MLK: What role did you play in promoting gender equality in the U.S. government?

TS: I will work backward from my most recent position, because I’ve been involved in the work for quite a few years now in different ways. When I left the government, I was serving as the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor’s first Gender Equality Policy Advisor. Of course, at the time of my departure, my title had been changed to Senior Advisor for Women and Girls. I prefer the first one, though, because that’s what I was hired under, and that was my original scope of work — to integrate gender equality issues across our broader democracy, human rights, and labor rights priorities. Back when I was in the bureau’s Office of Global Programs, I had advocated for this exact policy function to be created, and it took quite a few years to get. My policy role was based in the Office of Multilateral and Global Affairs, which has since been eliminated.

Prior to that, I served as a Senior Data Analyst and Program Officer contracted within the Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues [S/GWI, also known as GWI], in their Global Programming Unit. In that function, I was the Department’s lead on assistance coordination for all gender equality funding across the Department of State, which was a fascinating role. I got to see the ins and outs of all the funding mechanisms across each bureau, coordinated a lot with USAID (the United States Agency for International Development), of course, and drafted the congressional reporting on our gender equality funding. I also managed our technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) programming portfolio and some of our women, peace, and security (WPS) programs.

Before that, I was a master’s student. I was out of government for a little while, studying conflict transformation and social justice with a heavy focus on the nexus of WPS and technology, which prepared me well for the S/GWI job. Prior to leaving for my master’s about eight months into the Biden administration, I was working in DRL’s Office of Global Programs, as a Program Officer on the Marginalized Populations and Middle East and North Africa teams. As part of that first time, I led the global gender portfolio, alongside three other colleagues. We had grown the portfolio significantly under the prior Trump administration thanks to the passage of the Women, Peace, and Security Act [of 2017]. It was amazing but also feels kind of crazy looking back, knowing where things stand today.

To summarize from the beginning, I started as an intern in DRL under [the] Obama [administration] back in 2016 and then officially started working there as a contractor in 2017. I came in and out [of the State Department] as a contractor for almost the entirety of my career, until I finally converted to civil service in July 2024. It took more than ten months to get into that position due to the clearance process, so by the time that I left in June 2025, I had just barely been in it as long as I had waited for it. That was a hard pill to swallow. The election happened in November, and pretty much everything that I had been working on from July to October stopped, and we started recalibrating from there on out. I loved my work and was committed to doing it regardless of who was in office — that is the life of a civil servant — but the Trump administration had other plans in mind for us.

Our mandate at the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, like our name suggests, is to promote democracy, human rights, and labor globally through diplomacy, programming, and public affairs. S/GWI, by contrast if you will, was specifically focused on advancing gender equality and the rights and status of women and girls globally. Bouncing in and out of those two bureaus was really interesting. My original title [of Gender Equality Policy Advisor] in DRL was important because my scope of work was intentionally designed to fill a gap not being filled by GWI.

I think there is a sort of tension that often arises in women’s rights and feminist spaces — and we similarly experienced it within the Department — whereby “gender” gets conflated and used interchangeably with “women.” Not only is this factually inaccurate, but it also raises questions and concerns from a broader human rights perspective about who is, or is not, being represented in conversations around gender equality. I think, for many of us younger feminists, it was especially difficult to accept the pushback we sometimes received from older generations of feminists to meaningfully including lesbian, bisexual, and trans women in the work that we were doing to support women and girls more broadly. We understood the political dynamics and sensitivities, of course, but it was still very hard to reconcile the words we were saying — that we were being intersectional and inclusive of women and girls in all their diversity — with what we were sometimes doing in practice.

