Since the beginning of the modern LGBTQ civil rights movement, there have been small but meaningful shifts in policy and public attitudes over the past 55 years that have allowed many within the LGBTQ community to feel safe in their right to love. The Trump-Vance administration is dramatically eroding that sense of security by enacting policies that directly harm LGBTQ people.

The Lavender Scare 2.0 is here, LGBTQ advocates warn, with stark decisions regarding LGBTQ federal employees that harken back to a time when you could be arrested — or worse— for not being a straight, cis citizen.

The Washington Blade spoke with Lucas F. Schleusener, the co-founder and CEO of Out in National Security, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that works to “empower queer national security professionals,” about the change in tone coming from the White House on LGBTQ government employees in national security and other federal circles.

There are almost 2.3 million federal government employees — not including uniformed military personnel, U.S. Postal Services employees, employees of federal contractors, and employees of federal grants — but only 7.3 percent of federal employees identified as LGBQ, and less than one percent identified as transgender, according to the 2023 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey. Despite these numbers showing that this population is a minority within federal government employees, the steps the Trump-Vance administration is taking to erode LGBTQ federal workers’ protections seem to be of grave importance — especially within the military.

There are many things that caused shifts in public opinion of LGBTQ people (and their rights). Small victories over time build up and can change how the public views a particular issue — from the beginning legal fights for LGBTQ rights, which started nearly a decade before Stonewall by Frank Kameny, to the assassination attempt of the first openly gay public official Harvey Milk, to even the widespread humanizing impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on LGBTQ people who have suffered the most from the disease. All help make up the concept of American LGBTQ rights. Trump — laid out by Project 2025 and aided by other conservative politicians — is beginning to erode these rights.

One of the clearest ways the slow erosion of this protective space for LGBTQ federal employees can be seen, Schleusener explained, is through destabilization efforts within the bureaucratic system coming from the Oval Office — and with that is the return of 1980s–90s–style harassment.

“There’s an overwhelming bureaucratic trauma happening — a destabilization that feels intentional,” Schleusener said. “And underneath that, we’re seeing a return of different flavors of workplace harassment across national security agencies, from the CIA to the Import-Export Bank.”

GLIFAA, an employee resource group founded in 1992 that advocates for LGBTQ inclusion, equality, and workplace protections within U.S. foreign affairs agencies, was forced to have its entire board resign to comply with Trump’s “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” executive order the Blade covered in January, ultimately removing an important social and professional group that supported public servants. Since the executive order, the GLIFAA website has removed most of it’s content and contacts.

Schleusener continued, explaining that this policy will hurt LGBTQ federal workers.

“The administration has dissolved all minority employee resource groups, destroying networks of belonging and leaving queer federal employees in a state of psychological precarity,” he said.

Other organizations that have had to change their approach to supporting LGBTQ federal employee worker rights include the American Federation of Government Employees’ PRIDE program, a subsection of the largest federal employee union representing 820,000 federal and D.C. government workers. AFGE PRIDE was founded in 2015 to get more LGBTQ-inclusive contracts for federal workers and educate all members on LGBTQIA+ workplace and safety issues. AFGE has had numerous public disagreements with both Trump administrations’ anti-LGBTQ policy, notably when the federal employee union criticized the government’s multiple implementations of transgender military bans, and when it called out questionable budget-cutting techniques within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and multiple LGBTQ specific organizations by flagging — and subsequently removing — funding for anything with “transgender” in it.

Beyond minimizing the power of official structures created to specifically protect workers’ rights, the current administration and some members of the Republican Party have started to use “digital witch-hunts,” using social media to harass, dox, and lie about LGBTQ federal employees. While not as bad as denying a job to a deserving candidate for past homosexual “proclivities” like what happened with Frank Kameny, there are consequences to this shift in what is deemed acceptable for the online appearances of LGBTQ federal workers inside and outside of federal buildings.

“It’s not clearances being denied so much as it is targeted harassment. Laura Loomer has essentially declared herself the new Joe McCarthy, going through the Plum Book to identify anyone with ‘LGBT,’ ‘DEI,’ ‘equity,’ or ‘trans’ in their job titles and doxxing them.”

This intolerance promoted by the Trump-Vance administration and his party is not like whistleblowing on a State Department official for selling secrets to foreign governments, Schleusener explained, but rather attacking a part of LGBTQ federal workers’ human identity.

“These are ordinary federal workers — not public figures — whose home addresses end up on the internet simply for doing their jobs.”

