Project 2025 says 'porn' to mean 'imagined enemies of the family'

What does Roberts mean by "children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries." What is this "pornography" that Project 2025 says should be "outlawed"?

Melissa Gira Grant reminds us today in "The Real Targets of Project 2025’s War on Porn" (The New Republic):

"The prominence of pornography in Project 2025 is no mistake, of course; it’s absolutely core to the authors’ agenda for Trump. The attack on porn is inseparable from the attacks on abortion and contraception, on marriage equality and trans rights, and of course on drag queens and library books—all of which, they believe, threaten the straight, married family as the natural bedrock of society. All of these threats, to them, constitute pornography. By calling on the president to outlaw porn, they’re calling for the eradication of all these imagined enemies of the family.

Though Project 2025 does not define 'pornography,' their concern clearly extends beyond porn itself. Pornography, according to the Mandate, is responsible for the 'normalization' of non-normative gender expression and identity among young people—what the right often calls 'gender ideology.' Pornography could be anything that contributes to that purported normalization. 'Pornography,' Roberts continues, is 'manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children.' And how should it be outlawed? 'The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.' Project 2025 is not targeting 'pornography' as something that’s harmful to children per se, but rather redefining anything concerning sexuality and gender that they say is harmful to children as pornography."

Pay attention:

"Behind all this is what philosopher Judith Butler calls anti-gender ideology and movements, which is how we should understand Project 2025’s anti-pornography rhetoric. It’s a transnational movement, fueling and also fueled by the reassertion of patriarchal order, of a return to normative sex and gender roles, and of ordering the world by sex and gender hierarchies. Gender in this movement has come to be regarded as a code, as Butler has described it—for pedophilia, for the destruction of the family, 'a plot by urban elites to impose their beliefs on ‘real’ people,' a threat to civilization, a threat to masculinity. When the fight is defined that way, a fight to save not just children and families but society and civilization, nearly any crackdown can be justified."

Read also: Exclusive: Justice Amy Coney Barrett defends overturning Roe v. Wade and reveals Supreme Court dynamics in new book Joan Biskupic, CNN Chief Supreme Court Analyst, September 2, 2025

Aziz Rana on Republicans' constitutional control

Constitutional scholar Aziz Rana talked to The Ink. Rana is author of The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them (2024). You can subscribe to the Ink if you like this stuff — in fact, now's the time.

Rana says there were

"specific dynamics in the mid-20th century. From the New Deal to World War II, through the Cold War and decolonization, that created the conditions for political agreement rather than anything that's there in the text of the Constitution. And now all of that has gone away. I worry that liberals oftentimes invoke that broken set of agreements whenever you see even more brazen acts of misbehavior by either the Court or political actors like Trump. And I just don't know that that's going to work going forward."

That agreement "defined politics in the mid-20th century." It was a time when "there was some degree of center-right, center-left consensus around the terms of the institutions, how folks operated with respect to each other, which types of discretionary misbehavior were out of bounds, and which kinds of discretionary misbehavior would be papered over." But now, it has broken down. We have "nostalgia" for it, but that doesn't help. The breakdown explains why "we're in this moment."

Some liberals appeal to what the Constitution supposedly really says or should mean, at least on a symbolic level if not with any real-world political force that they could leverage to promote their ideas. Although "Constitutional veneration...can provide some constraints," in the long term it may be unhelpful, as it legitimizes the whole system that lets certain people get away with bad behavior.

More specifically:

"The problem, in my view, is that the long-term trajectory of American power and the centrality of the presidential office to the national security state and the national security apparatus have over the long term overwhelmed these proceduralist constraints such that the War Powers Resolution is deeply ineffective.

The courts overwhelmingly ended up deferring to presidential authority. And I'd say that the collapse of the Soviet Union was seen as a validation of not just the American Cold War project but specifically the belligerent, aggressive Reaganite approach to the Cold War. That was very closely tied to market fundamentalism, to a kind of belligerent posture towards the world, to unilateralism globally.

And all of this got built into the cultural politics of the country, and made it very, very difficult, in Congress and certainly in the courts, to constrain the presidency. And we saw this dynamic play out again in the War on Terror."

Sure, "use whatever constitutional devices that are available to try to hold Trump accountable," but recognize "why those devices fail time and time again."

