Dale began his accidental government career at the National Park Service about a decade ago, after signing up as a volunteer. “I didn’t know this was what I wanted to do until I was doing it,” he said. Today, he works for the Bureau of Land Management as an outdoor recreation planner, doing everything from cleaning toilets to working with high schoolers who’ve followed in his volunteer footsteps. He’s stayed in the field because, he said, “I really believe in public service.” For him, working for the American people “is honorable work.”
Dale (all names in this story are pseudonyms to protect the identities of people working for a government that is openly against trans rights) transitioned to male while working for the federal government back in 2015. It went smoothly, he said, with his supervisor almost overnight updating his name tags and interfacing with H.R. and his co-workers. “I always felt like it was handled really well,” he said. Even during the first Trump administration, he didn’t feel the need to change his name legally.
Things are different this time around. The first administration was “shocking and surprising,” he said. This time, it’s “Buckle down and hide.”
After the election, his dad “sat me down,” he said, and warned him that the incoming administration was going to be hostile to trans people. His passport had expired and was under his old name, so he rushed to get a new one with the right name and that says male. It wasn’t until after the inauguration that he realized he could, and possibly should, have changed his gender with the Social Security Administration. Now it’s too late, which means the health insurance that he gets through his job, which is tied to his Social Security account, says he’s female.
Now Dale is preparing for the worst. Before testosterone, he was in “a horrible, irreversible depression spiral that I could not see any way out of,” he said. It felt like he had been treading water his entire life and he was running out of the energy necessary to keep himself alive. Within 72 hours of starting on the hormone, everything changed. “Suddenly I’m standing on solid ground biochemically, emotionally. I can take a breath,” he said.
But testosterone is classified as a controlled substance, so he can’t get more beyond the limits of his prescription. Instead, he’s taking a bit less than what he’s prescribed to slowly build up a stockpile. He worries that, at some point, his federal insurance could stop covering it. Maybe someone will notice that his Social Security account says female and yet he’s being prescribed testosterone. Maybe he’ll get fired through a reduction in force and his monthly cost will shoot from $5 with insurance to $100 without. In any of those instances, “I would like to have some time to figure that out before I start spiraling,” he said.
Federal employees have all been on a roller-coaster ride since President Donald Trump was reelected, waiting for DOGE to come knocking on their agency’s door or for mass layoffs to hit without warning. Trans federal employees have to deal with all of that chaos while working for a government that is openly antagonistic to their very being. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order rolling back protections for trans people; a week later, he signed one barring them from the military (which has, so far, been blocked by the courts) and another threatening to revoke funding from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care. I spoke to five trans federal employees across different agencies and locations. They all have their unique worries and situations, but one thing is clear: It is taking a huge toll on trans people to work for a regime hell-bent on erasing their identities.
Every trans federal employee I spoke to said things changed for them at the exact same moment: Election Day. They didn’t have to wait until Trump started signing executive orders or their agencies told them to erase their pronouns from their emails. They knew what was coming right away. Election Day was when “immense grief just broke down the door and flew through,” said Rian, who works for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “Those who were truly targeted were the ones who needed to really pay attention to what he was saying.” Felix, who works on a high-profile program on Hill Air Force Base in Utah, thought to himself, “I have no security anymore. I have zero. I’m not secure at all, and I’m not safe here.”
Ann, who is intersex, and their wife, who is trans, sprang into action immediately after the election. At first, because their wife was working remotely, they looked into leaving the country, but then their wife was laid off, cutting that avenue off. So now they’re trying to leave Texas, where they live, for a friendlier state. To make it happen, Ann took a job with the Department of Agriculture based in California, in December, ending what had been a break from federal employment. “Getting out of Texas and getting my wife to a safer place was really priority number one,” they said.
Transgender people were right to be afraid—they’ve been in the Trump administration’s crosshairs from the start. On January 20, Trump signed an executive order against what it called “gender extremism” and defending “biological truth.” Then on January 29, the Office of Personnel Management sent a memo to all agencies telling them to, among other things, turn off pronoun features in email systems and disband all employee resource groups that “promote gender ideology.” Agencies subsequently removed the app that had allowed everyone to document their preferred pronouns and ended internal affinity groups like Pride. Rian, who was a member of such a group at work, now feels “newly defined as an enemy of the administration.” Ann said all email signatures that had pronouns in them, including theirs, were wiped.
Soon after that, Ann was on a Zoom call in which they still had pronouns in their username. A colleague contacted them to point it out. “I think it was probably good natured,” they said. Still, “it was irritating that anyone noticed.” A similar thing happened to Felix: He had been out sick when the executive order was signed, so his pronouns were still in his signature when he came back. A co-worker responded to an email with a screenshot of his signature line, telling him he was directly defying the president.