Recently Laura Loomer, the far-right political activist, conspiracy theorist, internet personality, and Trump confidante, accused the trans community of playing some role in the assassination of right-wing political pundit Charlie Kirk, even going as far as to say that transgender people are “a national security threat” and constitute a terrorist movement, despite the shooter not being trans.

Trans federal employees have been facing a particularly difficult time under Trump’s second presidency. From bathroom bans restricting what gender bathrooms people can use to harassment on behalf of the federal government to remove them from military positions, there is a hyper-critical lens being placed on trans federal workers.

“There’s an organization called STARRS that combs through Instagram and LinkedIn looking for minority service members who show any pride in their identity. If you’re LGBTQ, a person of color, or even an ally who took your kids to Pride, they will tag and harass you — and they have a direct line into the Pentagon,” Schleusener pointed out. “People have been removed from their posts because of this, including the Navy’s top West Coast endocrinologist, whose only ‘offense’ was having a rainbow banner and pronouns on LinkedIn.”

Commander Janelle Marra was the medical director of Expeditionary Medical Facility 150 Bravo in San Diego until the TikTok account “Libs of TikTok” posted about her role as the Navy deputy medical director for trans healthcare, which was listed on her LinkedIn page, leading Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to publicly order her removal from the role.

In addition to formally using the government to be hostile — if not outright discriminatory — against LGBTQ federal employees, the Trump-Vance administration has also fostered more informal harassment directed toward LGBTQ federal employees.

“It’s a climate of fear without any logical pattern — people doing important, everyday work suddenly find themselves targeted. These are not public political actors; they’re regular federal employees who now have to manage LinkedIn as if they were cabinet officials,” the former Pentagon employee and Obama national security associate shared.

“Between the administration’s formal hostility and these informal digital witch-hunts, queer employees are being squeezed from every direction.”

While there are some very clear discriminatory policies being put out by the White House, there is clear pushback from LGBTQ, human rights, and democracy advocates to stop them within the courts. With such a high amount of discriminatory action being taken by the Trump-Vance administration, it leaves the possibility for “legal chaos” within an already unhelpful system and the risk of a bad U.S. Supreme Court precedent.

“A lot of what we’re dealing with legally is documenting enough harassment to file viable claims, but the system is stacked against us. Even when we find a legal path — like restoring pensions for trans service members whose retirement benefits were revoked — everything is designed to be slow, difficult, and demoralizing,” Schleusener said. “And the frightening question is always whether fighting back could result in a bad Supreme Court precedent that hurts queer workers nationally.”

These pointed actions taken to harm LGBTQ federal worker protections by Trump and his followers in the federal system warrant a declaration of a second Lavender Scare, Schleusener told the Blade.

“Yes — this absolutely constitutes a second Lavender Scare. The federal government is saying trans people don’t belong in the military, even after spending billions training them for an all-volunteer force, which is both dangerous and absurd. Combined with attacks on ERGs, human rights reporting, and attempts to purge queer employees, it mirrors the patterns of the Cold War era.”

But this isn’t your grandparents’ Lavender Scare with vice squad cops trying to catch federal employees cruising like in the 60s. This is a whole other beast, Schleusener said.

The escalation of offenses, particularly for trans women within the government, is a major concern. The distaste for the trans community within the White House and among the president’s supporters on Capitol Hill makes this worse than a fine or a night in jail. The attempts to expand laws and policy regarding gender identity — particularly related to the National Defense Authorization Act and passport approvals — could have lasting impacts on LGBTQ federal workers’ ability to live in the U.S.

“This Lavender Scare is escalating: the NDAA moving through Congress includes a ban on trans women at service academies, and the administration is using Cold War statutes like the Walter McCarran Act to bar trans foreign nationals from entering the country.

Every opportunity they’ve had to go further, they have taken — and there’s no indication they plan to stop at trans people.”

Schleusener explained that although they are different in implementation, this new Lavender Scare is taking just as much of a toll on LGBTQ federal workers as it did the first time around — most of whom just want to help make the U.S. a better place.

“Like the original Lavender Scare, this is a manufactured moral panic weaponized through bureaucracy. Back then, the State Department bragged about driving queer employees to suicide; now we’re seeing trans service members taking their lives under the pressure of these policies. The difference today is that social media makes the harassment instantaneous and far-reaching, even as queer visibility also makes it harder to shove an entire community back into the closet.”

