Queer intel officers targeted by top secret chat leak get their chance to speak

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As soon as Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2024 presidential election, Moon knew the threat was imminent. “The day after the election I basically was like, my clearance is gone because he's going to say trans people are not ‘trustworthy’ or that we’re ‘dishonest’ because we cannot live as our assigned gender,” the former contractor for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)—an agency of the Department of Defense (DOD)—recently told The Handbasket. 

It’s impossible to quantify the toll the early days of the second Trump administration have taken on queer people as a whole, but those who work for the federal government have felt double the effects. While Trump is working towards eroding the entire foundation of American democracy, he has paid particular attention to making it impossible to exist as a queer—and especially trans—person in this country with a slew of punitive executive orders. And when right wing activist Chris Rufo leaked DoD chat logs in late February from a top secret internal and anonymous chat room for queer intel workers, the walls came crashing down for many members. They recognized their own words being used against them and characterized as “lurid” and “pornographic.” Now some of them are ready to share what happened in their own words.

Rufo broke the story of the chat leaks on February 24th with a thread on X describing “NSA’s secret transgender sex chatroom, in which NSA, CIA, and DIA employees discuss genital castration, artificial vaginas, piss fetishes, sex polycules, and gangbangs—all on government time.” While the chat discussed gender transition surgeries, how those surgeries impacted sex and the experience of ones body, and the choice to have multiple partners, Rufo’s inflammatory characterization stemmed from his extreme anti-trans activism. Also, he obviously really wanted clicks.

“I was talking about having multiple partners instead of complaining about my wife, and I was talking about top surgery instead of foot surgery,” Moon said, pointing out how cisgender, straight employees used the internal chat for all manner of non-work related conversations.

The day after Rufo’s first report dropped, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard issued a memo to all agencies under her purview. “On 24 February 2025, media sources reported that multiple Intelligence Community (IC) employees have engaged in obscene, pornographic, and sexually-explicit written discussions on the IC Intelink classified platform,” Gabbard wrote in her memo. “All heads of IC elements shall immediately take action to determine the identity of those employees and contractors that engaged in such conduct. Any IC employees found to have engaged in such conduct should be processed for termination of employment and revocation of security clearances.” The same went for contractors. Directors were told to report the results of their investigation and who they had fired by that Friday. 

Shortly after Rufo’s story, Gabbard went on Fox News to trumpet her directive and claim she’d fired 100 intelligence officers from 15 agencies as a result of Rufo’s leak. Never mind that the deadline for investigations hadn’t come yet—it was important to project control and telegraph to Trump and his team that she was a loyal soldier in the war on trans people. But two months later, while a handful of contractors and employees were outright fired, many remain on paid administrative leave with suspended security clearances and remain in the dark about their professional future. On March 14th, Gabbard announced an investigation into the leaked chats and the launch of a whistleblower hotline.

Now the remaining and fired employees say a new “Lavender Scare”—the mid-20th century effort by the federal government to root out queer employees—is upon us.

Each agency has opted to handle their own investigations differently, with some carrying out Gabbard’s orders with no questions asked, and others attempting to move things forward in normal order. Moon’s agency was in the former camp.

“My agency complied in advance,” they told me. “They said ‘here are all the trans people.’” Within two days of Rufo’s story, their security clearance was suspended. And the day after that, they were fired. They still haven’t been given a precise reason. (Moon is the screen name they used in the chat and is how they’ve chosen to be identified for this story.)

Prior to Trump’s election and inauguration, Moon’s time at DIA was generally positive with a supportive and tolerant team. They’d been in government service for 17 years, starting with the Navy and moving to civilian service for a company that contracted with the federal government in 2014. And when they switched to a new contracting company in late 2023, they began their transition almost immediately. 

“I transitioned in front of them,” they said. “It was a terrifying and scary thing to do even without the political climate.”

