The Quiet Erosion

What the LGBTQ+ Workforce Stands to Lose — and What It Will Take to Protect It

You know the moment. You’re at your desk and someone asks about the weekend, and you edit your response before it leaves your mouth. Not a lie, a subtraction. You say “partner” instead of “husband.” Instead of a photo on the desk, you think the photo is less obvious as the wallpaper on your phone. You stop correcting people who use the wrong pronoun — not because it doesn’t matter, but because you’ve done the math on what correcting them will cost you, and the math has changed.

Nearly half of LGBTQ+ adults in the United States report being less out somewhere in their lives over the past twelve months. More than one in four have become less visible specifically at work. Researchers are calling it “recloseting” — and it is not a metaphor. It is millions of people, every morning, recalculating how much of themselves it is safe to bring through the door.

What you’re about to read is not a story about a law being struck down. This is what it looks like when the institutions that were supposed to enforce the law start signaling that they’d rather not.

The Federal Signal

On January 21, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14168 — “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” Within weeks, federal employees could no longer display pride flags on their desks. Transgender workers were told they could no longer use restrooms consistent with their gender identity. Pronouns were banned from official communications. The order directed every federal agency to recognize only two sexes, deemed absolute from birth, and began stripping LGBTQ+ protections out of federal policy, guidance, and enforcement infrastructure.

EO 14168 also revoked a Johnson-era civil rights measure, EO 11246, that had prohibited federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The Williams Institute at UCLA put numbers to it: roughly 14,000 transgender federal employees and over 100,000 LGBTQ+ employees of federal contractors lost workplace protections in a single action. That doesn’t count subcontractors.

On January 22, 2026, the EEOC voted 2-1 to withdraw its Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace. This was the document that — since 2024 — had given employers and employees a shared language for what harassment actually looks like under federal law. It incorporated case law from the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, which established that firing someone for being gay or transgender is sex discrimination under Title VII. The EEOC didn’t replace the guidance, they provided no public comment period or notice. A party-line vote, and the most comprehensive federal resource on workplace harassment — covering every protected category, not just gender identity — gone.

Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal, the lone dissent, called the vote what it was: “throwing out the baby with the bathwater, without giving the American people a voice.”

Let me be precise about what this did and didn’t do. It did not change the law. Title VII still prohibits sex-based discrimination. Bostock is still binding precedent. What the withdrawal removed was clarity — the practical framework that told employers what their obligations looked like and told employees what they were experiencing had a name. The signal was not subtle. The federal agency responsible for enforcing workplace anti-discrimination law stepped back from its own enforcement framework.

What It Looks Like on the Ground

The numbers tell a story that policy language can’t. The HRC’s 2026 Corporate Equality Index found that 39.1 percent of U.S. workers reported that their employers rolled back DEI practices. Among LGBTQ+ workers at those companies, 57.4 percent reported experiencing stigma, bias, or discrimination. LGBTQ+ workers who reported stigma were nine times more likely than their non-LGBTQ+ peers to identify their workplace as hostile.

The Williams Institute’s national survey — still the most comprehensive LGBTQ+ survey we have — found that 47 percent of LGBTQ+ employees have experienced workplace discrimination or harassment because of who they are. For transgender and nonbinary workers, that number is significantly higher across every measure: fired, not hired, verbally harassed, physically threatened, denied access to facilities.

The corporate response has been, overwhelmingly, retreat. Fortune 500 participation in the HRC’s Corporate Equality Index dropped 65 percent in one year — from 377 companies to 131. The HRC noted that among companies still participating, actual inclusion policies hadn’t declined. But that’s a distinction employees don’t get to experience. When your employer stops saying they support you — even if the policy is technically unchanged — you hear it. You hear the silence.

Meanwhile, the lawsuits are mounting. A data scientist at the National Security Agency (NSA) says her agency canceled its policy recognizing her identity, banned her pronouns in communications, purged references to transgender people from official materials, and barred her from the women’s restroom. A military readiness specialist with the Illinois National Guard was assigned to a single-stall bathroom far from her workspace — making two-hour meetings across campus an exercise in logistical humiliation. How many suits have been filed? Unknown. Many are confidential.

