Status: 🔴 Conservative think tank that authored Project 2025, produced anti-trans model legislation, and helped drive the federal rollback of transgender rights
The Heritage Foundation is a conservative American think tank founded in 1973 in Washington, D.C., by conservative activists including Paul Weyrich. Over the past decade it has become one of the principal architects of the anti-trans agenda: it produced the Project 2025 blueprint that guided the second Trump administration, writes and distributes anti-trans model legislation for state lawmakers, and presses federal agencies to strip transgender people of legal recognition and protections.
Project 2025, Heritage’s presidential transition project, published Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise in 2023 — a 900-page policy blueprint assembled with input from more than 140 former Trump administration officials. The foreword, written by Heritage president Kevin Roberts, frames transgender ideology as “pornography” whose “purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women,” and says educators and public librarians who purvey it “should be classed as registered sex offenders.”
The blueprint’s health chapter, written by Heritage vice president Roger Severino, calls for ending federal support for gender-affirming care — for adolescents and adults alike — stripping sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) protections from federal regulations, and deleting “the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) and gender from every federal rule, agency mission statement, regulation, contract, grant, and piece of communication.”
Donald Trump publicly disavowed Project 2025 during the 2024 campaign, but its proposals were enacted at record speed once he took office — including his executive orders 14168 and 14201, the removal of gender identity data from federal agencies, and the rollback of transgender protections across federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Kristi Noem.
Heritage maintains a model-legislation library for state lawmakers. Its “Defining SEX Act” would define sex strictly by reproductive cells (gametes), erasing legal recognition of transgender people.
In 2021, Heritage teamed up with Alliance Defending Freedom and Family Policy Alliance to create a website allowing Republican lawmakers to download ready-made anti-trans bills. The partnership supplied legislative text for the wave that made 2021 the worst year on record for anti-trans legislation: at least 73 bills introduced in the first three months alone, 65 targeting trans youth and 41 targeting trans student athletes. The first sports bans ever signed into law — in Mississippi under Tate Reeves and South Dakota under Kristi Noem — came out of this wave.
In 2010, Heritage founded Heritage Action, its lobbying and advocacy arm, which pressures Congress and state legislatures to pass Heritage’s agenda, including its anti-trans model bills.
In September 2025, Heritage urged federal law-enforcement authorities to formally designate “transgender ideology” as a domestic violent extremist ideology — a designation historically reserved for terrorist movements.
In July 2024, Kevin Roberts told Newsweek the United States was “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Heritage’s 2026 agenda, “Restoring America’s Promise,” includes a “Put Family First” section carrying forward its anti-LGBTQ+ priorities. In February 2026, Roberts announced Heritage’s intention to outlaw gender-affirming care for transgender adults entirely.
Heritage has spent decades opposing LGBTQ+ equality: it fought marriage equality in Massachusetts, opposed transgender protections in federal Title IX guidance issued in 2016, hosted panels with “gender critical” extremists, and spread medical misinformation about gender-affirming care — including promoting a 2022 study that LGBTQ+ advocates and medical professionals said falsely linked such care to higher suicide risk.