Moon is disabled and trans/nonbinary, and sported Pride apparel at the office loudly and proudly. They’re also polyamorous and part of the kink community, topics they openly discussed in the chat. Their reasoning was that working in intelligence was all about trust, and they felt complete honesty in a top secret space would ultimately be beneficial. 

This type of radical transparency was encouraged across agencies. At the CIA, according to a trans staffer who was fired in the aftermath of the chat leak, employees are subject to regular security interviews where they’re encouraged to reveal personal and private details about their lives. The idea is that if any foreign adversary tries to use those details to blackmail them, they can honestly say "work already knows.” But things have radically changed since January.

“In this administration, however, that trust has been broken and these personal details are now being weaponized to either encourage employees to quit, or undergo an embarrassing Personnel Review Board to determine their suitability for continued employment,” the former staffer said. “Some employees are being fired with no reason given at all, and contractors caught up in the net have even fewer protections.”

Before their termination, they said they witnessed a new culture of fear and humiliation, where certain staffers were given confusing orders that made it impossible to properly perform their jobs, to suddenly having their security clearances revoked and being walked out of the building by security.

“One common thread runs through many officers' stories: They are queer,” this former staffer said. “Some participated in Agency-sponsored Pride events, some were members of Agency Resource Groups, some were out and had told their story to encourage other non-straight employees.”

They said they believe the CIA is going after behaviors it can reclassify as "unsuitable" instead of firing employees for their sexual orientation—which is illegal— and, “they've essentially stolen countless professional intelligence officers from their mission areas…causing incredible morale and trust issues within the secluded vaults of American Intelligence.”

An IC staffer who was on administrative leave when we spoke and got word just this past Friday that she’d be reinstated described a recent “weird” interview with an agency investigator who’s part of the team helping to decide who among the chat participants stays and who’s sent packing. This staffer, who doesn’t want to identify her specific agency because of the precarity of her current situation, was flagged that first week after Rufo’s leak for being in the chat and for using terms like “RFK” (meaning the current HHS secretary) and “polyamory.” She was then told she was being investigated and placed on leave for “potential misuse of a NSA collaboration platform.” 

She said the investigator told her “that the DNI memos made it sound like something horrible had gone on in the chat rooms, and he didn’t think that was the case.” Now two months later she’s learned she gets to keep her job, but it couldn’t be more bittersweet: Just moments before she found out she was reinstated, she learned another friend in the IC who was part of the chat had been walked out and had their clearance revoked. It’s unclear if they still have a job.

Another queer IC employee who wasn’t in the chatroom from which Rufo leaked the chats but was in similar one and knows many of the participants, said they’re struggling to figure out how to remain at a job where queer employees have been made into targets.

“It’s a real moral challenge,” they told me. “Part of me wants to leave, but the job market is so horrible that I haven’t been able to find a new job, and I don’t have funds or a support network to sustain me without one. Then the other half of me thinks it’s better to stay and minimize damage/call it out when I see it.”

They added, “There’s a real cognitive dissonance; most people I know really hate what’s going on, or believe it’s wrong, yet they’re doing it anyway.”

Aside from the obvious loss of jobs and wages, the former participants in the chat said the loss of the chat itself is devastating.

“In no way did I ever think that chat would be the end of my career,” Moon said. “I had talked about how amazing that chat had been; it had been my savior.”

As for the identity of who within the IC leaked the chats to Rufo, that remains under wraps. Moon said they know who it is, but refuses to stoop to their level by publishing their name. As far as they know, this person has not been disciplined. 

“Everyone feels gaslit right now,” the IC employee who was not in the chat told me. “Queer employees like me, we spent the last four years being told how much we mattered, how much our leadership supported us. The Lavender Scare was treated as a horrific, regrettable period in history. But when it came time to actually stand up for us, it’s crickets. I know there’s probably a strategy, or at least a well intentioned reasoning, for their silence now, but it’s still a slap in the face.”