So, my scope of work was written around gender equality to not only include women and girls but also men and boys and LGBTQI+ people. My role in DRL was meant to help serve as a bridge of sorts between various DRL offices and issues, the Office of the Special Envoy for LGBTQI+ Persons — which sat under our bureau — and S/GWI to ensure that we weren’t intentionally or unintentionally excluding anyone from our efforts to advance gender equality. And just to be clear, with all that said, I still think there is a certain need for the prestige of a Secretary’s-level office and Ambassador that champions women’s issues, specifically, and we have unfortunately lost that now with the elimination of S/GWI.

AG: I had long worked in civil society focused on the intersection of U.S. foreign policy and the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons, and in early 2024, I ended up receiving a full-time career civil service position in the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor as their Senior Advisor for the Human Rights of LGBTQI Persons. That position was owned by DRL’s Office of Multilateral and Global Affairs (MLGA). What is interesting about the role is that when there was an Office of the Special Envoy to Advance the Human Rights of LGBTQI+ Persons as there was during the Biden administration, my position was loaned to that DRL office. When the Office of the Special Envoy closed, as it did when the Trump administration returned in 2025, I was moved back into my home office of MLGA which house the role under successive Democratic and Republication administrations. That office was also where you found a lot of thematic human rights issues, everything from elections and freedom of expression and political prisoners to your more vulnerable, marginalized communities impacted by human rights violations. That’s where you found your gender advisor, your indigenous persons advisor, your disabilities advisor, and myself, one of the LGBTQI+ advisors at the time.

My role was to be a point person for addressing human rights violations targeting individuals on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or sex characteristics. Specifically, we framed this work as countering criminalization, violence, and discrimination. Unfortunately, even though many countries have struck down criminalization statutes regarding consensual same-sex relations, more than 60 countries continue to criminalize these acts. In jurisdictions in 12 of these countries, they can be punishable by death. For transgender and nonbinary individuals, more than a dozen countries have laws criminalizing “cross-dressing.” Laws on public morality can also be used to arrest and detain those on the basis of their gender identity. Working on these issues is sensitive and requires deep trust with those in the LGBTQI+ community due to government surveillance and impunity. The United States had long recognized the intersection of these issues with our national security goals, including advancing global health security, reducing migration, bolstering democratic values, and countering violent extremism.

MLK: What was your background going into your roles at DRL?

TS: I consider myself pretty lucky, because I was studying political science, international studies, and women’s studies as my undergraduate background, and all of my roles with the government have sat at the nexus of those fields. At the time that I applied for my internship, placement within the Department was very happenchance. You picked your top two bureaus and hoped for the best. Mine were S/GWI and DRL. When I got a call to join DRL’s Offices of Global Programs, I couldn’t find much information about their work — which I later learned was somewhat intentional. They explained that they managed federal grants to non-governmental organizations around the world and appreciated both my academic background and that I had some grant experience from a high school philanthropy group. That was how I initially got my foot in the door. It was then during my internship that I first learned about the women, peace, and security agenda, and really adopted it as the issue that I wanted to focus my career on.

I went back to school to finish my bachelor’s degree and did more research on that subject during my senior year. Then I came back to DRL and worked my way up. I started very junior in terms of a Program Specialist position that was largely an administrative role, doing all the back-end grants management support functions. But I was also going to briefings, meetings with partners, and observing what was being said and how decisions were being made. I was promoted to a Program Officer position and that’s when I started managing the global gender programming portfolio for DRL. And eventually, after more school and working in S/GWI, I made my way over to the DRL policy side of things a few years later.

AG: I went to the University of Michigan for both my bachelor’s degree and my master’s of public policy. I originally focused on refugee resettlement and refugee policy work. I served as a graduate fellow at Human Rights First, working as a Refugee Protection Fellow. I had worked at a variety of refugee resettlement organizations in Michigan and done a tour of a headquarters here in Washington, DC. When I finished my master’s degree, it was 2018 and the [first] Trump administration had decimated our refugee resettlement programming, so when I was looking for a job, there weren’t many policy jobs within the refugee field.

