Non-Monogamy 101: Honest Talk About Open Relationships
October 8, 2026
Open relationships, explained without hype or judgment: what ENM and polyamory really mean, the agreements that work, and how to handle jealousy.
The war on LGBTQ+ rights didn’t start in 2025, but that year is when the strategy stopped pretending to be subtle. What began as a scattershot of state bills hardened into something more deliberate: a coordinated push to roll back federal protections, narrow the legal definition of “sex,” and shrink the space queer and trans people occupy in public life. To understand the attacks on LGBTQ+ rights now unfolding across the United States, you have to map two things at once: the sheer volume of legislation moving through statehouses, and the policy blueprint that ties so much of it together.
That blueprint has a name. Project 2025, formally the Presidential Transition Project, is a roughly 900-page governing manual called “Mandate for Leadership,” published by the Heritage Foundation in April 2023. On the surface it reads like a dry agency-by-agency reorganization plan. Read the sections touching LGBTQ+ people, though, and a clearer intent emerges: strip federal anti-discrimination protections, defund diversity programs, and rewrite civil rights law around a fixed, binary view of gender and sexuality (ACLU).
Volume is part of the playbook. During the 2025 state legislative session, GLAAD’s ALERT Desk tracked 575 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced across the country, and reported that roughly 92 percent of them were defeated (GLAAD). That defeat rate sounds reassuring until you sit with the math: hundreds of bills, drafted, filed, debated, and beaten back in a single year, only for a fresh batch to arrive the next session. The point isn’t necessarily to pass every bill. It’s to flood the system, exhaust the opposition, and move the handful of most extreme measures wherever the political climate allows.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which maintains its own running map of these bills, recorded more than 600 anti-LGBTQ+ measures in state legislatures over the course of 2025 and has continued tracking the 2026 session, where it has logged hundreds more across dozens of states (ACLU 2026 tracker). The categories repeat year over year: bans on gender-affirming care, restrictions on how LGBTQ+ topics can be discussed in classrooms, limits on which sports teams or bathrooms transgender people can use, and efforts to define gender strictly as “biological sex.”
It’s worth being precise here, because precision is exactly what the loudest voices on both sides tend to skip. Project 2025 was assembled with more than 35 primary authors and a coalition that the Heritage Foundation said exceeded 100 partner organizations by early 2024. Where LGBTQ+ rights are concerned, advocacy groups and policy analysts point to several recurring proposals in the text:
The Heritage Foundation frames its agenda as restoring constitutional order and “the family as the centerpiece of American life.” Civil rights organizations describe the LGBTQ+ provisions differently, arguing they amount to legalized discrimination and the systematic removal of queer and trans people from federal recognition (ACLU). Both readings are out there; what isn’t in dispute is what the document proposes on the page.
For a while, Project 2025 was a paper threat. In 2025 a number of its themes showed up in actual federal action. On his first day back in office, January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order directing the federal government to recognize only two sexes — male and female — defined as fixed “at conception,” and to use “sex” in place of “gender” across agencies (Executive Order 14168). The State Department subsequently suspended its policy allowing transgender, intersex, and nonbinary Americans to select an “X” marker or update the sex field on their passports. A week later, a separate order moved to bar transgender people from military service.
These actions drew immediate legal challenges, with mixed results. In late 2025 the Supreme Court sided with the administration on the passport question, allowing the revised policy to remain in effect while litigation continued. The throughline is hard to miss: ideas that lived in a think-tank manual in 2023 had, two years later, become the subject of executive orders and federal courtrooms.
The single most consequential development of 2025 came not from a statehouse but from the Supreme Court. On June 18, 2025, in United States v. Skrmetti, the Court ruled 6-3 to uphold a Tennessee law banning puberty blockers and hormone therapy for minors experiencing gender dysphoria (United States v. Skrmetti). The majority concluded that the law classified by age and medical use rather than by sex, so it did not warrant heightened constitutional scrutiny and survived an equal-protection challenge under the more deferential “rational basis” standard.
