You know what's not refreshing? When your team concedes a last minute equalizer or feeling pressured into joining in the Mexican wave. Or when you spot your best friend at the match, even though he said he was busy, Kevin. But a cold pint of Heineken brewed with just three natural ingredients. That's refreshing. Get the facts. Be drink aware. This is drinkaware. Ie.

Hi, I'm Jonsaki, and this is the third episode of our special How to Win series, The Threat of Project 2025. On this episode, we'll explore the threat of Project 2025 on LGBTQ+ rights.

The ways that they're defining heterosexuality in the ideal family unit, they are actually trying to put provisions into place to control us in our decisions.

This This is Kelly Robinson, head of the Human Rights Campaign.

Everything that we enjoy today is our normal way of being, right? From being able to go to work, to raise your kids in the way that you choose, to have a partner that you decide and pick, all of that they're saying they want the government to control it. This is a dangerous, dangerous document that's laying out exactly what they plan to do.

On the first two episodes of the series, we looked at the Project 2025 playbook for Criminalizing Abortions and the Threats to Our Public Education System. But this plan also proposes significant risks to the rights of minority groups, including members of the LGBTQ+ community, especially those who are trans.

Some of the policies they propose include rescending regulations prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation education, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics, rescending Biden era Title IX protections to LGBTQ+ students, and eliminating transgender health care in Medicare and Medicaid.

For all of the efforts to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025, he sounds an awful lot like the team at the think tank that wrote the Project 2025 plan. Here's Trump just last year.

We will promote positive education about the nuclear family, the roles of mothers and fathers, and celebrating rather than erasing the things that make men and women different and unique. I will ask Congress to pass a bill establishing that the only genders recognized by the United States government are are male and female, and they are assigned at birth. No serious country should be telling its children that they were born with the wrong gender, a concept that was never heard of in all of human history. Nobody's ever heard of this, what's happening today.

And in recent weeks, he's doubled down on these views and his attacks against his political opponents.

Kamala's record is horrible. She's a radical left person at a level that nobody's seen. She picked a radical left man. That is, he has positions that it's not even possible to believe that they exist. He's going for things that nobody's ever even heard of. Heavy into the transgender world, heavy into lots of different worlds, having to do with safety.

So no surprise, Trump is pretty aligned. Here's the other thing. This rhetoric isn't new, and the threat to gay and trans rights has always been there. So there is a model at the state level of what could happen if these restrictive laws are implemented on the federal level.

Families and doctors are now suing the state of Alabama after the governor signed a bill criminalizing transgender health care for minors. The law would make providing that care a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed four bills that took aim at the transgender community, drag performances, and discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom. Representative Brad Hudson says the Missouri Safe Act would make it illegal for health care providers to prescribe hormone treatments and puberty blockers to kids under the age of 18. Hudson called the transition methods experimental and wrong.

So with gay and trans lives already at risk, what else could Project 2025 mean for LGBTQ+ rights? I'll be speaking with ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio to walk us through the specific language that aims to criminalize trans existence. And then we'll hear from Debbie Jackson, a mom who's been fighting for the safety of her child who is trans. That's all coming up, so stay tuned.

You know what's not refreshing? When your team concede a last minute equalizer or feeling pressured into joining in the Mexican wave, or when you spot your best friend at the match, even though he said he was busy. Kevin. But a cold pint of Heineken brewed with just three natural ingredients. That's refreshing. Get the facts. Be drink aware. This is drinkaware. Ie.

Sunday, September 29th, an MSNBC special presentation, Black Women in America. Msnbc, Simone Sanders Townsend and Melissa Murray offer an in-depth look at the unique power Black women hold in this year's election and what candidates can do to earn their votes.

We have to let our voices be heard so that the system can work for us.

It's a time of opportunity, but also of hope.

Black Women in America, Sunday, September 29th, at 9:00 PM Eastern on MSNBC and streaming on Peacock.

Only on Meet the Press. Just days after the presidential debate, how did it impact the race and what will it change in the final sprint to election day? Kristen Walker sits down with VP nominee JD Vance and former presidential candidate, Pete Buttagej. On Meet the Press. Listen to the whole episode now wherever you get your podcasts.