I ended up taking a position in the broader human rights realm at an organization called American Jewish World Service (AJWS). It’s not well-known by the American public, but it’s an incredible organization. They are an advocacy and grant-making organization for local grassroots human rights defenders in about eighteen countries around the globe. They have portfolios focused on land, water, climate justice, and indigenous rights, as well as civil and political rights, sexual health and rights, and humanitarian and disaster response. I was there for about three years. I worked largely as their sexual health and rights policy advisor seeking to advance sexual and reproductive health and rights in U.S. foreign policy. What is notable is that AJWS is where I started to get my background and experience in LGBTQI-specific work, as that organization is one of the largest funders of LGBTQI+ groups. They fund some of the most amazing organizations you’ve ever heard of in some of my favorite countries. And as part of my role, I was very much focus on working with the U.S. government, particularly [on Capitol] Hill.

I was eventually brought over to Human Rights Campaign (HRC), where I was the Senior International Policy Advocate. I led HRC’s engagement with the National Security Council, the Hill, the State Department, the Treasury Department — any of the agencies that focused on foreign affairs and their intersection with the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons. I was there for about three years and was promoted to Associate Director of Global Advocacy. I engaged a lot with USAID and the State Department in that role. Over the course of her tenure, State Department Special Envoy [Jessica] Stern worked diligently to get a full-time career staffer dedicated to the LGBTQI+ portfolio, and when that position became available, I threw my name in the ring to go learn the other side of the work.

I had long been a civil society person. I had engaged with the U.S. government and had been the person pressing the United States to live up to its values. I thought it would be really important, as someone who had experience working with human rights defenders, to go to the government side and see what the U.S. government can do from within to support the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons. What can we be doing better? What is and is not acceptable? And who can kind of be the connection between civil society and the U.S. government? I accepted the job in February of 2024. Notoriously, security clearances take a long time, especially if you’ve worked with a lot of foreign nationals in your career, in your professional life, so my first day wasn’t until November 18, 2024, at which point we already knew the outcomes of the election.

MLK: In your view, what were the main accomplishments while you were at DRL?

TS: I think the work that we were doing on TFGBV, collectively, was one of the most important achievements that we were in the process of making. It was one of those issues I had started asking questions about back in 2017 or 2018. I remember putting forward a proposal to work on TFGBV-related activities in Southeast Asia and being told it was not a priority at the time. And I just thought: It is, and it’s going to be. By the time I was departing to pursue my master’s degree, under the Biden-Harris administration, it was THE issue. Everyone was seized with needing to work on this and the threat it posed to democracy.

To see all those efforts finally come to fruition was great. SHE WINS and SHE PERSISTS were the initial flagship Summit for Democracy initiatives that S/GWI and DRL, respectively, designed. I was more focused on the SHE PERSISTS project, which aimed to bolster women’s political participation and good governance globally by, amongst other things, addressing politically-motivated TFGBV against women leaders. Seeing that launched by Vice President [Kamala] Harris was incredible. The Global Partnership [for Action on Gender-Based Online Harassment and Abuse] was also only a brainchild when I was leaving the Department. By the time I came back just over a year later, the Global Partnership had not only been launched but was expanding and making significant investments in TFGBV-related issues and research.

It was a cool progression to witness and contribute to. We were able to achieve so much on TFGBV in such a short amount of time. S/GWI was in the process of launching a first-of-its-kind TFGBV emergency response mechanism dedicated to supporting women in public leadership roles when the administration changed. All of its TFGBV programs that I had built over the prior two years were terminated. Fortunately, DRL managed to keep several of its TFGBV-related initiatives with slight modifications — though SHE PERSISTS was not one of them.

