The Gender War Is A Forever War, Continued

Are you now or were you ever

It was the queer, sultry summer of 1958 and Madeline Tress, an economist for the Department of Commerce, was being held in an air condition-less room by two men from the federal government. The two men asked Tress to swear an oath and she reluctantly obliged. After a few perfunctory questions about her name and birthdate, one of the agents informed her they had evidence she was an “admitted homosexual.” Though Tress had only been working at the Commerce Department for a few months, her coworkers told the Commission she was “mannish,” a “tomboy” with “personality problems,” an “unstable” fashion sense, and a “bohemian” lifestyle.

Unbeknownst to her, her coworkers at the Department had reported her to the US Civil Service Commission, then tasked by the Eisenhower administration with rooting out homosexuals who were considered, at best, a security risk for blackmail and, more frequently, lacking in morals or work ethic required by the federal government. Alongside communists, unionists, and anti-segregationists, homosexuals were characterized as a foreign import, adherents to a dangerous ideology that threatened the American way of life and certainly had no place in the government itself.

As David K. Johnson documents in his masterful book The Lavender Scare:

Tress froze. Which would be worse, she wondered, admitting being gay or. lying? Tress said she had no comment, and adamantly refused to discuss the matter. The investigators had more subtle questions for her. "Were you ever at the Redskins Lounge?" one of them demanded to know. Figuring there was nothing illegal involved, she admitted she had been to the lesbian bar. Asserting that she "enjoyed the orchestra there," Tress denied that she went there "for the purpose of making homosexual contacts, as the officials suggested. "Do you know Kate so-and-so?" the investigator continued, dropping the name of a lesbian acquaintance of hers. He named a host of her gay friends, demanding to know if she associated with any of them. Again, thinking that this was not illegal, Tress admitted knowing what the investigators termed "known homosexuals" but insisted she was attracted only by their "intellectual appeal." "How do you like having sex with women?" one of them sneered "You've never had it good until you've had it from a man.”

Declining her request to have a lawyer present, the men noted her “feminine attire” but gave her demerits over the fact her dress was missing two buttons.

As Johnson writes, interrogations of this sort were typical for queer people working in the federal government for 25 years between the New Deal and the relative progressivism of the 1960s. Anti-homosexual paranoia was paired with anti-communist and racist backlash to President Truman’s desegregation of the military and the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. This campaign of accusations and suspicion was made possible by a culture of snitching, spying, and rumor-mongering from within the federal bureaucracy itself, often by people like Tress’s co-worker but also by true believers in this project.

While Senator Joe McCarthy is the most infamous leader of these purges, it was a 1950 report led by Senator Clyde Hoey (titled “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government”) and a 1953 executive order from Dwight Eisenhower expressly forbidding anyone suspected of homosexuality from federal employment. As Hoey’s report reads:

Aside from the criminality and immorality involved in sex perversion such behavior is so contrary to tlle the normal accepted standards of social behavior that persons who engaged in such activity are looked upon as outcasts by society generally. The social stigma attached to sex perversion is so great that many perverts go to great lengths to conceal their perverted tendencies. This situation is evidenced by the fact that perverts are frequently victimized by blackmailers who threaten to expose their sexual deviations.

The interrogations and firings faced by Tress would shame and humiliate thousands across the federal workforce—far more than were accused of communist allegiances—only slowing down in intensity following a spate of public suicides among the accused. Eisenhower’s order remained on the books for over 40 years, eventually being repealed in parts by Bill Clinton over the 1990s and then entirely by Barack Obama in his final order before leaving office in 2017.

Stuck in this room and harassed by these two men, Madeline Tress eventually admitted to having queer feelings in her youth and the two men asked her to sign a paper to that effect. She refused and handed in her resignation but, before she left, she cornered a deskmate at the Commerce Department until he confessed to having reported her. Under Eisenhower’s executive order, he faced the potential loss of his own job if he failed to report his suspicions of Tress’s deviance.

It’s Madeline Tress I thought about as I watched the unfolding of Donald Trump’s first weeks back atop the executive branch, announced by a volley of orders attempting to remake the federal government and the country in his narrow, racist image. In the four years since he lost re-election in 2020, Trump and the conservative movement around him—namely The Heritage Foundation and their Project 2025 agenda—have trumpeted clear plans to purge “the deep state” and transform thousands of nonpartisan, apolitical posts into appointments made by Trump himself, with candidates vetted for loyalty to Trump and opposition to select ideologies.

Before his inauguration, the coverage of this planned purge often focused on its scale, its projected disruption of routine government services and functions, and its dubious defensive legal logic. But as has been made clear over the last fourteen days, Trump’s purge—or, perhaps more accurately, Elon Musk’s purge—has focused primarily on workers associated with diversity initiatives and any program, research, or funding engaged in what one Trump executive order described as “gender ideology.”

