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Lily has spent much of the past two months wondering whether she is going to get fired. As a transgender federal employee, she’s also spent time training her body to suppress the urge to pee. She’s cut down her intake of water and stopped eating lunch so she won’t have to visit the office restroom as often, given the attention she might attract.
Lily has worked for the Department of Defense for the past decade and a half. (Like nearly everyone quoted in this piece, she asked for a pseudonym to protect her from retaliation.) Her agency hasn’t announced an explicit bathroom ban yet, but she has no doubt that it’s coming. On his very first day in office, Donald Trump signed an executive order on gender that formally rejected the validity of transgender identity. Among other things, it directed agencies to begin segregating “intimate spaces” by biological sex.
It seems inevitable that at some point in the near future, Lily will be ordered, as a condition of her employment, to use the men’s bathroom. And she won’t be able to bring herself to do it.
“I am a woman,” she told me. “I look like a woman. I feel that I would be sexually harassed or assaulted in the men’s restroom.”
All this physical and mental preparation has taken a toll. Lily has had to miss more than a week of work already, and she’s upped her dosage of anti-anxiety medication. She dreads what the coming months will bring.
As the Trump administration wages a large-scale assault on the civil service and seeks far-reaching restrictions on the ability of trans people to participate in public life, transgender federal employees find themselves in a uniquely vulnerable position. Their internal networks for social and professional support were disbanded by the executive order ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Bathroom bans are looming. At some agencies, higher-ups have prohibited the means by which trans employees have identified themselves, like posting their pronouns in Microsoft Teams. Some worry that Trump’s executive order on biological sex is written so broadly that simply calling oneself transgender could violate it.
But many fear the advent of a more explicit purge of trans workers. In an atmosphere of justifiable paranoia, rumors abound: Some whisper that the Office of Personnel Management will ask agencies to furnish lists of employees whose background checks show a history of different names or gender markers. An executive order that laid the groundwork for a trans military ban declared transgender identity inconsistent with “an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle,” and thus incompatible with military service. It’s easy to imagine the administration extending this argument to security clearances, leadership roles, or federal employment itself.
Several transgender workers told me they see chilling parallels to the Lavender Scare, the McCarthy-era crusade to rid the government of gays and lesbians. Under the justification that they posed a threat to national security by being susceptible to blackmail, thousands of gay people were investigated, outed, and terminated from federal employment in the mid–20th century. The moral panic spread to state and local governments, too, making more than 20 percent of American jobs unavailable to openly gay people. The U.S. Civil Service Commission didn’t end the ban on gays in the federal workforce until 1975, amid a mounting push by the nascent gay rights movement for nondiscrimination protections.
Today, the Lavender Scare is widely viewed as a shameful period in U.S. history—a witch hunt that demonized a vulnerable minority to build support for a broader right-wing agenda. For Oliver, a trans man who now works for the Department of the Interior, that legacy added meaning to his decision to enter public service. In a previous federal role, representing his agency at a local Pride event “was one of the proudest moments of my career,” he said. It felt momentous to speak to other LGBTQ+ people as a uniformed federal employee, “when just decades before, that would not have been possible or anywhere near the reality of what the life of a trans person could look like.”
The past two months have been disillusioning, to say the least. Oliver struggled to process the executive order that claimed trans-inclusive policies corrupt “the validity of the entire American system.” Like Lily, he immediately realized that a bathroom ban would likely come next.
Oliver is the only current federal employee I spoke to who agreed to use his real first name in this piece, because he plans to leave his job within the month. The demand, led by Elon Musk, that feds write up a weekly list of their accomplishments put him over the edge. “I’ve had a lot of trouble sleeping over the last couple of weeks,” he said. “Worrying about what my job is going to look like, worrying about my existence as a trans person in the federal government. That just made me reach my breaking point where I had to ask myself, ‘What am I willing to subject myself to?’ ”
Oliver’s story mirrors the journey of several other transgender federal workers who told me they had envisioned long, productive careers in public service. Within a few weeks of the Trump administration, that goal began to seem impossible or intolerable: Now, they say, it appears likely that they’ll either be fired for being trans—even if the official pretext is something different—or be driven out by a degrading work environment that treats them with suspicion and contempt.
One of the first transgender workers to lose her job in the new Trump administration was Amy Paris, who has worked for the federal government for most of the past decade. Over the years, she’s had a hand in numerous projects that made the government work better for trans people and everyone else: adding an X option on passports for people who prefer their gender to be “unspecified”; developing software that helps Americans file their taxes directly with the IRS; ditching the pink and blue buttons that required TSA agents to pick a gender before each body scan, which resulted in unnecessary pat-downs, longer lines, and the public humiliation of transgender travelers.
Paris’ most recent job was in the Department of Health and Human Services, where, until earlier this year, she worked to improve the nationwide system governing organ donation and transplants. Then, at 9 p.m. on a Friday in the middle of February, Paris received an email announcing her termination. “Your ability, knowledge, and skills do not fit the agency’s current needs, and your performance has not been adequate to justify further employment at the agency,” it read.
Less than a month earlier, a performance evaluation had rated Paris “outstanding,” the highest ranking available in federal employment. It seems clear to her that her ouster was not based on an assessment of her work quality, though she can’t be sure it was because she is trans. Members of the Trump administration “are really out there to make sure that the federal government is not able to provide critical services, and that is their top goal,” she said. “If they happen to hurt some trans people along the way, all the better.”
