Most of us learned about the Red Scare in school — Senator Joseph McCarthy, the hunt for communists, the blacklists. Far fewer of us learned about the quieter purge that ran alongside it, the one that targeted gay and lesbian Americans and drove them out of public life by the thousands. Historians call it the Lavender Scare.
Between roughly 5,000 and 10,000 federal workers were fired or pressured to resign during the McCarthy era for no reason other than being suspected of being queer.
It was sold to the public as national security. The claim was that gay employees could be blackmailed by foreign agents and were therefore a threat.
When McCarthy’s efforts to expose actual communists stalled, he and his allies simply folded homosexuality into the same panic — treating queerness itself as evidence of disloyalty.
There was never any real proof. There didn’t need to be. The accusation was the punishment.
That history matters right now, because the Trump administration is reaching for the same tools.
As the ACLU lays out, the mechanics are almost identical — only the target has shifted from gay and lesbian Americans broadly to transgender people in particular.
The Lavender Scare Turned Neighbors Into Informants
A signature feature of the Lavender Scare was getting ordinary people to report on one another.
In Florida, the Johns Committee pushed teachers, students, and administrators to flag anyone they thought was gay, leftist, or otherwise “subversive.” (The ACLU of Florida was founded in 1955 specifically to fight back.)
Side Note: Groups exist that target the LGBTQ+ community today — using more direct, evil methods. There is a social media account that exists just to spread hate and dox LGBTQ+ individuals called “Libs of TikTok.” GLAAD covers this anti-LGBTQ account run by Chya Raichik.
Seventy years later, the federal government is doing a version of the same thing.
In June 2025, the FBI opened a tip line asking the public to report teachers who “promote gender ideology” and doctors who provide gender-affirming care.
More recently, the Department of Justice tried to force hospitals to turn over the names and private medical records of transgender young people who received care.
The ACLU and Lambda Legal are suing to stop it. These tactics do real damage: they pit neighbors against each other, push people to surveil children, and make safe medical care feel dangerous to seek.
Forcing Queer People Out of the Military
During the mid-20th century, recruits were literally asked whether they had “homosexual tendencies” on induction day.
Tens of thousands of service members were pushed out with less-than-honorable discharges, branded for life over who they were.
One week into his second term, Trump signed an order claiming transgender people can’t meet the “honorable, truthful, and disciplined” standard of military service — and that their presence hurts unit “cohesion.”
That’s the same argument once used against Black servicemembers, against women, against gay troops.
Transgender people make up less than one percent of the military.
Early this June, an appeals court partially blocked the ban, after the Supreme Court had reinstated it in May 2025.
“Protecting Children” as Cover
The Hoey Committee’s 1950 report declared gay people “unsuitable” for federal employment and helped justify President Eisenhower’s 1953 order barring them outright.
The selling point then, as now, was protecting families and children.
Today the White House frames gender-affirming care as a danger to kids, describing it in apocalyptic terms while censoring doctors, researchers, and teachers from even acknowledging that transgender people exist.
Advocates close to the administration have reportedly called trans youth “low-hanging fruit,” with the longer-term goal of ending access to care for trans people of every age.
Disease as a Weapon
Until 1973, the medical establishment classified homosexuality as a mental illness — a label used to justify arrests and brutal “conversion” treatments like electroshock.
That classification fell hardest on people living at the intersection of multiple oppressions.
Ava Betty Brown, a Black trans woman arrested in 1957 simply for how she dressed, was forced to undress by police and convicted at trial, then arrested and beaten again and again.
The Trump administration leans on the same logic, strongly implying that being transgender is a disorder in order to justify stripping away care, bathroom access, and jobs.
We Have Been Here Before
Here’s what the history books often skip: the people targeted fought back, and they built something.
The Mattachine Society, the country’s first lasting gay rights organization, was founded in 1950 — in the thick of the Lavender Scare.
The persecution was meant to terrorize a community into hiding. Instead it helped birth a movement that is still standing.
That is worth holding onto right now. The cruelty is not new, and neither is the resistance to it.
A community that survived the Lavender Scare, that survived Jim Crow and Stonewall and the AIDS years, knows how to endure — and how to win.