The Compounding Weight

If this story were just about LGBTQ+ workers as a single category, it would already be alarming. But the data breaks along exactly the lines you’d expect it to — and the further someone sits from the center of any one identity category, the worse it gets.

Start with the numbers that don’t make front pages. Almost half of all LGBTQ+ workers in the U.S. are people of color — 46 percent, including 26 percent who are Latinx and 11 percent who are Black. The Williams Institute found that LGBTQ+ people of color reported higher rates of workplace discrimination than white LGBTQ+ people across every metric. Unemployment for transgender people of color has reached four times the national average. Black same-sex couples experience poverty at more than double the rate of Black heterosexual married couples.

The revocation of EO 11246 didn’t just strip LGBTQ+ protections. It eliminated protections based on race, national origin, sex, and religion for employees of federal contractors — protections that had been in place since 1965. For LGBTQ+ people of color already navigating discrimination along multiple axes, this is not a single loss. It is a framework collapsing.

Transgender workers — particularly transgender women of color — are at the sharpest edge. Nearly half of transgender adults reported discrimination in public spaces in 2024. More than two in ten reported housing discrimination. Nearly two-thirds of transgender and nonbinary Americans say they cannot access needed healthcare because of this administration’s restrictions on gender-affirming care. When your housing is precarious, your healthcare is being taken away, and your ID doesn’t match who you are, documenting your manager’s behavior is not on the list. You are trying to survive. The paper trail is several rungs down the hierarchy of needs.

The Invisible Intersection: LGBTQ+ Workers and Age

There is one intersection that gets almost no attention, and it matters here. About 2.6 million adults over 50 identify as LGBTQ+ in the United States. Eighty-five percent are concerned about discrimination based on their sexual orientation. Eighty percent fear they’ll have to conceal who they are to receive adequate care as they age.

Older LGBTQ+ workers carry something specific into the workplace. They built their careers in eras when being out could get you fired, assaulted, or erased. The habits of concealment run deep. And here is the paradox: older LGBTQ+ workers are actually more likely to be out at work than their younger peers. Precisely because they are out, they are more likely to experience discrimination. SAGE and the Center for American Progress found that LGBTQ+ workers who are out are nearly four times more likely to have faced workplace discrimination than those who remain closeted.

AARP’s January 2026 survey found that 64 percent of workers over 50 have seen or experienced age discrimination. For LGBTQ+ workers navigating age bias on top of the current political climate, the pressures don’t add — they multiply. Less economic security. Less workplace safety. More reasons to stay quiet. And silence, as anyone who has worked in HR will tell you, is where the problems grow.

Crisis Competence: The Skill Set No One Taught You to Name

If you want to understand why LGBTQ+ workers respond to this environment the way the data says they do — by recloseting, by self-managing, by absorbing rather than reporting — the policy discussion won’t get you there. You need to understand what coming out actually produced.

There is a concept in developmental psychology called crisis competence. It was first described by Doug Kimmel, PhD — the first openly gay gerontologist in the United States — in 1978, and later developed by Harold Kooden, PhD — a clinical psychologist, APA Fellow, and LGBTQ+ rights activist who has been doing this work since before Stonewall. Dr. Kooden is my mentor. His observation is deceptively simple, and once you hear it, you can’t unhear it: the experience of coming out — surviving a crisis that required courage, strategic self-disclosure, coalition-building, and the dismantling of internalized shame — produces transferable competencies for navigating every major challenge that follows. Not as inspiration. As documented psychology.

He identified three competencies specifically: the ability to resolve loss without collapse; flexibility in roles and expectations that mainstream gender socialization had made rigid for others; and the construction of chosen families and community networks that provided real support outside official structures.

Dr. Kooden wasn’t writing about workplaces. He was writing about aging, identity, and development. But the framework maps onto workplace behavior with striking precision.