Chase Strangio is the Deputy Director for Transgender Justice at the ACLU. We sat down to talk about the explicit and implicit anti trans language embedded throughout Project 2025.

Chase, thank you so much for taking the time. I have been reading a lot of the Project 2025 900-page document, and I keep coming across aspects of it that are more and more alarming. I think the best thing we can all do is inform people out there about what exactly is in here. Let me just start off. I mean, one of the broadways people have explained, and I think I've done this, too, Project 2025, is that it's a large overhauling plan to roll back the clock. There's lots of meanings to that. But I wanted to ask you specifically about LGBTQ plus protections and rights. Where does this plan roll the clock back to? If you can even put a timeline on it.

Yeah. Well, so first, I'm sorry that you have been reading the 900-page mandate. It's motivating, Chase. It's motivating. It's both motivating and horrifying, but I do think it is so alarming and so much part of a vision of government that's already manifest in this country in state legislatures, in efforts to change the federal government. Contending with it is critical regardless of what happens in this election, but particularly because if Donald Trump is elected, this is the plan. It is hard to think about, well, where does it roll it back to? Because it is such a fundamental assault on everything we understand to be true about government in the United States, that it's hard to identify discrete structural moments in which the version of government that it envisions was manifest here in the United States. In that sense, I would say there is no analog anywhere in history to what it envisions. Then we have to look at what is it anticipating. With respect to LGBTQ people, it is catastrophic as it is for so many communities. I would say it is in two central ways. One is that it takes away every discrete legal protection that LGBTQ people have fought for over the past many decades, that those protections that were so hard fought, whether it's the right to marriage equality, the right to have employment, education, health care protections recognized under federal law, the ability to serve openly in the military, all of those things go away.

There's that discrete rolling back of legal protection. Then almost more concerningly, there is this atmospheric assault on LGBTQ identity, and particularly trans identity, that is really a central theme in the document. Sometimes it's referred to as gender ideology, and sometimes it's referred to as pornography, but it's the situating of LGBTQ people, and trans people in particular, as almost inherently pornographic and as a threat to children. The document is fixated on pornography. It's thematically obsessed, and then talking about the criminalization of pornography and purveyors of pornography. But we're not talking about pornography in the way that many of us might think of pornography. It's literally referring to LGBTQ people as pornographic.

I want to dive into that because I think it takes you a couple readings of it to really understand what the document is trying to do as it relates to pornography. This is on the first page for those who haven't read it. Look at America under the Ruling and Cultural Elite Today. Children suffer the toxic normalization of Transgenderism with Drag Queens and pornography invading their school libraries. There is so much to unpack there, but that is on the very first page. But let's talk about the pornography, Keith, because, again, for those who are listening who don't about this, Project 2025, that's specifically called for pornography, it's your point to be outlawed, saying that, The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who convey it should be classed as registered sex offenders, and telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered. But there's also a catch, to your point, which is their definition of pornography in this document. It defines it as, Manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children. So just like this is my reading of it. The document is basically saying that people who distribute it should be imprisoned.

Educators who purvey it should be registered as sex offenders. And I guess my question to you is, is it fair to interpret this as saying a trans person simply existing around a child should be either imprisoned or registered as a sex offender? I don't be too extreme here, but you've thought about this a lot.

I mean, That is my read of it. In fact, it is in some ways the logical extension of what we're seeing. We're seeing the groundwork for this being laid right now, both in policy and in rhetoric. If you look at the don't say gay laws manifest to their extreme, they are saying in those laws that you should not talk about LGBTQ existence in front of children. And so the idea that they are metabolizing across the country is that LGBTQ existence is harmful to children. This isn't new. This is Anita Bryant on steroids in a social media climate. These communities are then cast as inherently predatory. And then once that becomes part of the discourse, it allows for the expansion of government to control us. That's what this is saying. It's right there on page literal one.

Let's go back to this Anita Bryant reference, because I've heard you talk about this before. But for anybody who's not sure entirely what that is, talk to us a little bit more the Anita Bryant reference.

