Progress 2025: A Vision for LGBTQ Rights

Sep 11, 2024

The Heritage Foundation鈥檚 Project 2025 has promised a dystopian vision for LGBTQ rights. Its ideas are consistent with authoritarian, Christian nationalist, and white supremacist objectives. It aims to criminalize the existence of LGBTQ people through regressive legislation that targets freedom of expression, health care policies that deny access to medically necessary care (especially for transgender people), and a culture of repression, intolerance, and hatred for those deemed 鈥渄ifferent.鈥�

But what would a progressive vision for LGBTQ people look like? As part of 大象传媒 Media鈥檚 initiative, Jenn M. Jackson, Ph.D., answers that question in a conversation with 大象传媒 Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on 大象传媒 Presents: Rising Up With Sonali. Jackson is a 大象传媒 contributor, an assistant professor at Syracuse University鈥檚 Department of Political Science, and author of Black Women Taught Us (Penguin Random House, 2024) and the forthcoming Policing Blackness (University of Chicago Press, 2025).

Sonali Kolhatkar joined 大象传媒 in summer 2021, building on a long and decorated career in broadcast and print journalism. She is an award-winning multimedia journalist, and host and creator of聽大象传媒 Presents: Rising Up with Sonali, a nationally syndicated television and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and dozens of independent and community radio stations. She is also Senior Correspondent with the Independent Media Institute鈥檚 Economy for All project where she writes a weekly column. She is the author of聽Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice聽(2023) and聽Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence聽(2005). Her forthcoming book is called聽Talking About Abolition聽(Seven Stories Press, 2025). Sonali is co-director of the nonprofit group, Afghan Women鈥檚 Mission which she helped to co-found in 2000. She has a Master鈥檚 in Astronomy from the University of Hawai鈥檌, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. Sonali reflects on 鈥淢y Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host鈥� in her 2014聽聽of the same name.