Project 2025 creator wants to ban gender-affirming care for trans adults

After successfully pushing unscientific bans against gender-affirming care for youth, the creator of Project 2025 wants to outlaw the life-saving treatment even for adults.

Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts recently endorsed taking care away from transgender adults, saying in an episode of the PBD podcast that the organization is currently "running the numbers" on the supposed correlation between gender-affirming surgeries and violence. His proposed solution? "You outlaw it."

"But where there continues to be disagreement is on what you do with adults. At Heritage, we believe that so-called transgender surgery is bad for anybody because of what you saw in Rhode Island yesterday," Roberts said, referencing the Monday mass shooting that left three people dead, including the shooter, and three others critically injured, all of whom were related to the shooter. Police have described the attack as targeted and domestic in nature.

"There does seem to be a mounting body of evidence that suggests a correlation between that surgery at any age, mental health issues, and increasingly, although we're running the numbers on this at Heritage, acts of violence," Roberts added, falsely.

Related: No, transgender and nonbinary people are not frequently mass shooters

The U.S. Secret Service Threat Assessment Center’s review of 172 mass attacks from 2016 to 2020 found that 96 percent of perpetrators were cisgender men. The Advocate has previously reported that out of more than 4,600 mass shootings between 2014 and 2024, at most six involved trans suspects — just 0.128 percent. As trans people account for only one percent of the U.S. population, they are significantly less likely to be mass shooters than the overall population.

As for gender-affirming care, the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, the World Medical Association, and the World Health Organization all agree that it is evidence-based and medically necessary not just for adults but minors as well.

Several studies demonstrate that depression and anxiety is alleviated in youth when they socially transition and receive treatment for gender dysphoria. Many other longitudinal studies show that gender-affirming care vastly improves quality of life for people who identify as trans. Out of 55 peer-reviewed studies, not a single one found that gender transition has negative outcomes.

Despite the overwhelming evidence, 26 states currently ban gender-affirming care for youth, according to the Movement Advancement Project. In 11 states, the care is already restricted for adults through laws preventing Medicaid from covering the treatment for all ages. Roberts continued to say he would support completely outlawing the care.

"We like that idea, too," he said. "One of the reasons is that we not only work in coalitions, but we often work toward an ultimate goal via incremental steps — sometimes people will call us radical incrementalists. We're willing to take a quarter of the enchilada if we can keep working there. So if that's the kind of thing that policymakers can agree on left and right, Heritage would be fully supportive of that, knowing that ultimately we have an ideal position that would be much stronger than that."

Related: What is the Heritage Foundation, the group behind the terrifying Republican Project 2025 agenda?

The Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank with direct influence on Donald Trump, boasting that he has "embraced over 64 percent of The Heritage Foundation’s policy recommendations" and that it has placed over 60 policy experts in his administration, according to a report from Media Matters for America. It has been deemed an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group by GLAAD.

The group is behind Project 2025, the far-right playbook to reshape the federal government by overhauling agencies, purging career civil servants, and replacing them with loyalists. It also seeks to limit abortion access, restrict LGBTQ+ rights, dismantle the Department of Education, end diversity programs, and promote "fertility awareness" programs over contraception. Many of its objectives have already been completed or are currently in progress.

Roberts himself has ties to the far-right and secretive Roman Catholic group Opus Dei, whose members practice corporal mortification, the deliberate infliction of pain or discomfort in an effort to become closer to god, often through self-flagellation. He's been accused of killing his neighbor's dog with a shovel, and while he has denied this, several of his colleagues corroborated that he bragged about the incident during a dinner party while working as a history professor at New Mexico State University.