Yeah. So Anita Bryant is the early manifestations of this Christian rights campaign. She in Florida, had a Save Our Children campaign in the 1970s, and it was very focused on gay people being teachers. This idea that gayness proximate to children is an assault, not just on children, but on society and the social order. That had a huge impact Because that rhetoric around gay people being harmful to children led to, in Florida, the ban on gay people adopting children, which then was central to the many justifications for restricting same-sex couples from marriage. You see these rhetorical campaigns that start out as fringe as Anita Bryant did and become increasingly mainstream, leading not just to these cultural understandings and realities, but these legal ones. Because we ended up in a world in the 1980s and 1990s and early 2000s, where gay people were systematically attacked and excluded from institutions that allowed us to care for and protect our children. If you think about now what this means for me as a transparent, I have a child. What does it mean to say that I can't be around children? What does that say to my child? What does that say to me?

And what does that say to everyone that we interface with? And that is then the cultural framework that allows for those legal assault on our communities. And that allows for Florida laws like we're seeing now, which says that trans teachers can't announce their pronouns in the classroom. That's somehow an assault on the children. That's the same as Anita Bryant saying, gay people can't be in the classroom with children.

There's so many parallels to your point. It's so important for people to understand, too. It's not brand new, but the Save Our Children campaign sounds good, right? There's a similarity here. Children shouldn't have access to pornography. I mean, that sounds rational. It's then when you dig into the details of it is when it becomes alarming, discriminatory, so bad for families, children and entire communities. You mentioned being trans and also a parent yourself. I think part of what happens in society is people are scared of what they don't know, right? It feels different. People act in fearful ways about things they don't know. Tell me a little bit about yourself and your life every day as a parent. What's your life like every day?

There's so much in the world that is out of our control, and our children are in so many fundamental ways who they are. And this idea that we are imposing queerness and transness on our children in a society that makes it quite clear that it prefers you to be cisgender and heterosexual. And this idea that we as queer and trans parents have this ability to override all of that just by is completely absurd. I'm always stunned by the fact that people are so fixated on what other people are doing with their lives when it's... Parenting is hard.

No kidding.

I wake up every day and I want to do right by my kid. I want to make sure that they feel loved, cared for, supported. And this idea that my transness is A, compromising my child, or B, wholly destabilizing a very unstable society is just ridiculous to me.

Or impacting someone else. This is the bottom line. Why do you care? Why do people who are so hateful care? I mean, what I'm getting at, too, here is, look, I had a battle this morning with my kids about breakfast and what shoes they were going to wear to camp. Did you have similar battles this morning? I bet you may have, right? Yeah.

And it's like, oh, my God, if your children are fed and wearing clothes out the door, I feel like, can we just celebrate that success and leave other people alone?

I think your personal story and your passion for this is so important for people to also understand. But you are also such an expert that I just want to go back and dive into some key components of this to help people understand. I wanted to ask you about some of the legal cases that are referenced in here, and you've worked on some of them. Bostock versus Clayton County, Georgia. Let's talk about that one. What did that case establish, and what are they hoping in Project 2025 to change?

Yeah, so let's just get right down to what Bostock was about. Three employees, two were gay, one was trans, were fired from their jobs because they were gay and trans. That was the legal question. And the single question before the United States Supreme Court is, was it lawful under the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in employment to fire someone just because they are trans or just because they are gay? And the Supreme Court said that federal employment law that prohibits sex discrimination includes discrimination against LGBTQ people. That being gay or being trans and being discriminated against on that basis is a form of sex discrimination. It was a very logical conclusion It was a 6.3 opinion, in essence saying, if you are firing someone because they are gay, that is because they have an attraction to someone of the same sex. That is because of sex. There's no other way to look at it. If you are firing someone because they are trans, it is because they are coming into work in a way that you don't think aligns with their sex at birth. That is because of sex. End of story. Very simple.