With Republicans in control of the Supreme Court,

"the internal disagreements of the right — how much immunity is too much immunity, how much of the administrative state to gut, whether or not to completely get rid of the right to abortion or just to functionally get rid of it by systematically undermining the checks on laws that would constrain reproductive rights — that is the sum total of the legal universe. And that means that the rest of us are effectively now just subject to their internal disagreements."

Democrats and journalists still imagine an "ideological spectrum" that used to exist in the Supreme Court but no longer does. The justices will only agree to hear cases on things they care about ("affirmative action, abortion, Trump's immunity, the nature of the administrative state"), and they'll debate the answers from their own perspectives. Issues that matter to many Americans today — "the carceral state," "a fundamental right to education" — are never going to be taken up by the court.

We need "systematic changes to constitutional structure, including some very fundamental reforms to the structure of the Supreme Court itself." More justices on the court, term limits for them, and better procedures to amend the Constitution.

Rana's book:

Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959–1968

Today, CNN has an article: "In upstate New York, Casa Susanna was a safe haven for trans women in 1960s America," Suyin Haynes, CNN, June 26, 2024

"With coiffed black hair, pearls, a hand on her hip and a high-heeled pointed toe, a woman poses jubilantly for the camera on the steps outside her home. Her name is Susanna Valenti, and her home is Casa Susanna, located in the Catskills, in upstate New York. In the 1950s and ’60s, Casa Susanna served as a safe haven and a sanctuary for people to explore their gender identity and expression in ways they were not able to in daily life. ... Purchased in 2004 at a New York City flea market by two art dealers and later acquired by the AGO in 2015, this particular selection of 340 Casa Susanna images are part of a much wider archive, including some currently in the personal collection of photographer Cindy Sherman. ... In the last decade, Casa Susanna has inspired a Broadway play, Harvey Fierstein’s “Casa Valentina”; been referenced in the television series “Transparent”; and was the subject of an acclaimed documentary film released last year."

I hope to get a copy of this book, Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959-1968, to find out if Spanish was spoken there. As CNN says:

"Born in Chile in 1917, Valenti met her wife at a wig shop — popular with crossdressers — that Tonell ran in New York City. Casa Susanna was Tonell’s property in the Catskills; those who frequented the home included Gloria, a millionaire from Michigan; Jessica, a Colombian heiress; and Felicity, an airline pilot and World War II veteran who was the sibling of photographer Lee Miller."

Learn more about the book, a hardcover with 400 color illustrations, on the publisher's website.

Or buy it through Bookshop:

Just learned of this book, which has 400 color illustrations! "In the 1950s and '60s, an underground network of transgender women, gender nonconforming people, and men who dressed as women found refuge at a modest house in the Catskills, New York."

[image or embed]

— Tucker Lieberman (@tuckerlieberman.bsky.social) Jun 26, 2024 at 4:06 PM

Putting effort into ethics

A pithy way of saying that it's important to put effort into living an ethical life:

"When easy doesn’t bring ease

Ease is a simple concept in theory. For example, we might put beeswax on the tracks of a dresser drawer that’s sticking, so the drawer slides with greater ease. Things are more aligned, so they’re easier.

But in modern industry, easier usually means something more like, “less thought is required.” In MarketingSpeak that’s pronounced “convenient”. Ironically these easier choices often don’t bring ease. They bring misalignment with core values. They bring dis-ease."

— B. Lorraine Smith, "Putting ease into easy," email newsletter, June 21, 2024

False "ease" leading to "dis-ease": What feels easy in the short-term won't be in the long-term. Ease eats itself, inverts itself.

Cameron Summers: 'Technology is not the protagonist of history'

Cameron Summers writes for Broken Hands (What is Technology? (Contraslop, Part 1), June 19, 2024):

"Now, students, like most people, mean something very particular when they talk about technology: they always mean, specifically, digital, technology, and usually mean technologies that have been popularized in the last 5-10 years. Maybe they stretch it a bit older and include social media, but usually it’s a very limited slice of time.

My standard move here is to point out that things such as cars, washing machines, printing presses, and usable fire are all forms of technology and request that they refer to the category that they’re talking about as digital technology."

Why?

"This is actually a fairly important thing for me: I believe that discussing this is key to teaching students how to live in the world. One must not treat technology as a special category that only deals with the latest 0.003% of human existence."