Though surely only the beginning, the impact of this censorship regime has already been swift and sweeping. Hospital networks are shutting off care for transgender people under 19 as Trump threatens to cut off research grants and, more critically, their participation in Medicare if they don’t. Schools are being threatened with losing access to critical funds if they so much as use the preferred pronouns of transgender students. Transgender women held in federal prisons—already subject to routine violence and abuse—are having their health care withheld from them and forced under a blanket policy into men’s prisons and, more likely, solitary confinement. The State Department is currently withholding an untold number of passports and other documents from transgender people who submitted them for updates and has not said when or if they would be returned. These material harms have been paired with the banishment of anything that mentions the very concept of gender, leading the CDC to order the suspension of all published research to ensure none included a list of forbidden words: ”transgender,” “transsexual,” “nonbinary,” “assigned at birth,” and “gender” itself. Federal workers who are themselves transgender have been informed their gender identity is effectively meaningless to the federal government and their rights under nondiscrimination laws limited at best.

In his various executive orders fueling this blacklisting, Trump has variously described trans people as “mutilated” and compared us to a “contagion.” In the order banishing transgender people from enlistment in the military, Trump pulls right from the language of the Lavender Scare and its portrayal of homosexuals as amoral and disturbed:

Beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life. A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.

As I’ve written before, it’s hard to imagine a world in which this onslaught of restrictions and censorship remains exclusively focused on the small minority of people who call themselves transgender. Among Musk, Trump, and all their failsons, anti-transgender animus is a patriarchal desire for control and purity paired with misogynistic and racial dreams of a white and masculine re-ascendancy, the dawning of a walled-in golden age free of alien influences, deviant impulses, or human empathy. Those of us who reject our gender assignment are convenient scapegoats, vulnerable to misrepresentation and public shaming. But ultimately the rules we break are broken by all people to one extent or another, and the tighter those rules are enforced—by Trump or those he can successfully deputize as snitches, informants, and recruits—the more people will captured in their dragnet.

Reading Johnson’s descriptions of the firings and investigations faced by queers like Tress, I was immediately struck by how frequently reports of suspected homosexuality depended not just on conduct of the accused but on their body. Johnson describes the testimony of a secretary at the State Department who harbored suspicions about her supervisor with “peculiar lips—not large, but oddly-shaped” who hung around another colleague with a “mannish voice.” Another female coworker had “very little in the way of hips” while a male coworker had “a feminine complexion” and a “girlish walk.” Others were condemned just for giving this secretary “an uneasy feeling.” Though far from definitive evidence of homosexual activity or desires, investigators with the Civil Service Commission included such “borderline cases” as part of a “no tolerance” policy “where every rumor and innuendo, no matter how unreliable, was sent to them for investigation.”

From The New York Times on December 16, 1950

You may recognize this range of damning characteristics as a “spectrum.” The essentialist definitions provided by the Trump administration for “sex,” “man,” and “woman” are an effort to suggest they have no concern or regard for the categories of behavior and aesthetics that might come to mind when you hear the word “gender”—as one White House official unconvincingly told a reporter last week, “I don’t think anyone’s trying to do a dress code or anything like that.” But sex is not simply what’s between your legs and gender is not simply what you wear. The physical characteristics we associate with “male” and “female” are themselves broad, malleable, and overlapping. Particularly in the age of transvestigators—when the gender identity of women of color, in particular, is challenged if they fall outside the thin, European, and white ideal—such a judgment is clearly aimed at nothing as abstract as an “ideology” but against people and their deviant, literally non-binary bodies.

They do so not only out of an individualized hatred against a clearly labeled sexual minority but in defense of a faux-naturalized ideal, a vision of perfect manhood and womanhood born of nature yet clearly nonexistent without a police state enforcing it. This is why, as I wrote when a CPAC speaker called for “eradicating transgenderism from public life entirely,” the gender war is a forever war. They likely know this mythical ideal is beyond their reach. But by demonizing those who fall furthest from it—or, as trans people do, challenge the very notion of its inevitability—they can justify a permanent state of fear and persecution.

Revisit the story of Madeline Tress at the top of this newsletter and, specifically, her two missing buttons. The men investigating her already had confirmation she associated with known homosexuals, went to bars famous for hosting homosexuals, and had been reported for suspected homosexuality by close coworkers. But failing to replace not just one but two buttons was deemed by these men a notable failure of her sex—that is, a missed opportunity to live up to the domestic ideal of womanhood. Now consider not only the behaviors and performances such paranoia demands but the embodiment and physicality it prizes, too. Once under the watchful eye of the inquisitors, no detail about you—your dress, your habits, your acquaintances, and your sex—is beyond their note if it’s deemed to fall out of line.