So that decision was decided in 2020. And then under the Biden administration, the administration, I think, quite logically and rightfully interpreted other federal laws that prohibit sex discrimination to also protect LGBTQ people. So that includes Title IX, protection from discrimination in education. That includes the Affordable Care Act in health care. That includes the Fair Housing Act in housing. These are just basic parts of society where I think, generally, when people step back and think about it, we think we should not be discriminated against just because of who we are in these parts of life. This document says, Absolutely not. They want to erode all of those protections that were just confirmed in 2020, and they are attacking each regulatory and sub-regulatory decision by the Biden administration to ensure that LGBTQ people are protected. And that will be a day one Trump administration action to get rid of every single federal interpretation of law that protects LGBTQ people. You better believe it. That's happening right away first 100 days.

It's sometimes hard to envision and understand what the impact of these flips, as you said, at the first 100 days, if they roll back these laws, what does it mean? But we have seen some states that give us a sense, right? Where as much as the Biden administration has tried to protect against discrimination, there are some states that have done the opposite. Some laws that are in place are a roadmap for what this would be like. Are there some that are most glaring to you or that you think people should really be aware of in terms of what this could look like if these protections are rolled back?

Absolutely. I think this is all familiar because we've seen it in the States. We've seen it in Idaho, in Texas, in Florida, in Missouri. Twenty-five states ban medical care for trans adolescents and ban trans girls from women's and girls' sports. So we see the blueprint. We have increasing number of States across the country that restrict access to restrooms in schools for trans students. We have schools that are allowing teachers to misgender trans students in schools. We have laws like the so-called Don't Say LGBTQ or Don't Say Gay laws that restrict discussion of LGBTQ people in the classroom, increasing censorship in libraries of that simply mention LGBTQ people. Of course, they're being pushed in the States by the Heritage Foundation, by Alliance Defending Freedom, by America First Legal, Stephen Miller's organization. And guess who are the architects of Project 2025? Those same organizations that have been using highly gerrymandered state legislatures to push and enact these policies, have them implemented by governors like Greg Abbott, like DeSantis, and then we see the impact.

I mean, one of the things that Trump has obviously been trying to do is back away from Project 2025. But there's a ton of overlap between his policies, what he's proposed, what he's advocated for, and everything in this document. So if we look at LGBTQ+ rights and the restrictions proposed in here, how does it overlap with what Trump has proposed and what his administration and people around him are talking about wanting to do?

Yeah, I mean, obviously, the incoherence of Trump does make it hard to pinpoint a particular policy that he's proposing. But rhetorically, I mean, when he's talking about Tim Walsh, for example, it's he deep in the transgender world. Well, of course, what he's talking about is he's conflating legal protections for people with an ideology. It's all coming from the rhetoric from Project 2025. That is Heritage Foundation rhetoric. And he picked Jamie Vance as his running mate. Who could be more closely aligned with these policies and with this Christian-nationalist version of society in which women have a singular role as bearers of children and caretakers of children. And grandmas, too. Grandmothers, yes, and postmenopausal women, as we know. The assault on trans existence is central, actually, to this notion of how they understand the gender binary more generally and how they understand the role of cisgender women. They are envisioning very much a society in which the role of women is as caretaker, as subservient to the husband. The child is cat lady is as much a threat as the trans person because both are an assault to this vision of the heterosexual nuclear family. And so what transness becomes is an existential threat to that model.

But ultimately, what they want to impose on society is a model that has hugely detrimental effects for cisgender heterosexual women.

As we've discussed, there's not a specific section necessarily in the Project 2025 document about LGBTQ rights, but the restrictions proposed, they run through it. They're a thematic backdrop. But there are some references, including on page 284. This is what it says about HHS. The HHS Secretary should pursue a robust agenda to protect the fundamental right to life, protect conscience rights, and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological realities, not ideology. What exactly does that mean? And what are its implications on trans people and their health care?

So first of all, this idea that there's this binary between a biological reality and an ideology is very central to this Christian right project. It conflates transness with an ideology. This idea that to be trans is ideological at its core. What they're saying here is that they want to create the mechanisms to restrict access to medical care for transgender people, and they propose that in some concrete ways. For example, in the document, they talk about rolling back the 1557 regulation. The Affordable Care Act has a prohibition on sex discrimination that under the Biden administration and previously under the Obama administration, have been interpreted to protect LGBTQ people and trans people in particular from discrimination in health care, including in accessing gender affirming health care. So it very directly takes an assault on that, as they've already done through litigation over the last eight years. But nonetheless, it says explicitly, we're absolutely not going to have health care protections for LGBTQ people. And of course, everyone thinks that means access to gender affirming care, but that also just means straight up being protected from discrimination when you go to the emergency room. As a trans person, you are worried about that at all times.