The trans workers I spoke to told me that prior to Trump’s reelection, they had all felt valued and protected in federal employment. Within the first few weeks of their starting at the EEOC nearly a decade ago, someone in leadership asked Rian when they were going to dye their hair, having seen photos of them online with purple hair. “I realized, ‘Wait a minute, I actually can come to this agency and I can be myself,’” they said. That’s why they decided to come out as transgender at work for the first time. “I felt like I could be protected, and I could be myself,” they said.
NJ’s current position at the National Park Service, in technical support, is the first one in which they haven’t had to endure discrimination and harassment for being queer and trans. Finally, they felt they could tell people to respect their pronouns and “be fully out,” they said.
Felix had worked for the federal government for five years before going into the private sector in 2020. He decided to return about a year ago, seeking stability after he lost his parents, as well as some protection as a trans person. “In [private] industry, it ebbs and flows where you can find safety,” he said. At first, he found the stability and protection he had been seeking in federal employment. He planned to stay there until retirement. “That was my endgame,” he said. “I would 100 percent stay if all of this B.S. hadn’t happened.”
Now, everything is different. In late January, acting EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas issued her own statement about “removing gender ideology,” in which she said that one of her priorities as chair is to “defend the biological and binary reality of sex and related rights.” A few days later, she rescinded the agency’s internal nondiscrimination policies for gay and trans EEOC employees, saying anything that had come before was null and void. “That signals to LGBTQ employees like myself that our rights are no longer recognized and will no longer be enforced within the agency,” Rian noted.
Rian has to go into the office five days a week, and it’s become extremely difficult. Before the election, they were excited to go in on the two days a week they had to work in the office. Now they have to spend a few hours each morning emotionally preparing, repeating things to say if someone misgenders them and reassuring themselves that they’re going to be OK. Every day, they pause in front of the revolving door outside of their building and take a series of deep breaths before entering. Their stomach “feels like there’s two squeezing rocks on either side,” they said. They go in very early each morning, hoping to get settled and out of the shared break rooms before everyone else shows up.
They no longer feel like they can be themselves at work. They have a timeline in their office of their career at the EEOC, and the start of it had their former name from before their transition. When they came back to in-person work after the inauguration, they crossed that name out with a black Sharpie, “even though it’s a name that I cherish,” they said. They realized that a co-worker could use their former name as a way to hurt them. “I am closing down parts of me that really matter to me,” they said, tears in their voice.
Sometimes Rian has to rub their neck and forehead in an attempt to “calm down,” they said. They take frequent breaks throughout the day, often coloring in a coloring book with pictures of gender-diverse people and trans-affirming statements. “I try to hold onto that and continue to tell myself that’s what’s real,” they said. “Not what other people are saying or what other people believe.”
The workplace has changed for other people too. Although NJ has been misgendered in various ways in past positions with the Park Service, they’re noticing far more of it now, and “I know I’m also not speaking up as many times because I’m scared,” they said. Before January, Felix was able to work remotely when he needed a break from the “banter” in his office, he said, but now he has to work in person five days a week. He has watched as the macho, anti-trans banter on the base has gotten louder and more frequent. “I’m exhausted all the time just from the mental and emotional toll it takes on me,” he said.
The workplace bathroom has become a particular site of intense anxiety for many trans federal employees. Rian isn’t using the bathroom of their choice, instead the one that feels safer based on their physical presentation. Still, they “get really nervous” going to the bathroom every day, fearing they have no recourse if a co-worker were to harass them.
Things are even trickier for Felix. After Trump’s first executive order, he spoke to someone in leadership who knows he’s trans about how to handle the bathroom. That person suggested he leave the base and use a bathroom off site, an ordeal that, at the very least, would take him half an hour: going through multiple sets of secured doors, getting into his car, driving through the gates, going somewhere outside, and returning. He refused that plan and has been using the men’s room, but “it comes with a whole set of anxiety,” he said, wondering if today is going to be the day that someone “clocks” him.
There are days when his anxiety about it is so intense that he won’t use the bathroom for hours at a time, resulting in a pounding headache from the effort of holding it in. Some days he’ll go to in-person meetings off base that he doesn’t strictly need to attend because he knows he can safely use a gender-neutral bathroom there.
These ordeals come on top of the other changes wrought by DOGE’s cuts and purges. Dale thought he was going to be fired in the initial firing of probationary hires. Although he was hired more than a year ago, he was on a different kind of probation. “I had a week in there where I had my panic attack,” he said, moving things out of his office and polishing up his résumé. He faced putting over a decade into working for the federal government only to be fired “for no reason, illegally.” In the end, his termination never came.
NJ’s work is meant to involve a lot of travel, but DOGE’s spending freeze means there’s a lot of work they can’t do at all. “That’s difficult, because it’s not that there is a lack of work, there is an overabundance of work,” they said. It’s “damaging the long-term future” of the parks. The freeze even meant that when a piece of technology they need to do their work broke and needed to be replaced, they couldn’t pay for the mailing label needed to send it to tech support.
