How the New Lavender Scare Puts the LGBTQ+ Community at Risk

Extremists aren’t attacking DEI; they are attacking us.

A new “Lavender Scare”—a moral panic that led to the mass dismissal of many LGBTQIA+ people from government service in the 1950s—is now a very real threat in 2025.

This New McCarthyism is part of the Trump administration’s broad roll back of civil rights, LGBTQ+ rights and DEI commitments:

- Surveillance of LGBTQIA People: The Department of Homeland Security has changed its policies to allow surveillance based solely on a person’s gender identity or sexual orientation.

-Greenlighting Discrimination: Trump’s executive order (EO) reverses protections for transgender federal government employees and LGBTQ+ employees of federal contractors. It also revokes non-discrimination protections for employees of federal contractors based on race, national origin, sex, and religion, which dates back to the Johnson administration! The EEOC has stopped their investigations of anti-queer and trans workplace discrimination.

-Prohibiting Employee Resource Groups (ERGs): Federal agencies now prohibit ERGs that promote “unlawful DEIA initiatives” or “employee retention agendas based on protected characteristics.”

-The Government Declares War on Trans People: Trump’s EO attempts to impose widespread discrimination on trans people in hospitals, schools, sports, homeless shelters, and prisons. The EO mandates that the federal government recognize only two sexes—male and female—which contradicts the scientific, medical and scholarly consensus that sex is a spectrum. (I was a Women’s and Gender Studies professor for 20+ years so I know a thing or two about this)

-Targeting LGBTQ+ People under the Guise of Ending DEI “Promotion:” The government has opened a tipline for federal workers to report colleagues who have worked on DEI. This recalls the Lavender Scare, when employees were encouraged to report—and out— their gay coworkers.

Speak out, friends! Together we can break the cycle of gaslighting, denial, and misinformation that obscures the true intent of these policies: legal discrimination, social persecution, and erasure.