As in you go to the emergency room and what happens? If you're allowed to be discriminated against an emergency room, what could happen to someone?

I'll tell a story of someone I know, which is that he, a trans man, had an ovarian and cis. He had his ovaries, but he was someone who was very much perceived and read as a cis man. He was having an acute episode, a crisis, went to the emergency room in Texas. When the doctor realized that he was trans, what they considered to be a man with ovaries, they would not see him. They said, Absolutely not. They were disgusted by his existence and would not treat him. This is not uncommon. Our health care protections from discrimination are needed to protect against being turned away from emergency services. Of course, access to gender-affirming medical care is critical, but so is also access to nondiscriminatory health care that we need in all aspects of our lives, whether it's going to see your primary care physician about any number of things, going to the emergency room when you're in crisis.

Also, there's massive mental health connections between kids who are trans, and I mean, teenagers and adults, too, to seek the medical care that they need and warrant. There's lots of studies in mental health and suicide rates. There's the other side of this, which is that when people are prevented from living the life of who they are, and nobody talks about that on the right.

Yeah. No, I think this is so important. I really appreciate you bringing it up because we end up having this discourse in society and really across the political spectrum that talks about this idea that all these risks attendant to medical care related to gender transition. Those risks are gravely overstated. Of course, risk is part of all medical care. But the benefits are so substantial. I work with families all the time across the country who had no idea what it meant to be transgender, who had a trans child, who... I mean, they could not have been further from the vision of someone who is just so excited to have a trans child, but worked through watching their child suffer and suffer. And then the benefit of this care is that their child comes back. And any parent should just really relate to this idea. When your kid is suffering, you are suffering. You want to understand desperately what is going on, who do I talk to? And you find a medical expert, and you find research, and you figure out that, wow, maybe there is something I can do for my child, hard and confusing as that might be.

And then these parents finally get there. Their children are finally thriving. And what happens? The state comes in and says, no.

You can't help your child.

You can't help your child. That's what they're to these families, and that's what this document contemplates.

So, Chase, we're also going to be talking with Debbie Jackson, who is, of course, the mother of Avery, and well known, I think, among people who have followed this fight. But I know you work with a lot of families, and I know you know Debbie and Avery, too. Tell me a little bit about what these families are going through and what the day-to-day challenges are like when you're living in states where these restrictions are being put in place or are already in place.

I will say first, as a trans adult, all wanted from my advocacy was for life to be better for trans young people than it was for me. As we started to see that as people were able to access medical care that allowed them to live fuller and freer adolescence, that was so liberating and beautiful. Then what do we see? But this just unbelievably aggressive backlash from all parts of government. The consequences of that, our families are forced to go from helping their children, watching them thrive, to being in utter dire straits, where you are at risk of losing the medical care that has enabled your child to fight back against anxiety, depression, suicidality, and live as themselves, something that we should all get to do. Then to have families be pushed out of their homes. Debbie's experience is so devastating, and it is something that is being experienced across the country where families are uprooting their lives, leaving their extended families, leaving their communities because they have to leave and find places to live where they can safely access medical care for their children where their children can go to school without being surveilled and punished and kicked out of sports teams and bathrooms.

I do hope over time that there can be just a little more empathy. This idea that these are just kids trying to live and parents trying to take care of their kids as we are all trying to do, and the crisis that they are experiencing. Not everyone has the means to uproot their families. And so lots of people are selling everything they own, leaving behind everything they have. I mean, it is truly an internal displacement within our country and sometimes outside of it. I know, and I can relate to the idea that you will do everything you possibly can for your child, but nobody should have to do this, and no child should have to experience this. And bless all these parents who are doing whatever they can, but nobody should have to do this.