NJ fears that they’ll be reassigned from living in a community where they feel safe, and working for a supervisor who’s supportive, to a more hostile location and manager to fill in for people let go in the mass firings. The uncertainty is so high that they didn’t re-sign the lease on their housing in December out of fear that they were going to be fired and no longer able to afford it. If fired, they have three options for housing, they said: move in with family that doesn’t respect their gender identity, live in their car, or “take up the kindness of a stranger.” Then there will be the question of medical care. NJ is disabled and sees a half-dozen doctors every week. If fired, “then all that medical care I need every week I cannot get,” they said. “I would have to go without.”
NJ knows other co-workers are similarly trying to sort out what their government employment future looks like. But it feels different for them. “It is every part of my life that is getting attacked,” they said. Still, they want to keep doing the work. “I want to stay because what I do matters,” they said. “I want to outlast what’s happening right now.” But they know that there may be a point where they can’t keep it going. “Right now, working for the federal government is equivalent to being in an abusive relationship,” they said. At some point, they will probably have to leave that relationship. “I can’t be a martyr.”
For Ann, the current chaos in the federal government feels like “psychological terror.” “It takes up so much space in my brain,” they said. They never know if they’re going to show up at work and a bunch of people will have been fired. Co-workers come to them asking if they should take the early retirement offers. Then there’s the actual work of responding to data requests from the DOGE team. “Eighty percent of my work now is responding to all of the chaos,” they said.
It’s made what should be a simple move a very complicated one. What if Ann gets laid off just as they and their unemployed wife move to an expensive California city? Their administrative job, they fear, is exactly the kind of position that DOGE wants to eliminate. “My life feels very messy right now,” they said. “I’m someone who kind of likes things buttoned up and not a lot of chaos, and I just feel like I’ve been thrown into a lot of chaos all outside of my control.”
They feel like a “double boogeyman,” they said: othered for being trans and demonized as a federal employee for supposedly being “entitled and lazy.”
Many fear the demonization of trans people could turn into a witch hunt to root them out of federal employment. NJ said they are “well known as being out and trans,” which now makes them feel like “a massive target.” They worry that it’s only a matter of time until they’re fired, despite having a track record of high performance at their work.
Felix worries that “McCarthyism,” as he put it, is going to happen again and he’s going to be fired just for being trans. He isn’t out at work, but he has been “very honest and forthright” in official paperwork and processes to get clearance to work on the base, where he worked when he originally transitioned. “They have all of my records,” he said. “All of my information is out there.”
Even though most of his co-workers don’t know he’s trans, “I feel very exposed and vulnerable,” he said. At some point, there was a glitch in an internal records program that’s connected to his Social Security number, and instead of populating his real name it populated his birth name and gender at birth. It took months to get I.T. to fix it, and in that time a higher-up happened to look at the records that revealed his birth name.
He’s working on how to best cope with what he’s experiencing. He’s been going to the gym more, but he’s also isolating himself from friends and acquaintances, feeling safest in his own home. “I cry a lot,” he said.
Not many people at work know Dale is trans—he presents as male to those who don’t know him personally. But if someone wanted to find out, there’s a form in his personnel file from when he changed his name, and there’s the Social Security file. “Theoretically if anybody had a reason to look it would not be difficult to identify me as a trans person,” he said. “I think that it is prudent to assume that the worst outcomes are possible.”
If they don’t get fired in mass layoffs or a trans witch hunt, the question of whether to stay in the government or flee to a different job is at the top of everyone’s minds. Felix didn’t even consider taking the “fork in the road” offer, but a more recent deferred resignation offer has been tempting. “I don’t know how much more, mentally and emotionally, I can take this,” he said. Then again, he said, “That’s exactly what they want. They want to wear people down, and I don’t want to be worn down like that.”
Rian is determined to stay as long as they can. “They want me to disappear, but I need to stay and hold the line,” they said. “When somebody actively tries to erase you, the most powerful response to that is: I exist.”
Dale was similarly defiant when he received the “fork in the road” email. “I was like, ‘You are going to drag me out of this office, I’m not going to quit,’” he said. “This is my job, but it’s also my work, I believe in it deeply and I’m not walking away.” Nevertheless, he’s thinking through contingency plans. It’s hard to know exactly what he’s planning for. Getting fired? Getting outed? Being disappeared? He thinks a lot about what it would take for him to leave the country. “It is important to me that I took an oath to defend the Constitution. This is my country too, and I don’t want to get pushed out of it,” he said. “So what would it take? And I don’t know. I have no idea.”
The post What It’s Like to Be a Trans Federal Employee Under Trump appeared first on New Republic.