I’m also really proud of doubling our gender equality foreign assistance attributions to $2.6 billion under the Biden administration. Getting to that number was very difficult but also incredibly rewarding. For me, it was less about the amount at the end of the day, but the process of getting to it. We did a lot of educational sessions internally about: How do you do gender integration, or mainstreaming, correctly? Teaching people: What does that mean? What does it look like? How do we convince our higher-ups that might not be supportive of this work that it is a goal worth pursuing? It was a very close collaboration between the State Department and USAID in terms of how we were going to reach that goal, and it involved a lot of interaction with and support from colleagues across bureaus.

The connections built during that process and seeing people realize that doing this work wasn’t as hard or as complicated as it initially seemed — you just had to be more strategic and intentional in your design — was one of the highlights of my career. It was not without its challenges and limitations but the kind of growth we saw and the number of gender equality champions we empowered throughout the process were amazing. I really feel like the institutional support and capacity we built — including with some folks that are still trying to navigate this work much more quietly and subtly within the Department — was perhaps the bigger, more sustainable, and more impactful achievement than actually meeting the $2.6 billion goal. And I say that because many of the programs attributed to meeting this goal were either canceled or never came to fruition once the administration changed.

AG: I think having Jessica [Stern] as a Special Envoy was a huge win for the LGBTQI+ community itself. I don’t know that Jessica can say this about herself, but I will say it for her. The only person who’d previously had that role was Ambassador Randy Berry, and he was an incredible first Special Envoy. He was a career foreign service officer, an ambassador, and he had to sell that role to the building — why we need a standalone role, and why it matters that we have someone who thinks about LGBTQI+ rights day in and day out.

That was an important moment, because the State Department had been working on responding to violence, stigma, and criminalization for decades. [All the way back to the George H.W.] Bush administration, there are references to LGBTQI+ human rights violations in the human rights reports, dating back to the late 1980s. But this was the first time that [the special envoy] was created into a role that centralized expertise and coordinated across the Department. The government can be very siloed in its work, and so this person was really meant to break down those boundaries and barriers and provide crucial technical support on engagement.

When Jessica came in, it was exciting to have someone who came from civil society, who had relationships with human rights defenders, and who wasn’t necessarily a government person. She was the person who’d been on the other side, calling on the U.S. government to do more to respond to human rights violations against LGBTQI+ persons. I think that was a huge win in general for the broader advocacy work that the LGBTQI+ community has done. It was [also] huge that it was a woman. We’ve only ever had two confirmed openly lesbian ambassadors. One of those is from this administration, Tammy Bruce, who’s the deputy ambassador to the UN (United Nations) and she unfortunately has advanced anti-trans rhetoric. There have been 25 to 30 [gay men], largely white men. Having a queer woman be the head of U.S. foreign policy on the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons was a [special] moment.

Another thing for you to be aware of is that there had been bipartisan support for programs that supported the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons for years. I say this as someone whose life was dedicated to increasing that pot of money because, unfortunately, in foreign assistance, and particularly in countries of criminalization, if you’re not directly funding LGBTQI+ persons and LGBTQI+ groups, our foreign assistance dollars aren’t reaching them. PEPFAR [the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief] had success because it directly funded key population groups, like LGBTQI+ groups, that offered trusted, safe, welcoming, affirming centers for individuals, even in criminalized countries, to come and have HIV treatment and prevention programming.

Expanding the amount of money beyond global health was a huge win. I would [credit] the State Department and USAID for coming up with programs that addressed more than global health concerns, which is an entry point for a lot of people in criminalized settings. That’s how Botswana decriminalized. It was through the entry point of global health and PEPFAR. But also, we need everything else, right? We need legal monitoring, human rights monitoring. You need community engagement. You need economic livelihood support programming, education programming, housing programming — all of the services that LGBTQI+ people sometimes aren’t able to get from their governments due to criminalization or discrimination, or the bigger organizations that do programming that don’t necessarily have the right relationships or trust with LGBTQI+ people to get them into those programs.