Up next, we'll hear what this displacement was like for the family Chase is talking about. Back in a moment.

You know what's not refreshing? When your team concedes last minute equalizer or feeling pressured into joining in the Mexican wave, or when you spot your best friend at the match, even though he said he was busy, Kevin. But a cold pint of Heineken brewed with just three natural ingredients. That's refreshing. Get the facts. Be drink aware. This is drinkaware. Ie.

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This was a mission impossible, a mission stupid.

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We Welcome back.

As Chase Trangio mentioned, the ongoing attacks on LGBTQ+ rights has led to an internal displacement as parents seek protections for their own children. And under any new policies modeled after Project 2025, it might get even harder to find safe havens. Debbie Jackson was already having to fight for her child. She was living in Kansas City when anti-trans laws passed in Missouri and Kansas led her to uproot her family and seek a safer place to raise her child Avery, who is trans. It was a brave choice, but as Debbie puts it, never saw themselves as more than a regular family.

I originally came from the Deep South. I'm from a conservative Southern Baptist family. I was an army brat, so I grew up in that very conservative environment. I don't think my family is anything special. It's always so hard to try to describe my family. We're just your average American family, Midwest values. There's really nothing that's spectacular about us, except the fact that we have a transgender child and didn't know anything about trans people and their trans experience until this magical creature came into our lives.

Let's talk about the magical creature that you're mentioning. Let's talk a little bit about Avery and their story. I mean, first of all, what a kid was Avery growing up?

Yes, Avery was precocious. That's the word that I've learned is the most polite- That's a good one. And brilliant, funny, laughed all the time. Just a super fun, happy kid.

Tell me a little bit what it's been like to be a parent of a trans child and what that journey has been like for you since Avery was young, right? They're four years old, I think you've said.

Yes. Avery's social transition began at the age of four, and they've just turned 17 this year. I mean, the easiest thing to say is we had a parenting challenge, and every parent has a challenge with their child. You just don't know what it's going to be. But it's with something that did not have the answers and didn't have an instruction manual. We had to figure it out as we went along. So around the age of three, instead of that happy, bubbly, precocious kid, we had a kid who started to get a little angry and act out. And around the same time, we see Avery wanting to do things like play dress up in girl clothes, not boy clothes, and take on the persona of girl cartoon characters, not boy cartoon characters. But again, I didn't know anything about gender identity. I had never given a lot of thought. But instead, that play time and imagination coincided with the mood swings and the darkness. Then there were questions about dying and hurting themselves. All of that culminated after several months of Avery saying very directly, You think that I'm a boy, but I'm a girl on the inside.

That moment changed everything. We talked to our pediatrician, and our pediatrician said, Yeah, this seems much more than imaginary play. Go see a child psychologist. The child psychologist says, I know about trans people, but I don't know about kids. Go see a gender therapist. We went to a gender therapist and she said, Everything you're telling me about your child makes perfect sense. Everyone was telling us trans people exist. They must know as kids, why don't you go ahead and change pronouns? Say daughter instead of son and see what happens. We ended up with a completely different kid. I have a happy, affirmed child. This kid has changed my life. Opened my eyes. I I have completely changed my perspective on life, and it's given me purpose to go out and fight for other kids and have more compassion for all kinds of other people that I've met along the way. And honestly, it's been a blessing.

Such a good parenting lesson that could be applicable to so many things. Tell us a little bit about what's been happening on the legislative level in Missouri, how you got involved in that, how Avery got involved in it, what that has been like.

Sure. I mean, it began innocently enough. We had a bill that was proposed in our town to add LGBTQ protections. It was in one of the little tiny towns that was outside of the Kansas City Metro area. I went to do some public testimony because we had people trying to fear monger about trans people in the bathroom. I stood up to testify and said, I'm worried about my daughter's safety in the bathrooms, too. But the reason I'm worried is because my daughter the trans one, and I'm worried about these adults coming in and looking at my child or accusing my child of something. That flipped the script on a lot of what was being said. I think it really got everyone's attention because I describe myself, how I describe myself to you, Southern Baptist, conservative. No one could believe that a parent with that background would possibly support a trans child, much less go up and publicly talk about it and do so with love and pride.

