The more I think about this, the more I think it’s bad for adults to affirm children.

The definition of sex that I adhere to is coherent and consistent across all anisogamous organisms. Same for humans as plants as clownfish (and how we know when they’ve changed sexes) as crocodiles (who lack sex chromosomes), et al. Sex is determined by the type of gamete the organism produces or their bodies are organized around the production of. Some species are able to change their sex (none that I know by choice; some that do under various environmental pressures), but humans are not among them. We can mimic various sex characteristics thru nomenclature and dress (cultural signifiers) or surgeries (primary and secondary characteristics) or hormones (secondary characteristics), but not actually change sex. Maybe this changes someday as technology continues to improve, but for the foreseeable future we can not. So we are lying to them if we tell them they can change their sex. And choices they make as a result of that are rooted in lies, setting them up for a lifetime of chasing fundamentally unattainable goals.

With adults, I’m fine with this. If you’re grown and entrusted with full independence, you can do whatever crazy **** you can dream up, idc. The dood who had plastic surgeries to turn himself into a cat - cool bro whatever’s clever - you own it. But for kids, they aren’t independent. I don’t trust my kids to make decisions about what food they’re going to eat for dinner (they’d choose candy and ice cream all day every day) without my guidance but I should trust them to make lifelong decisions about something as intractable as their sex and as complicated as modern conceptions around gender? That feels deeply irresponsible.

Instead, legal and policy development work on ideas that are too radical even for Project 2025 are being handled elsewhere, including at a Trump-aligned think tank called the Center for Renewing America that is run by Russell Vought, who was Mr. Trump’s White House budget chief.

An early 2023 email from a member of the center’s staff listed 10 agenda topics for papers that the center planned to write on legal and policy frameworks. An introduction to the email said the goal was to “help us build the case and achieve consensus leading into 2025.” The email went on to circulate more broadly, and The Times reviewed a copy.

The email placed each topic into one of three categories. One set involved Congress. A second involved “broader legal” issues — including “Christian nationalism” and “nullification,” the pre-Civil War idea that states should be able to negate federal laws they don’t like. The third category was “day one” ideas, meaning those whose legal frameworks were already well established, and which could be put into effect by a president unilaterally.

No. 4 on the list: “Insurrection — stop riots ** — Day 1, easy.”

The Center for Renewing America has since published papers about several other agenda items on its list, including arguing that a 1974 law banning presidents from impounding funds — or refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for things the White House dislikes — is unconstitutional (No. 1 on the list) and advocating for the elimination of the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department investigative independence from the White House (No. 5).

The center has not published any paper on invoking the Insurrection Act to use troops to suppress violent protests. But earlier this year, it published a paper on a closely related topic: invoking that law to use troops in Southwest border states to enforce immigration law. The paper was co-written by Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy Homeland Security secretary in the Trump administration.

While the paper focuses on border security, most of its legal analysis applies to any situation in which a president deems the use of troops necessary to suppress lawlessness. It laid out extensive arguments for why the Insurrection Act provides “enormous” leeway for the president to use regular troops directly to make arrests and enforce the law.

It also cited a sweeping Justice Department memorandum written after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, by John Yoo, a Bush administration lawyer with an idiosyncratically broad view of presidential power. Mr. Yoo had argued that the Posse Comitatus Act could not stop a presidential decision to use the armed forces domestically to combat terrorist activities.

In a statement responding to The Times’s reporting, Rachel Cauley, a spokeswoman for the Center for Renewing America, said, “Thank you for confirming that we have made it a priority to articulate that the president has the legal authority to use the military to secure the border.”

While the center’s statement — like its paper — framed the prospect of using troops on domestic soil in the context of securing the border, not suppressing anti-Trump protests, Mr. Vought was more expansive in a hidden-camera video released last week by a British journalism nonprofit, the Centre for Climate Reporting, which spoke with him while deceptively posing as relatives of a wealthy conservative donor.

“George Floyd obviously was not about race — it was about destabilizing the Trump administration,” he said. “We put out, for instance, a 50-page paper designed for lawyers to know that the president has, you know, the ability both along the border and elsewhere to maintain law and order with the military and that’s something that, you know, that’s going to be important for him to remember and his lawyers to affirm. But we’ve given them the case for that.”

Mr. Trump and his campaign have tried to distance themselves from Project 2025 and other outside conservative groups, saying that only policy proposals endorsed by the campaign count. Ms. Leavitt said, “As President Trump and our campaign has repeatedly stated, outside groups do NOT speak for him. The ONLY official second-term policies are those that come directly from President Trump himself.”

Still, as a matter of substance, the lines between Project 2025’s work, the materials being developed separately by the Center for Renewing America and the Trump campaign can be blurry.

For example, Mr. Vought has also been in charge of one of the most important components of Project 2025: drafting executive orders and other unilateral actions Mr. Trump could take over the first six months in office. Mr. Vought also remains personally close to Mr. Trump. And the Republican National Committee, which Mr. Trump controls through allies, including his senior campaign adviser, Chris LaCivita, and his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, put Mr. Vought in charge of the committee that developed the party’s platform.

That platform calls for “moving thousands of troops currently stationed overseas to our own southern border” to secure it against migrants.

At the Center for Renewing America, Mr. Vought has also hired Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official in the Trump administration who was indicted in Georgia for working with Mr. Trump to help overturn the 2020 election.

Mr. Clark wrote the center’s paper laying out a legal framework for why the president can take direct control of Justice Department investigations and prosecutions, and was also appointed to co-lead Project 2025’s Justice Department policy efforts.

The federal indictment of Mr. Trump, which deems Mr. Clark an unindicted co-conspirator, recounts how a White House lawyer told Mr. Clark that there had not been outcome-changing election fraud — and warned that if Mr. Trump nonetheless remained in office, there would be riots in every major city in the United States.

“Well,” Mr. Clark responded, according to the indictment, “that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”