The Era of Purges

The firing of trans officials is part of a broader pattern of exclusion

Here is what happened. An intelligence employee at the National Security Agency leaked chats of fellow officers to a political activist. The chats included inappropriate messages, mostly around medical issues, plus mockery of political commenters. The political activist published the chats, calling for the employees to be punished. The richest man in the world used his social media platform to promote the attack. The new Director of National Intelligence immediately fired the analysts.

What seems problematic with this story? The inappropriate discussion on a work platform is unprofessional. But it is also hard to eliminate. If you are a supervisor, maybe you issue a warning.

The bigger issue is that a political activist has a direct pipeline into everything government employees are saying, even platforms that are supposed to include sensitive security messages. Who leaked the information?

The bigger issue is that the DNI fired these employees without even a hint of due process.

The bigger issue is that these employees were targeted and fired because they were trans.

It is simply impossible to believe that a group of White male analysts would have been peremptorily fired for engaging in what their Commander in Chief has deemed “locker room talk.” The political activist being mocked, LibsofTikTok, were known for their anti-trans activism. That is why she was being mocked in the first place.

The political activist who broke the story, Chris Rufo, also mischaracterizes much of the discussion: he presents shared advice about transition surgeries and related medical issues as sexually deviant fetishes, leading to headlines like this in right-wing media:

Pink News analyzed the leaked chats and characterized the discussions as “honest and open accounts of various LGBTQ+ topics and experiences, many of them apparently written by trans employees and offered up as useful advice for colleagues.” People outside the trans community may have different levels of comfort with these discussions, but the context is that Rufo and others have consistently fed a stereotype of trans people as dangerous deviants. You don’t have to condone what the employees did to realize that the accusations of deviance are being used here in a way that would never be the case for other employees.

None of this is about security. Not really. It is about purging certain people and identities from public life. Whatever you think about trans people, you should be disturbed by this. If you are familiar with the Lavender Scare — when gay people were purged from government positions in the 1940s to 1960s — you probably know it as a cautionary tale from an intolerant past. A tale of moral panic and persecutions not to be repeated. But it is being repeated.

There is a broader context. Purges are occurring at a historic rate in your government, for a variety of reasons. Governmentwide purges of employees are occurring to create a smaller and more acquiescent government for Trump and Musk. Purges in the military and Department of Justice ensure a legal and military infrastructure that will do the President’s bidding.

But some purges are about identity, both the identity of those being purged or simply hat welcoming diverse identities is not unacceptable. DEI staff are being purged. People who attended a DEI training are being purged. Anti-discrimination policies have been removed. A tipline was created to identify workers who were in anyway associated with DEI. None of these people broke any law. They merely helped implement the priorities of a past President.

LGBTQ and especially trans public employees are targeted. Trump has ordered that trans people not be allowed serve in the military, and for existing trans service members to be purged.

The Office of Personnel Management issued a memo saying that resource groups tied to identity can no longer operate. This means that employees who are seeking to organize with other LGBTQ employees cannot do so. In the US Department of Agriculture, employees were asked to identify the leaders of these groups. LGBTQ people now have to worry that they will be reported on by their fellow employees, as Rufo’s victims were.

The hypocrisy is obvious. After a DOGE employee was discovered making racist statements online, he resigned, only to be welcomed back after Musk, the Vice-President and the President urged his return. Hating people is fine. But being the target of hate is grounds for firing.

How many of those people who bemoaned cancel culture — many of whom also had a sideline in anti-trans hate — will push back? Chris Rufo is no longer pretending that concern about cancel culture needs to be even-handed. He says the rules of cancel culture simply need to be rewritten:

to determine how the Right can protect its own members from unjust cancellation attempts and how it can enforce just consequences on political opponents who violate the new terms.

Rufo demonstrated this tactic. The day before he wrote: “Social media posts, often imbued with irony and hyperbole, should no longer be grounds for automatic social and professional annihilation” he published his expose of trans public employees in chat rooms, leading to their firing.

Time and again Rufo’s harassment campaigns have worked because institutions and the media go along with one story he is telling — that he is battling institutional corruption — while deliberately ignoring another story he is telling about a campaign to purge certain ideas and people from public life.

His attacks on Black scholars, including the successful campaign to remove the President of Harvard, were not about academic integrity, but about ending DEI in academia. His attacks on CRT were not about the actual literature of critical race theory, but about rebranding scholarship related to race and gender as radical and in need of censorship. He has labeled teachers who discuss gender identity to be groomers. He fueled the false claim that immigrants were eating their neighbors cats and dogs. At this point, why would anyone take his claims at face value?

At the federal level, of course, Rufo’s anti-trans fellow passengers are in charge, and just looking for fuel for their intolerance. All of the people in this story, apart from the people fired, have a record of attacking trans people. The activists are known for trying to chase trans people out of public life, and their posts have led to threats, including bomb threats. The richest man in the world has a record of anti-trans statements, including saying his trans child was “dead” to him. The DNI Director has associated LGBTQ people with pedophilia. They work for a President who made demonizing trans people a cornerstone of his campaign.

At some point, institutions need to stop the most obvious propagandists as serious voices. At some point, they have to decide if they are satisfied playing their assigned role in Rufo’s play.

I regret to inform you the New York Times is at it again. Their first account of the firings mentions Rufo, but not his record of smear campaigns, mentions transition surgeries, but not that the purge is targeted to trans people, or the broader context of attacks they are facing. The Times is not alone. This is what you get if you google “Gabbard”—an uncritical framing of the story as punishment for “explicit chats” rather than about identity.

Maybe later versions will do better, but their initial instinct is to hew to Gabbard’s account: the employees were unprofessional, and need to be fired. The Times uncritically repeated Gabbard’s claim that the firing was part of an effort to:

clean house, root out that rot and corruption, and weaponization and politicization, so we can start to rebuild that trust in these institutions.

Rebuilding trust in the institutions? How do you rebuild trust based on purges?

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