Yeah, it's a really inspiring backstory. Just your support for Avery has been remarkable. It's such an amazing model. You did decide to leave the state, and that, I'm sure, was a difficult decision. Talk to me a little bit about why you made that decision.

Well, that one positive win that we had in our city was followed by a few others. But around the same time, that's when they started introducing legislation at the state level across the country. I'm sure everyone has heard of HB2, and they knew about the bathroom bill and how it failed. But the problem was that was testing grounds, and they started introducing other legislation across the country. Missouri and Kansas were no different. Each year, we needed to start going to both of the state capitals, sometimes on the same day, driving back and forth across the states to testify against bills that wanted to allow discrimination on religious grounds. It was just one bill after another, after another, after another. Avery did go with me at first, wanted to be there, would wave the flag outside at the rallies, would sit through the hearings with headphones on, generally, to not have to hear all the hateful things that were said. And about three years ago, decided, I need to do my part. I want to go and testify. Went to the Missouri State Capitol with me one day, testified about sports and why playing sports would be really important to them.

And in the middle of that hearing, one of the senators interrupted and said, But what parts do you have? Have you had a search Audrey, I would be uncomfortable being in the bathroom with you. I could not believe that a person in power of authority sat in a room full of strangers and asked my teenager about their genitals.

What did you do in that moment? What was going through your head?

Avery was incredible and tried to defend himself and say, I'm here talking about sports, and I can't believe you just asked me that. I went into mom mode and was like, How dare you ask my child about that? I would never think to ask you about your genitals. This It was highly inappropriate. I can't believe the behavior I'm seeing from people here. And we just wrapped it up. I could start to see the sweat happening and the shaking. My child was shaking. I'm holding their hand. We went to the back of the room and Avery had a full-on panic attack. This was trauma in real-time, crying, shaking, red. And the hearing, thankfully, only had a few more minutes. We ended everyone out. There were other trans kids sitting in the audience there. They were having panic attacks and stress responses. I remember so many adults were running and getting ice packs and essentially triaging a bunch of kids in a senator's office because of what had just happened, the dehumanizing language and treatment of a teenager who is there to talk about why playing sports would be fun. After that, a bill passed. It was going to allow legacy patients like Avery to continue with their health care, but we knew that was going to be a lie.

They would come back the next session and try to take that out. And that session, Avery couldn't go. Every single time we got in the car to drive, started feeling sick of their stomach, was having a trauma response every week when we had to go to these hearings. And at the end of the session, just said, Why are we still living here? I can't do this again. Why are we still living here? They're going to do it on the Kansas side. They're passing the bills. The governor is vetoing. But we can't just move from one side of the state line to the other. Our hospital is going to get closed. Why are we here? And for years, I had said, We can move you to a safe place if we need to. I wanted to stay and be visible. I didn't want to leave and send the message to other people that these very out public, high-profile families would leave because they could and then leave everyone behind. But I also needed to take care of my kid through all of this. In that moment, when they said, I'm willing to leave my friends and everything that I've known.

I just can't do this anymore. We said, okay. We started packing and selling and looking at different places and trying to figure out who had sanctuary laws, where could you afford to go. So many of the places that are safely blue are more expensive when you're coming from the deep south, like so many other families who've had to leave or from the Midwest. Instead of our house that has a yard that fits our dogs, we might be crammed into a smaller apartment just to be able to make ends meet. What do we do? And that's the scary part about the way this legislation has crept across the country. I've known families who have moved from one state to another. Then one year later, the same bills get introduced and passed there, and now they're stuck. They can't move a second time. Yeah.

Such an important... I had not thought about the fact that some blue states and blue areas are more expensive, and most people can't just pick up and leave or might not be willing to leave and do as you did with your family. How is Avery doing now?

Avery is doing fantastic now. We have been in our new safe home with protections in place for just under 10 months, and they just broke up with their therapist. That's the best way I know how to say it. But it's the breakup that you want to have. That means everything is going really well. They have been going through therapy for the last three or four years, and it's not because of being trans, they started going to deal with all of the bills and the anxiety and every political season, seeing the ads that focus on trans kids and the lies that are said and the speeches that are given and that thing. So Yes, they were able to break up with their therapists, and they feel so safe, finally, for the first time.

