliberately malleable, but appears to include most everything encompassed in the letters “L,” “G,” “B,” “T,” and “Q.” A middle grade novel where the protagonist has gay parents? Porn. A young adult novel that includes a gender-fluid friend? Porn. A chapter book that features an appearance from a trans uncle? Porn.

Laid out explicitly in the document is a promise that this new version—their version—of pornography will be outlawed in classrooms and libraries and that “People who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.” Furthermore, the document reads, “Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.”

It’s clear that Donald Trump doesn’t care one way or the other about any of this, which is why the authors of Project 2025 will have a clear path to our kids’ schools if Trump is elected in November. Books with LGBTQ+ characters will be illegal for minors. Teachers and librarians who make these books accessible to children will go to jail.

I know this sounds hyperbolic, but it’s all laid out right there on page five of their nine-hundred-page book of horrors. They are clearly, proudly, telling us exactly what they’re going to do.

What exactly does this mean? In his speech at the DNC, Pete Buttigieg—US transportation secretary and a married gay dad of two young kids—said, “My kind of life went from impossible, to possible; from possible to real; from real to almost ordinary, in less than half a lifetime.” The progress Buttigieg describes is indeed staggering, and it occurred in large part due to a huge increase in representation, and normalization, of families with gay parents. For the last two decades, brave teachers and librarians have made age-appropriate books that feature diverse families (and LGBTQ+ characters in general) accessible to students, recognizing the importance of doing this for the kids who are part of those families, and for those who are not. Making every loving family an “ordinary” story for a child is a gift to an individual, but also a gift to a generation.

What a Trump presidency means is that what has happened to Pete Buttigieg will happen again, only in reverse. And it won’t take half a lifetime. Once the erasure begins, once books are pulled from shelves, the impact will be immediate, with the generational ripples set in motion. What for one beautiful stretch was ordinary will become either invisible, or criminal. If Trump is elected, a year from now the bookshelves our children and grandchildren encounter in their classrooms will contain only the versions of America given the seal of approval by the very worst Americans.

This is one of 786 reasons why we have to elect Kamala Harris.

Susan Perabo is a writer and professor who lives in Central Pennsylvania.