He also pointed out the growing purges of women and people of color from federal roles alongside the targeting of queer federal employees. This is a time to be aware of how federal work policies could shift the culture — and the safety of some of the most disenfranchised citizens.

“This isn’t only about LGBTQ people — there’s a broader purge underway targeting women and people of color in the senior ranks of the military. The first woman to take command of the SEALs was pushed out purely because she was a woman.

It’s a coordinated effort to turn back the clock across multiple identities simultaneously,” Schleusener said.

This manufactured climate of fear for LGBTQ federal employees is causing some to hide, delete, or exit the federal workforce altogether.

“We’ve seen a huge uptick in people trying to scrub their names from websites, delete their public bios, or step back from leadership programs out of fear of being hunted by Laura Loomer or similar groups. Even something as basic as using the bathroom has become a fraught question because the Pentagon now requires people to use facilities based on sex assigned at birth,” Schleusener added. “It’s driving people out of public service early, especially those with skills that are highly valued in the private sector.”

The Blade attempted to speak to multiple LGBTQ federal workers on record about their experience in seeing an overall shift in policy and tone directed toward the LGBTQ community — either anonymously or with their name attached — but no one wanted to speak for fear of losing their job. The Blade also reached out to the White House Press Office but has not received a response to the request for a statement on these allegations.

For the first time since the global observance began, the U.S. government did not commemorate World AIDS Day on Monday.

World AIDS Day, first marked in 1988, has long served as an annual reminder of the ongoing effort to end an epidemic that has killed more than 44.1 million people worldwide and continues to disproportionately impact LGBTQ people, communities of color, and those in the American South. Yet the Trump-Vance administration declined to acknowledge the day this year, severing a symbolic but consistent tradition upheld by every president since Ronald Reagan.

The move comes despite the scale of the epidemic today. Approximately 1.2 million people in the U.S. are living with HIV, according to federal estimates, and about 13 percent — 158,249 people — do not know their status. Globally, the World Health Organization reports 40.8 million people were living with HIV at the end of 2024.

Presidents of both parties have historically used World AIDS Day to highlight progress, remember lives lost, and recommit to reducing disparities in prevention and treatment. Past administrations have also commemorated the day through displays of the AIDS Memorial Quilt — first created in 1987 and later spread across the National Mall and White House lawn. Today, the quilt includes the names of more than 94,000 people lost to AIDS on more than 47,000 panels.

This year’s silence from the White House follows several sweeping foreign aid rollbacks instituted by President Donald Trump after his 2025 inauguration. According to an October report by KFF, the administration enacted a “90-day review of foreign aid; a subsequent ‘stop-work order’ that froze all payments and services for work already underway; the dissolution of USAID, including the reduction of most staff and contractors; and the cancellation of most foreign assistance awards.”

These cuts have created significant funding gaps for nongovernmental organizations around the world — many of which work directly to prevent HIV transmission and expand access to lifesaving treatment.

The State Department dismissed criticism of the administration’s decision not to acknowledge World AIDS Day.

“An awareness day is not a strategy. Under the leadership of President Trump, the State Department is working directly with foreign governments to save lives and increase their responsibility and burden sharing,” deputy spokesperson Tommy Pigott said in a statement CNN first reported. “Earlier this year, we released a global health strategy aimed at streamlining America’s foreign assistance and modernizing our approach to countering infectious diseases.”

The U.S. historically played a central role in the global HIV response. Since 2003, the United States has been the largest financial supporter of HIV/AIDS programs — primarily through President George W. Bush’s PEPFAR initiative, which has invested more than $110 billion into the fight to end the epidemic.

Despite overall declines in transmission, HIV continues to disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ people, and men who have sex with men. More than half of new HIV diagnoses occur in the South.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Ending the HIV Epidemic in the U.S. initiative focuses on the 48 counties, D.C., San Juan, Puerto Rico, and seven rural states that accounted for more than half of all new diagnoses in 2016 and 2017.

Advocates say the administration’s withdrawal from World AIDS Day — combined with its cuts to foreign and domestic health programs — risks reversing hard-won gains.

“Though new HIV infections declined 12 percent from 2018 to 2022, progress is uneven with Black people accounting for 38 percent of new diagnoses, Latino people accounting for 32 percent of new diagnoses and more than half (52 percent) of new HIV diagnoses were among people living in the South,” Jarred Keller, senior press secretary at the Human Rights Campaign, told the Washington Blade via email. “Cuts to CDC funding have driven HIV prevention resources to historic lows, stripping support from HIV-focused programs.”