I know you are so familiar with what is in Project 2025. What are some of the concerns you hope people understand and know about there, about the impact of something like Project 2025 could be on families who have a transgender child or a child who's in the LGBTQ community?

I think the scariest part for me is the similarity in language that they used in a couple of bills, one that passed in Kansas last year, too, which is to define sex by taking out all references to gender and reducing people to reproductive parts. It's not just the LGBTQ community that is experiencing this and will experience repercussions. It's the exact same thing that we've been talking about with access to reproductive health care all along. They're reducing people to reproductive parts. But they're also in trying to define who can have have access to health care, they're trying to define who can and can't make informed consent. When they are not the person having the conversation with each individual patient, when the doctors are doing that, when the health care professionals are doing that, when the therapists are doing that, they are trying to take agency away from the trans community through these laws in various ways that will end up impacting other groups of people. That's what is so scary. They who are literally trying to define bodies and who has the mental capability to know who they are and to make decisions for themselves in so many aspects of their life.

That's incredibly alarming. And there's also some dark irony, I'll call it, coming from some who are from a party that have been more of the mentality of government, get out of our lives. But this is the opposite of that.

Absolutely. That was why I always considered myself a conservative and a Republican. I don't need you to tell me whether or not I should go see a doctor. I don't need you to tell me how to spend my money. I don't need you interfering in anything. I'm an adult. I can take care of myself. Leave me alone. And that's the exact opposite of what they're doing. But at the same time, they've also been talking about parental rights. And so much of it said, you can't tell me what to do with my child's body because of vaccines. But they're wanting to tell me what I can do with my child's body. They're saying, You can't interfere with my child's access to the education I want. But they want my child to go to school and not have a teacher use the name and the pronoun that makes them feel safe and comfortable. What about my rights as a parent? If you're so concerned with parental rights, then leave my family alone and let me parent my child in the best way that I can.

It seems very reasonable and rational and apolitical in many, many ways.

It should It should be.

Debbie, I'm so happy to hear that you and Avery are flourishing and what a courageous way you've approached your journey and using your voice and Avery using their voice. Debbie, I think a lot of people out there are looking for some hope in this moment, and sometimes it's hard to find. Your story has a lot of inspiration and a lot of hope in it. I know it hasn't been easy along the way, but what would you say to families out there who are looking for that?

I would say that there are actually more families like mine out there than anyone knows. A lot of times, they have to stay quiet right now for safety. But those of us who can be public or going to be public, there are so many ways that just as you hear my story and feel inspired, someone in your community is seeing you live your story and is being inspired by that. The greatest form of advocacy is just being out there, being joyful, letting people hear more about trans joy. Transitioning lets people feel joy. Family acceptance lets people feel joy. Even if your family isn't completely supporting you, there aren't people in your direct community who are supporting you. There are support groups online. There are grassroots orgs that will welcome you in. Get your kids out there. Let them meet trans adults. Let them see the possibilities that exist for their future. They are the future, and spread the trans joy. That's the best advocacy that any of us can do, and we will win in the end. There's no way all of these folks who have come out and experienced that trans joy are going to go back and hide.

They're just not. They're too strong. They're too committed. They know how life can be, and they're not going to give up on it.

Thank you for tuning in to this special series, The Threat of Project 2025, presented by the How to Win 2024 podcast. Podcast. All episodes of the series are available now, including a new episode on The Threat to Our Climate, led by Chris Hayes. So be sure to keep listening. The Threat of Project 2025 series is produced by Max Jacobs. Our Associate Producer is Jameres Perez. Research support from Shamus O'Tool, Katherine Anderson and Bob Mallory are our sound engineers. Bryson Barnes is the head of audio production. Ayesha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio, and Rebecca Cutler is the Senior Vice President of Content Strategy at MSNBC. I'm Jensaki. Search for How to Win 2024 wherever you get your podcast and follow the series.

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