Think about what LGBTQ+ employees are actually doing when they navigate a hostile work environment. From the outside it looks like patience. Maybe passivity. But look closer. We are reading rooms, assessing who can be trusted and who can’t. We calibrate what to say, to whom, and in what form. Our community is tracking patterns — not because someone handed us an HR documentation guide, but because we have spent years managing information that could be used against us. We are often building cases before we know we’ll need one.

These are not personality traits. They are trained competencies — developed through a history that required extraordinary adaptability without a roadmap or sanctioned support.

Here is the complication, and it is the thing that makes this framework essential for understanding the current moment. The same history that produces crisis competence also produces something that works directly against you in a formal HR context. If you survived by staying quiet, you do not suddenly become someone who files a complaint because there’s a policy on the wall. If you learned that pushing back cost you — professionally, relationally, sometimes physically — you carry that lesson into every subsequent environment. The instinct to manage down rather than escalate is not irrational. It was the right call in an earlier context. The problem is that it persists long after the context has changed.

What looks like resilience from the outside is often, on the inside, the suppression of a legitimate complaint. The employee who appears to be “handling it” is often the employee who has made a sophisticated calculation — sometimes conscious, sometimes not — that the system will not protect them.

The EEOC’s January 2026 withdrawal of harassment guidance makes that calculation worse, not better. When official structures signal they’re stepping back, people whose survival was built outside official structures are the first to go quiet. That silence is not a sign that nothing is wrong. It is crisis competence doing exactly what it was designed to do — in a context where it no longer serves the person’s interests.

The Documentation Gap

This is where the behavioral pattern meets the evidentiary one. In 2024, the EEOC received 88,531 new charges of workplace discrimination — a 9.2 percent increase over the prior year. Retaliation was in nearly half of all charges filed. It has been the most common charge category for over seventeen years. That is a system in which speaking up gets you punished, and everyone who works in it knows it.

For LGBTQ+ workers operating from crisis competence, our risk calculus is not new. It is old and it is deeply learned. Unfortunately the current environment has validated it: the agency responsible for investigating our claims has publicly deprioritized our category of discrimination. The EEOC has directed staff to halt the processing of claims alleging sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination. The incentive to stay quiet is not just overwhelming. It is historically familiar.

This is the gap. LGBTQ+ workers are among the most sophisticated readers of workplace dynamics in any organization. We see patterns early. We know when something is shifting. And yet — precisely because of the competencies we have developed — we are disproportionately likely to manage internally, absorb what should be escalated, and leave the formal record empty at the moment it matters most.

I wrote about this in my first published piece for Quiet Ally — “Your Managers Are Building Retaliation Cases They Don’t Know About” — where I introduced The Quiet Baseline, a documentation framework built around four disciplines designed to close the gap between what organizations record and what employees actually experience. The premise is structural: organizations document what protects them. Performance plans, formal warnings, termination letters — these are thorough and carefully worded because they exist to protect the company. What you experience between those checkpoints goes almost entirely unrecorded. That asymmetry is not accidental.

In my second piece — “The Paper Trail You Don’t Know You Need” — I made the case for documentation as a work habit, not a legal strategy. Something you do the way you check your email, not something you start after the situation has a name. That argument becomes exponentially more urgent when you understand crisis competence. The employees best positioned to build a record — because they see the patterns earliest — are the ones most likely not to. Our history taught us the record is for the other side.

In December 2025, a federal jury awarded $11.5 million against SHRM — the Society for Human Resource Management, the largest HR professional organization in the world — for racial discrimination and retaliation. The employee had been rated “Solid Performer” and “Role Model” right up until she filed a complaint. The negative performance narrative appeared only after she spoke up. SHRM’s defense collapsed because the records couldn’t support it. When documentation doesn’t precede the adverse action, the timing becomes the story.

That case involved race. The pattern is identical across every protected category. And it is the pattern this administration is enabling by removing the federal framework that helped both employees and employers recognize it.

What Still Holds — and What It Requires

I want to be clear about what has not changed, because it matters. Title VII still prohibits discrimination based on sex, race, color, national origin, and religion. Bostock remains binding — discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity is sex discrimination under federal law. Courts have continued issuing injunctions against the most extreme applications of EO 14168. Twenty-five states and DC have their own laws explicitly protecting LGBTQ+ workers.

