The New Lavender Scare [View all]

[Eugene]

Alternate title: It Was One of the Most Shameful Episodes in U.S. History. Federal Workers Are Watching Trump Try It Again Before Their Eyes.

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Source: Slate

The New Lavender Scare

The McCarthy-era purge of gays and lesbians in the American government was a uniquely dark episode. Some federal workers see chilling parallels now.

By Christina Cauterucci
March 27, 2025 5:35 AM

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.

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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.

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Read more: https://slate.com/life/2025/03/donald-trump-news-trans-dei-government-workers.html