Legal and public health experts echoed that concern, saying that there is a possibility to stop HIV/AIDS, but only if efforts are taken gradually over time.

“HIV is a preventable and treatable condition, but only if the research, organization, and effort continue to be a priority to those looking out for the health of Americans and people worldwide,” said Lambda Legal HIV Project Director Jose Abrigo.

Democracy Forward and the American Civil Liberties Union, two organizations focused on protecting Americans’ constitutional rights, filed a class-action lawsuit Thursday in federal court challenging the Trump-Vance administration’s bathroom ban policies.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of LeAnne Withrow, a civilian employee of the Illinois National Guard, challenges the administration’s policy prohibiting transgender and intersex federal employees from using restrooms aligned with their gender. The policy claims that allowing trans people in bathrooms would “deprive [women assigned female at birth] of their dignity, safety, and well-being.”

The lawsuit responds to the executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” signed by President Donald Trump on his first day in office. It alleges that the order and its implementation violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex discrimination in employment. In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Title VII protects trans workers from discrimination based on sex.

Since its issuance, the executive order has faced widespread backlash from constitutional rights and LGBTQ advocacy groups for discriminating against trans and intersex people.

The lawsuit asserts that Withrow, along with numerous other trans and intersex federal employees, is forced to choose between performing her duties and being allowed to use the restroom safely.

“There is no credible evidence that allowing transgender people access to restrooms aligning with their gender identity jeopardizes the safety or privacy of non-transgender users,” the lawsuit states, directly challenging claims of safety risks.

Withrow detailed the daily impact of the policy in her statement included in the lawsuit.

“I want to help soldiers, families, veterans — and then I want to go home at the end of the day. At some point in between, I will probably need to use the bathroom,” she said.

The filing notes that Withrow takes extreme measures to avoid using the restroom, which the Cleveland Clinic reports most people need to use anywhere from 1–15 times per day depending on hydration.

“Ms. Withrow almost never eats breakfast, rarely eats lunch, and drinks less than the equivalent of one 17 oz. bottle of water at work on most days.”

In addition to withholding food and water, the policy subjects her to ongoing stress and fear:

“Ms. Withrow would feel unsafe, humiliated, and degraded using a men’s restroom … Individuals seeing her enter the men’s restroom might try to prevent her from doing so or physically harm her,” the lawsuit states. “The actions of defendants have caused Ms. Withrow to suffer physical and emotional distress and have limited her ability to effectively perform her job.”

“No one should have to choose between their career in service and their own dignity,” Withrow added. “I bring respect and honor to the work I do to support military families, and I hope the court will restore dignity to transgender people like me who serve this country every day.”

Withrow is a lead Military and Family Readiness Specialist and civilian employee of the Illinois National Guard. Previously, she served as a staff sergeant and has received multiple commendations, including the Illinois National Guard Abraham Lincoln Medal of Freedom.

The lawsuit cites the American Medical Association, the largest national association of physicians, which has stated that policies excluding trans individuals from facilities consistent with their gender identity have harmful effects on health, safety, and well-being.

“Policies excluding transgender individuals from facilities consistent with their gender identity have detrimental effects on the health, safety and well-being of those individuals,” the lawsuit states on page 32.

Advocates have condemned the policy since its signing in January and continue to push back against the administration. Leaders from ACLU-D.C., ACLU of Illinois, and Democracy Forward all provided comments on the lawsuit and the ongoing fight for trans rights.

“We cannot let the Trump administration target transgender people in the federal government or in public life,” said ACLU-D.C. Senior Staff Attorney Michael Perloff. “An executive order micromanaging which bathroom civil servants use is discrimination, plain and simple, and must be stopped.”

“It is absurd that in her home state of Illinois, LeAnne can use any other restroom consistent with her gender — other than the ones controlled by the federal government,” said Michelle Garcia, deputy legal director at the ACLU of Illinois. “The Trump administration’s reckless policies are discriminatory and must be reversed.”

“This policy is hateful bigotry aimed at denying hardworking federal employees their basic dignity simply because they are transgender,” said Kaitlyn Golden, senior counsel at Democracy Forward. “It is only because of brave individuals like LeAnne that we can push back against this injustice. Democracy Forward is honored to work with our partners in this case and is eager to defeat this insidious effort to discriminate against transgender federal workers.”