Fascists use patriarchy to exert control. That’s why Republicans are openly planning to imprison librarians, teachers and parents as “sex offenders” for sharing essential information with young people.
If you don’t live in Florida, you may be inclined to distance yourself from the news that they just banned public school districts from teaching sex education—including lessons on consent, HIV transmission, abuse prevention and the existence of LGBTQ+ people.
But this is not a “Florida problem”—it’s a national preview. Because Project 2025 calls for a federal ban on sex education too. It’s just hidden, snuck in as part of their ban on pornography.
Russel Vought, Project 2025 co-author and former director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, didn’t know he was being recorded when he confessed two truths about the plan to undercover journalists earlier this year:
- Trump absolutely backs and embraces Project 2025, despite his protests to the contrary.
- And Trumpworld is dead serious about the Project 2025 proposal to outlaw what it calls “pornography.”
But there’s one thing he didn’t say that’s equally true: When right-wing hardliners like Vought say they want to ban porn, they don’t just mean blocking adult websites. They mean a set of shockingly repressive policies, from making it illegal to teach sex education anywhere in the country, to forcing librarians who shelve “inappropriate” material to register as sex offenders, to arresting transgender people for simply existing in public.
Believe them when they say it. It’s stated, briefly but plainly, on page five of the introduction to Project 2025.
It’s not too late to protect our reproductive and sexual freedom, our freedom to learn and our fundamental freedom to be ourselves—but it will be if we don’t take Florida’s example literally and seriously.
Many voters and pundits have assumed the plan to outlaw porn found in Project 2025 must be some kind of hyperbole. After all, Trump has a rather infamous passion for porn stars, and it’s hard to find more avid porn consumers than Christian evangelicals in red states. But authoritarians never apply their own rules to themselves.
More importantly, outlawing porn is a Trojan horse, hiding foundational moves the Trumpist right must make in order to seize national power—moves we know they will make if they can, because they are already making them across the country. The news out of Florida is just the latest example.
The tell is in the details: When we look closely at how Project 2025 defines pornography, we see that porn per se is not their only—or even their primary—target. It’s a short phrase, easy to miss in a 920-page document:
“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children…”
“Transgender ideology” and “sexualization of children” are right-wing code for damaging policies they’ve been pursuing at the state and local level for years.
“Transgender ideology” refers, of course, to the fact that transgender people exist, as they have always existed, and should be treated as equal members of society. This simple truth has resulted in the astronomical rise in anti-trans bills introduced by the right at the state level, from 21 bills in 2015 to 638 in 2024—so far.
Among the latest in these efforts is a Kentucky amendment that would remove children from their home and charge their parents with neglect, if a transgender child violates the state’s laws requiring them to use bathrooms not congruent with their gender. Taking kids away from their families is Republicans’ idea of “anti-porn.”
The phrase “sexualization of children” takes more unpacking, because Trumpists like to shove a variety of odious things in that particular suitcase—from rampant book bans, to attacks on sex education. On page 475 of Project 2025, you can even find them rejecting federal provisions banning discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, because nondiscrimination is “sexualization of children.”
Outlawing porn is a Trojan horse, hiding foundational moves the Trumpist right must make in order to seize national power—moves we know they will make if they can, because they are already making them across the country.
Republicans are also already pursuing these goals in states and school districts across the country. Most famously, they wrote Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law so broadly that it not only forced the removal of thousands of volumes from school libraries, but confiscated teachers’ own personal classroom libraries. Florida school districts stopped teaching sex education altogether for fear of violating the new law—even though sex education has been proven to make young people’s lives better in so many ways, including reducing bullying, increasing academic performance and helping kids stick up for each other if they see a classmate being harassed or abused. (It’s only after a successful lawsuit invalidated some of the worst provisions of the “Don’t Say Gay” law that some Florida school districts moved to re-instate their sex ed curricula, prompting this new directive from the DeSantis administration.)
It’s already not just Florida: PEN America tracked over 10,000 public school book bans during the 2023-2024 school year alone, heavily centered in Republican-controlled states. Many of the banned books are about sexual violence, LGBTQ+ characters and themes, and/or related to sex education. And according to SIECUS, a national organization that tracks sex ed policy, “Don’t Say Gay”-style bills were introduced in 26 states in 2024 alone—and they have already become law in Louisiana and New Hampshire.
Why such an obsession with sexual and reproductive health, sexual orientation and gender diversity? As Jason Stanley explained in How Fascism Works, fascistic dictatorships construct a mythical past for themselves, always including a patriarchal father to protect the women and children. Thus, “the fascist leader is analogous to the patriarchal father, the ‘CEO’ of the traditional family.”
That’s why, from the original fascists of Italy, to Rwanda’s Hutu Power movement in the mid ’90s, to right-wing movements in present day Poland, Hungary and Turkey, we see autocratic leaders push to ban abortion, birth control, Pride parades, gender studies and even the existence of transgender people altogether. This year, Vladimir Putin called motherhood “an amazing destiny for women,” while last fall, the Russian Supreme Court “banned the LGBT movement.”
Let us repeat: Fascists use patriarchy to exert control. That’s why Trumpists are openly planning to imprison librarians, teachers and possibly even parents as “sex offenders” for sharing essential information with young people. We know they’ll do it, because they’ve already been doing it.
Fascistic dictatorships construct a mythical past for themselves, always including a patriarchal father to protect the women and children.
Whatever happens in November, we have real work to do in our own communities to protect and advance sex education, diverse school libraries, and trans kids at school, knowing that we’re fighting for a future that includes all of us—no exceptions.
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