The practical effect was sweeping. The decision left in place the gender-affirming care bans for minors that roughly two dozen states had already enacted, and it signaled to other legislatures that similar laws were likely to withstand challenge. In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued the law plainly discriminated on the basis of sex and transgender status. Whatever one makes of the legal reasoning, Skrmetti reframed the fight: this is no longer only about bills that mostly fail, but about precedent that now shapes what states can do.
None of this is abstract for the people living inside the policy. The Human Rights Campaign reports that, with bans now on the books in more than two dozen states, roughly 40 percent of transgender youth ages 13 to 17 live somewhere their access to gender-affirming care is restricted (HRC). For families in those states, the choices narrow fast: travel hundreds of miles for appointments, navigate waitlists in friendlier states, or go without.
Other 2025 developments showed how fragile existing protections can be. In Kentucky, the Republican-led legislature overrode Governor Andy Beshear’s veto of House Bill 495, a measure that reversed his earlier executive order banning conversion therapy on minors and barred the state Medicaid program from covering gender-transition care (The Trevor Project). It’s a useful, sobering example: a protection that existed one year was gone the next, not by court order but by a single veto override.
Anti-LGBTQ+ legislation is not new. What distinguishes the current wave is its coordination across three fronts at once — statehouses, the executive branch, and the courts — and the way a single policy framework links them. State bills test the political waters. Executive orders move federal machinery. And rulings like Skrmetti set the boundaries everyone else operates within. Project 2025 didn’t invent that strategy, but it wrote much of it down in one place, which is why it keeps coming up.
It’s also worth keeping perspective. The vast majority of anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced in 2025 still failed. Public support for basic protections — fair housing, employment nondiscrimination — remains broad across party lines, according to long-running polling. The trajectory is genuinely contested, not foreclosed. Treating defeat as inevitable does the opposition’s work for it; so does pretending nothing has changed.
The attacks on LGBTQ+ rights in 2025 and into 2026 are not a single law to oppose or a single villain to name. They’re a system — overlapping bills, executive orders, and court decisions, loosely organized around a shared vision of who counts under the law. The high failure rate of individual bills is real and worth celebrating, but it isn’t a reason to relax. Skrmetti showed how much can change in one ruling, and Kentucky showed how fast a protection can vanish.
The honest read is that this is a long campaign, and long campaigns are won by people who stay paying attention after the headlines move on. They can publish all the 900-page manuals they like. Whether those pages become permanent policy is still, for now, an open question — and the answer depends largely on who keeps showing up.
GLAAD’s ALERT Desk tracked 575 anti-LGBTQ+ bills during the 2025 state legislative session and reported that about 92 percent of them were defeated. The ACLU, using its own methodology and timeframe, recorded more than 600 such bills over the year. Tallies differ because organizations count and categorize bills differently.
On June 18, 2025, the Court ruled 6-3 to uphold a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming medical care for minors. The majority held the law did not require heightened scrutiny and survived equal-protection review, a decision that left state bans on care for minors largely intact.
Project 2025 is a policy proposal published by the Heritage Foundation, not a binding law or official platform. That said, several of its themes — including federal recognition of only two sexes and rollbacks of diversity programs — appeared in executive actions taken in 2025, which is why advocates treat it as a roadmap worth watching.
In March 2025, Kentucky’s legislature overrode Governor Andy Beshear’s veto of House Bill 495. The measure reversed his executive order that had banned conversion therapy on minors and also barred the state Medicaid program from covering gender-transition care.
The ACLU’s annual “Mapping Attacks on LGBTQ Rights” tracker lets you filter active and defeated bills by state and category, and GLAAD’s ALERT Desk publishes regular reporting on legislation and incidents. Both are free and updated throughout each legislative session.
Banner Image: America the Beautiful by Adam-Varga.
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