Even in the [first] Trump administration, the funding pot grew with civil society support. When civil society organizations began to advocate for more funding, the State Department and USAID only had budgets of about $5 to 7 million annually, and by fiscal year 2023, that number had grown to $50 million annually. The Global Equality Fund was a public-private partnership that was staffed by the U.S. Department of State. It sat in DRL’s global programs office that no longer exists. All of the career staff lost their jobs during the RIF [reduction in force]. That office was one of the most safe and secure funding methods to get money to groups in criminalized settings to counter criminalization and to do some broader democracy work, to ensure that LGBTQI+ people were included in their society and in their communities.

That funding alone really helped support groups that were leading the charge to be full, active members of their society. One of the incredible groups I’ve had the privilege of working with is the National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission in Kenya, an organization which has brought many cases forward to the Kenyan Supreme Court. They weren’t able to legally register as an organization with the name Gay and Lesbian in their title because of criminalization statutes forbidding same-sex conduct. They took that to the Supreme Court and they won. They are legally registered as an organization called the National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission now, and their organization was supported with State Department funding in the past.

Advocates in Botswana were able to [engage in] efforts with the support of broader U.S. funding that helped them reach their community, do a public information campaign, and engage in legal monitoring. That was what the heart of our democracy and human rights programming was. It was so that all people had the ability to realize and exert their human rights, whether that was freedom of expression, association, or assembly, or freedom from violence. Those were the programs that civil society worked hand-in-hand on and told the State Department that we wanted more money. The State Department said: Well, we don’t control the money. Go talk to Congress. And civil society went and advocated with Congress until they provided increased funding for these lifesaving programs within DRL and USAID. And that money protected the lives of LGBTQI+ people around the world.

MLK: What happened in January 2025?

TS: In the early days of the [second Trump] administration, it felt like I was dodging a bullet every day. I can’t remember the order that they came out in now but, with every new executive order or OMB [Office of Management and Budget] memo, I found myself wondering which one would end my career. I was considered a probationary employee because I was still within my first year of civil service, so there were those executive orders. There was another one within the first couple of weeks that essentially said: If you have gender in your title, or if you changed your title in an effort to hide this, you had to disclose that to DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency). Then there was the DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) executive order, and it was very unclear how they were defining DEI — which of course was intentional.

Luckily, my leadership agreed all the way up the chain that DEI is about workplace policies, and that was not what I did. I worked on global and multilateral foreign policy primarily related to women and girls. My title and scope change caused a lot of nerves because we weren’t sure what was allowed or not at the time, but we were given a list of acceptable terms that we could use. Rather than working on gender equality, everything was amended to focus on women and girls.

While I’m very grateful to my leadership for all they did to protect my role and the work, it was also painful to see my role change in the ways that it did. We had to make sure gender did not appear anywhere in my scope of work. References were changed to sex equality, sex-based violence, which I did not support or agree with. I had put forward recommendations on how to reframe the language to focus on equality between men and women and violence against women and girls. Instead, we went to the opposite extreme to ensure consistency with the administration’s stated priorities and preferred terminology.

The probationary issue hung over our heads for a while. I finally got notification that it was settled around the end of February, beginning of March. But I was on a list of less than 30 people who went forward to Secretary [Marco] Rubio’s desk for review of our [job] descriptions, which had been summarized in one sentence of what we did — fewer characters than a tweet. Three of us were on it from my office. It was extremely nerve-wracking, but all three of us made it, even the LGBTQI+ advisor. She stayed with me until the very last day.

We both took the DRP [deferred resignation program] after it was confirmed that our office — the Office of Multilateral and Global Affairs — was being eliminated as part of the Department’s reorganization. It was very unclear if and what severance probationary employees would get in the event of an RIF, and that just wasn’t a financial risk that I could personally take. So even though it was agony to leave our colleagues and the work behind, especially knowing it was only a matter of time before they would be forced out, I made my choice. My last day was June 11, and the big RIF came exactly one month later on July 11.