Think:

"Here's a question, "broadly: if it offers no benefit, and no path to anything that clearly offers benefit, why are we spending time on it?

Technological determinism – the idea that there is some solid, continuous thing called technology and that this force, this entity, is the protagonist of our historical drama and the mainspring behind other kinds of change – is a false idea.

* * *

This isn’t to say that technology can’t drive change, simply that it doesn’t do that as a primary effect. It’s brought in to do one thing, and then it achieves something else as a side effect because it can extend its function in an interesting and novel way."

"My point is this: technology is not the protagonist of history, especially when we narrowly define it. It is, instead, the inventory of solutions that we have to our problems. Oftentimes they create a new set of problems, and require further solutions to keep using them, though if an alternate solution that lacks the new problems crops up and its own externalities are less pernicious, then people will switch over to the second technology."

It's a long article, and I recommend it.

If you wed yourself to the gender binary, you can't see past it

Regarding:

Claire Dederer. Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023.

Unlike people who transform their outrage into art, where it can be a "powerful and subtle hammer," Valerie Solanas

“is like a rat in a trap by the end. She understands, on some level, that material circumstances shape our lives, and must be altered if we are to improve the world. But she’s held back by the limits of her critique—she can’t see past gender. In this way, she exposes the limits of radical feminism. Seeing the world through a binary lens—men versus women—has its uses, but she can’t build a revolution out of that schism. The divide between male and female becomes a kind of spectacle she loses herself in.”

And by “taking us to the farthest extreme of a certain kind of radical feminism, she’s given us a glimpse of its limits. She sacrifices a true vision of liberation on the altar of gender essentialism.”

As Dederer phrases it: “She makes me wonder: How much is my preoccupation with the crimes of men blinkering me? What am I not seeing when I monster the monstrous men?

But as I’d put a slight twist or reemphasis on it: When we think in terms of a binary, and we preoccupy ourselves with monstering one side of it, we blinker ourselves. There will always be much that we’re not seeing.

You may also be interested: Metaphorical Gender in English: Feminine Boats, Masculine Tools and Neuter Animals, Language Matters - October 2, 2017 - 4 min

Milan Kundera: 'We can never know what to want'

Emet North gives us this insight:

"...who among us has never dreamt of an alternate world? A choice made differently? Who hasn’t stayed up at night, contemplating some difficult decision, wishing it were possible to see both scenarios played out, to know definitively which option to choose. “We can never know what to want,” the Czech writer Milan Kundera wrote, “because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.” The unbearable lightness: “if we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.” The many worlds interpretation saves us from this lightness, gives our lives the weight of infinite repetition and variation. True, the rescue is more theoretical than practical, given that nothing about the interpretation suggests access to the alternate universes."
— Many Worlds and the Queer Imaginary: Imagine three possible futures for yourself. Let your future selves be bold..., Emet North, Reactor, May 8, 2024

I file this idea as a possible response to people who "ask" — that is, ask aggressively: How do trans people know what gender they are or want to be?

I wrote Why transphobia teaches us to be terrified of regret. It's an 8-min read on Medium.

To this, I add:

"As early as 1985, plant ecologists Steward T.A. Pickett and Peter S. White wrote in 'The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and Patch Dynamics,' that an 'essential paradox of wilderness conservation is that we seek to preserve what must change.'"
— We Need To Rewild The Internet: The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists. Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon, Noema, April 16, 2024

Rebecca Latimer Felton speaks on video (1929)

A video interview with Rebecca Ann Felton (née Latimer; 1835–1930), the year before her death. For one day in 1922, at age 87, she served as a U.S. Senator from Georgia, making her the first woman to serve as U.S. Senator and the last former enslaver to do so.

A book about women who legally owned people:

Leni Riefenstahl's 'Olympia - Festival of Nations' (1936)

A video of the 1936 Olympics, which were held in Berlin when Hitler was in power. Leni Riefenstahl made it. It's meant to make Germany look good.

Watch it free on YouTube: 1 hour 55 minutes.

Read about the 1936 Olympics:

'A dynamite scare in church' (1886)

Newspaper clipping: Lancaster New Era, Mon, Mar 29, 1886, Page 1 — Newspapers.com

Image at top: Organ by Holger Schué, smoke by Pexels, both from Pixabay