But law without enforcement is just text. What the past fourteen months have shown us is how fast a right on paper can become a right no one enforces. Employers who used EEOC guidance to calibrate their harassment policies are now operating without a federal north star. Employees who might have filed a charge are making rational decisions not to. The 534 companies that earned perfect CEI scores are still doing the work. The 246 Fortune 500 companies that stopped participating are sending a different message.

If you work in HR, your obligation has not shrunk. It has shifted. State laws are in full force. Private plaintiffs get right-to-sue letters. Juries still read timelines. The retention cost of getting this wrong is measurable: more than eight in ten workers who described their workplace as hostile were also at risk of leaving. High-scoring CEI companies had net promoter scores eight times higher than companies that didn’t participate.

Managers need training they’re probably not getting. HR departments need to make affirmative decisions to maintain protections rather than retreating alongside the federal government. Employees — LGBTQ+ employees in particular — need to understand that when institutional protections are receding, your own documentation practices may be the most consequential professional habit you develop.

If you are an LGBTQ+ employee: the instincts you have developed are real, and they are sophisticated. The calculation you’re making when you decide whether to report, document, or absorb is not weakness. It is crisis competence in action. The question worth asking — ideally with support — is whether that calculation is current. Or whether it’s running on older data from an earlier environment.

If you lead an organization: an LGBTQ+ employee who appears to be managing fine is not necessarily fine. The absence of a complaint is not evidence of no problem. Understanding why LGBTQ+ employees often don’t report — not as a character trait, but as a historically produced behavioral adaptation — is the prerequisite for building a workplace where reporting is actually possible.

The Work Ahead

A generation of LGBTQ+ Americans came out into a country that was moving, imperfectly but perceptibly, toward recognition. Marriage equality in 2015. Bostock in 2020. Federal harassment guidance in 2024. For a lot of us, it was possible to believe the arc was bending. What the past year has made clear is that arcs don’t bend on their own. They are bent by people who show up, who document, who refuse to let the record be written entirely by the other side.

Dr. Kooden built his framework under conditions that required both intellectual rigor and personal courage. He was arrested at fourteen for being gay. He came out publicly at a national mental health conference in 1970, knowing it would close doors he had spent years working to open. He survived the AIDS epidemic carrying diagnoses of his own, burying his partner, watching his community decimated. During the first Trump administration, he was blocked from delivering a resilience training to the EPA’s LGBTQ+ employee group during Pride — an embargo that was not lifted until the Biden administration took office. He is eighty-nine years old. He has retired from clinical practice, but he has not retired from the work. He is now doing LGBTQ+ activism in Oaxaca, Mexico — with both the expatriate community and the local Oaxaqueño community. In his words: it is like being back in the seventies and eighties. What he built — across decades of clinical work, academic papers, his book Golden Men, his founding work with SAGE — is a body of knowledge about what it costs to survive outside a culture’s official structures, and what it produces in the people who do.

Crisis competence is part of that knowledge. It tells us that the silence we’re seeing in American workplaces right now is not passivity. It is a skill set — one forged in an era when the institutions could not be trusted, reactivating now because the institutions are signaling, once again, that they’d rather not be involved.

For LGBTQ+ workers of color. For transgender workers navigating a healthcare system that is being turned against them. For older LGBTQ+ workers carrying decades of concealment in their muscle memory. The stakes are not abstract. They are the meeting where no one uses your name. The project that disappears after you file a complaint. The performance review that changes after you ask a question.

These are the quiet erosions. They only become visible if someone writes them down.

What looks like silence is often the sound of someone who has learned, over a lifetime, that the system was not designed with them in mind.

The work of building workplaces where that is no longer true is not finished. It is more urgent now than it has been in years. And it has a longer history than most people realize.

The best time to start is before you think you need to. The second-best time is now.

Nothing in this article asks you to take my word for it. Sources and references are here.