In contrast to the days of the first Lavender Scare, there are thousands of out LGBTQ+ people currently serving in the federal government. But across the federal government, Paris said, there are also closeted trans people hoping they won’t be discovered by the current administration. Being outed might have been a nonissue or simply unpleasant in the recent past; now, it could cost them their bathroom access or career. Closeted trans employees fear the day that the Department of Government Efficiency starts combing through employee background checks, searching for workers with disparate names and gender markers in their records.
“I imagine they’re going to come, eventually, for the entire LGBTQ spectrum. They’re starting with trans people because we’re the smallest group,” Paris said. A broader sweep may have already begun: In February, Mother Jones reported that certain departments have been asked to hand over the names of LGBTQ+ resource group leaders to higher-ranking officials. (It remains to be seen what they will do with these lists.)
Inclusive policies around language and labels—such as the X gender marker that was available on many forms of federal identification until Trump took office—are also under attack. As soon as Trump signed his Day 1 executive order on gender, Lily said, colleagues who’d styled themselves as LGBTQ+ allies began deleting their pronouns from their email signatures. Eventually, Lily was directed to do the same.
Many of the people responsible for enforcing the executive order are not Trump’s ideological foot soldiers; they may resent having to carry out his anti-trans decrees. For Lily, that’s hardly a comfort. “That’s my fear for other policies that will have to be implemented,” she said. “People know that they will impact me and will be a detriment to my ability to contribute in the office, but they will still enforce them. Because they don’t want to lose their jobs.”
Gray, a nonbinary staff member at the General Services Administration, has had a hand in several projects designed to make federal workplaces more inclusive for trans employees. A few weeks ago, they were tasked with doing the opposite. After Trump’s executive order on biological sex, Gray was the person who pushed the button to implement a change on government webpages, removing mentions of gender identity and pronouns. “I sat there with tears streaming down my face while I did it,” they said.
Gray has been connecting with other federal employees on Signal, the encrypted messaging app. Over the past two months, several group chats of trans federal workers—at least one with dozens of members—have come together to commiserate, offer job search assistance, and share moments of joy amid the chaos. One group is led by David, a trans man who has worked in the federal government for more than seven years.
David wasn’t out as trans at work before he started his agency’s LGBTQ+ resource group. Having a devoted forum for meeting trans and queer colleagues “helped me feel like I had a grounding and helped me come out of the closet,” he said.
By dissolving these groups, the Trump administration is beginning to encourage workers back into the closet, suggesting that their identities are once again a liability in the federal workplace. One queer employee at the Department of Transportation said her resource group used to be a vibrant, active community with more than 400 members. Now, it’s a 50-person Signal chat that most users have joined under pseudonyms, lest they leave a record of participation.
Their coming together—and their caution—has historical precedent. During the first Lavender Scare, Frank Kameny co-founded the Mattachine Society of Washington, an early and influential gay rights group, after he was fired from his government job for being gay. At a preliminary meeting at a D.C. hotel, the hotel manager eavesdropped and reported the group to the FBI, which recruited an informant who outed dozens of alleged gays. Understanding the need for discretion, the majority of MSW members used pseudonyms, and membership records were stored under lock and key.
Under the threat of targeted surveillance and mounting hostility, David has forced himself to consider what his red line would be. What if he arrives at his office one morning to find his computer login has been changed to his birth name? What if the administration opens an email address for telling on trans people using the restroom, like the one created to report on employees doing DEI work?
“The urge to say ‘fuck you’ to all these orders is so strong,” David said. “But it’s also really hard to weigh, like—if I lose my job tomorrow, it’s going to have really serious impacts on me, on my family.” The parts of his job he once loved—the national impact, the public service, the security that helped him provide a stable life for his kids—no longer outweigh the stress of being trans in the second Trump administration, he said. “If I was 25, if I didn’t have a family, I’d just quit.”
Some federal workers worry that even innocuous discussions in the workplace about being trans could mark them for dismissal. They see an ominous sign in what happened to more than 100 intelligence officers who posted messages years ago in two LGBTQ+ chat rooms hosted by the National Security Agency. Last month, right-wing activist Christopher Rufo published a leaked series of old chats from the groups, calling them a “secret transgender sex chatroom.” In reality, the chats showed conversations about gender-affirming medical treatments and polyamorous relationships. Were a few of the comments inappropriate for work? Maybe. But hardly any mentioned sex. Even so, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard called the message groups “disgusting” and ordered intelligence agencies to fire those who’d participated.
“That is an opening to expand that aperture of, you know, trans people are dishonest. They’re untrustworthy,” Lily said. “I’m worried that that will be an excuse for removing clearances, as an example—or, outright, anybody that’s trans can’t be trusted with federal work at all.”
Lily and her wife have drawn up a budget to see if they could make ends meet on just one salary. (It would be extremely tight.) They’ve started reducing their spending just in case and discussing whether they would stay in Texas if Lily were forced to end the career that she has spent more than a decade building. In just a couple of months, their plan for a future together that looked solid has become distressingly uncertain.
“It’s an eventuality that I’m going to be forced out of the government,” Lily said. “I am preparing for that as best I can.”
