The Transgender and DEI Crises Cost Everyone But Billionaires

Organizations like The Heritage Foundation and Moms for Liberty vilify LGBTQIA+ students and marginalized groups to justify dismantling civil rights and the government agencies that oversee them.

Conservative billionaires and President Trump are banking on the vilification of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, Black Americans, and 1.6 million transgender individuals to clear the path for privatization—a goal they have been pursuing for 60 years.

The Heritage Foundation and its partners launched in 1973 to fight the effects of Brown v. Board (1954), The Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Title IX of 1972 on the "traditional fabric of America." What we're experiencing now is their sprint to dismantle protections for marginalized people and lift the burden of these protections on their wealth.

By manufacturing the "threats" posed by Black and Transgender Americans, The Heritage Foundation suggests that civil rights are the root of societal struggles and eliminating them will restore the intentions of the great American "experiment." Calls to roll back DEI or to ban transgender women from sports are carefully selected talking points that build support for misunderstood topics and mask their widely unpopular intentions.

Bottom line: The manipulation, lies, fallacies, and hateful rhetoric fueling this anti-DEI and LGBTQ agenda are emboldening deadly assaults, freezing federal funding, and reigniting the very racism, bigotry, and sexism our civil rights laws sought to prevent. We cannot tolerate or accept any twisting of facts claiming that The Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX, DEI, or Critical Race Theory (CRT) promotes unfairness or racism for white Christian nationalists.

Manufactured Crises: How We Got Here

The Heritage Foundation and prominent right-wing figures like Betsy DeVos, Christopher Rufo, and Steve Bannon have long championed privatization and a society built on a foundation of traditional Christian values.

However, their advocacy turned to malicious fabrication heading into the 2024 election, with calls to rebuild America from the ground up and salt the earth behind them. Since 1981, The Heritage Foundation has given each administration a "Mandate for Leadership," including Donald J. Trump during his first term.

Through Project 2025, its boldest and most visible Mandate yet, we observe Heritage's 1000-page plan to inject their civil rights-dismantling agenda and white Evangelical nationalism into the mainstream.

Manufactured culture war issues play out in every chapter of the Mandate, but the focus on the Department of Education (DOE) honors Heritage's origin story. The DOE is primarily a civil rights enforcement agency.

This chapter within Project 2025 begins,

"For most of our history, the federal government played a minor role in education. Then, over a 14-month period beginning in 1964, Congress planted the seeds for what would become the U.S. Department of Education. In July of that year, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, after Congress reached a consensus that the mistreatment of black Americans was no longer tolerable and merited a federal response."

The DOE oversees Title IX and funds equity programs like Head Start, free lunch, and support for low-income students and those with disabilities. Since federal law prohibits public funds from financing discriminatory private religious programs, such as vouchers, abolishing the DOE is key to achieving the foundation's privatization goals.

Radicalizing Race to Advance Unpopular Policies

Before the election, only 10% of Americans viewed Project 2025 favorably, with even MAGA Republicans expressing concern over its threat to American freedoms. Openly calling for the end of civil rights would be a political non-starter, but attacking confusing acronyms like DEI, CRT, or LGBTQIA+ opens the door.

Between 2020 and 2021, Christopher Rufo seized the opportunity to make the public believe they were losing their parental rights to public schools. He claimed schools were indoctrinating students with Critical Race Theory (CRT) and “gender ideology.” He proudly boasts of his efforts to build distrust in public schools as morally failing institutions while presenting religious private schools and corporate charters as the only safe alternatives.

Rufo ignited his culture war by distorting facts and leveraging pandemic-era Zoom classes to convince conservatives that people somewhere were gaining a virtual window into schools and being horrified by CRT lessons.

The Heritage Foundation channeled this manufactured outrage into Moms for Liberty, an organization designed to mobilize affluent suburban women against CRT, DEI, LGBTQIA+ students, and inclusive books. The foundation planted the seeds for this group in 2002, and together they authored the education policies in Project 2025.

Targeting Transgender People Highlights Harmful Ulterior Motives

While focusing on racial issues to dismantle The Civil Rights Act, The Heritage Foundation also targeted Title IX, which creates protections for sex-based discrimination and harassment for K-12 schools and universities. Betsy DeVos severely restricted Title IX in 2020, rendering it nearly useless.

Each administration modifies Title IX, but its most crucial aspect is defining how and when schools must investigate sex-based bullying, harassment, and assault. Biden’s proposed changes reflected two years and tens of thousands of public comments and included protections for girls and women. He also proposed new rules for LGBTQIA+ students, making them the next target of the conservative outrage machine.

In 2021, a high-profile bathroom assault in Loudoun County, Virginia, became a rallying cry. Conservatives falsely blamed a transgender student, and Moms for Liberty helped make the rumor a viral fear-mongering fact. However, unsealed court documents show the perpetrator was a straight male with behavioral issues and a history of previous consensual contact with the victim. The school mishandled the case, allowing the assailant to transfer schools and assault another student.

Attention shifted to women’s sports in 2022 when swimmer Riley Gaines tied for fifth place with transgender athlete Lia Thomas. Gaines soon became a spokesperson for The Heritage Foundation, making media appearances, campaign stops, and publishing a bestseller. Social media disinformation falsely claimed she won a $50 million settlement against the “woke” NCAA, further fueling conservative panic and validating the need to ban transgender people from as many places as possible.

Leading up to the election, conservative media latched onto a UN report on women’s sports, offered as proof of widespread harm caused by transgender athletes. In reality, the report focused on violence in countries like Afghanistan and Honduras and explicitly opposed discrimination against transgender athletes.

Nevertheless, Moms for Liberty and other conservative groups were primed to attack Biden’s Title IX final rule, immediately filing lawsuits to block protections for LGBTQIA+ students from bathrooms, schools, and sports. They ignored the rule’s broader provisions, which strengthened protections against all forms of sex-based harassment—including assaults committed by cisgender individuals. When the rule was released in the fall of 2024, it did not yet include guidance for sports.

While Title IX faced legal challenges, hearings on transgender athletes progressed. In December 2024, the NCAA testified that fewer than 10 transgender athletes competed among its 510,000 participants without specifying their gender identities. U.S. News & World Report estimates that less than 0.5% of 8 million high school athletes are transgender, and 20 states have already banned their participation. Yet, before further public hearings could proceed, the Trump administration announced an outright ban on transgender athletes in women’s sports.

American Girls and Women are More Vulnerable Than Ever

Ultimately, before Biden left office, the conservative Supreme Court struck down his Title IX final rule. Privatization advocates celebrated the decision, seemingly unaware or unconcerned about the collateral damage on the girls and women they claimed to be fighting to protect. The ruling left all students more vulnerable to sex-based harassment in bathrooms, locker rooms, and other school environments.

With every previously protected class under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX now more vulnerable than ever, The Heritage Foundation has successfully set the stage for dismantling the Department of Education. This is the catastrophic culmination of their manufactured crises, deception tactics, and social media psychological warfare designed to funnel public funds into private hands at the expense of marginalized communities, civil rights protections, and the safety of girls and women everywhere.