This is not directly related to my job, but I think it is important to remind people that, while civil servants were being attacked, villainized, and forced out by the administration, we were also just normal people trying to live our lives and support our country as best we could. For example, amidst all of this, I was buying my first house and getting married — big, once-in-a-lifetime events that should have been very joyous occasions. And we did our best to hold onto that joy, especially as a form of resistance. But I would be lying if I said it didn’t cast a dark cloud over some of these moments.

Getting back to what we achieved in the last few months [under the second Trump administration], the wins were far less flashy and public but they mattered in a different way. Sometimes it was quite literally down to blocking a tweet that was harmful, false or inaccurate, or raised serious legal concerns. There were a lot of problematic tweets and statements being put forward, and we were relatively successful in stopping some — or at least making them less terrible — for a little while.

Many originated with political appointees, including a senior advisor in DRL who, mind you, is quite young and had very limited foreign policy experience prior to starting the job. He wrote what I see as an extremely problematic piece on civilizational allies in Europe that came out last February [2025] and is very much behind the bureau’s move towards natural rights. That really set the tone for where we were headed as a bureau early on.

We were also told to take the word “gender” out of all UN resolutions and statements, including the political statement for the [2025] Commission on the Status of Women. There were something like 54 references to gender that [the Trump administration] wanted removed. We did our best to put forward alternative language that was the least harmful [with regard to] how it was going to be defined and who would be most affected. But there were so many terms that we just could not use and had to negotiate out. We got some of them out, and we got other countries to agree to these changes. For the administration it was a win but, for many of us, it felt like a huge loss. Advising on that negotiation process was probably some of the most challenging work I did in the last six months of my job — seeing efforts that, months before, we were celebrating and actively pushing for just being torn down and participating in that process. It was really, really hard — both personally and professionally.

Under the first Trump administration, of course, there were similar issues but, in my programmatic space, I was able to do a lot of good work because we had the Women, Peace, and Security Act and we had Ivanka [Trump] championing women’s economic empowerment. I know it was harder in some of the multilateral negotiations and in the policy space generally, and I know S/GWI couldn’t really use the word “gender.” But we found our way in DRL and even mandated a gender analysis requirement for all our programs because it was in the WPS Act that President Trump, himself, signed. This time, there was no sense behind some of the words that we were having to remove, like “inclusive,” or the decisions being made. For me, that was such a contrast and hurdle, because we were able to work around and explain things in the first administration. In this one, there was none of that. It was just: Take it out. Having your words and previously agreed-upon policy language quite literally taken from you was very difficult. How do you communicate with people and do you do diplomacy at that point, when we are not able to speak the same policy language as other countries and civil society activists?

I think one of the other things that felt very different under the second Trump administration is the culture of fear and distrust across bureaus and offices. It had a really negative impact on coordination internally at a moment when we desperately needed it. Coming into the change of administration, those of us working in the gender and democracy space were sounding the alarm bells that this time would be far worse than the previous [Trump] administration. We recognized how strong anti-rights and anti-gender movements had become, and that gender is a frequent and strategic target of authoritarian leaders to undermine democracy. And while I think there was a general consensus that we wouldn’t be able to use the “G-word” [gender] or work on transgender issues, people still felt relatively sure that we would have space to work on women and girls by just reverting back to prior framing of these issues.

So instead of working together to navigate the potentially dangerous implications of losing our ability to talk about gender issues — particularly for LGBTQI+ people — we saw a lot of offices distance themselves from DRL and even from my specific portfolio in an effort to protect their space. And I think that division helped contribute, in its own way, to the demise of both our gender equality and broader human rights and democracy work. Perhaps if we had better coordination and came together more strategically, maybe we could have planned and anticipated things differently. Either way, I hope we learn from that moving forward.

AG: It’s hard because I feel like no amount of time will ever be enough to fully process what happened in 2025. I’m sure you hear this from so many federal employees and former federal employees. The landscape just shifted so dramatically. I think we’d all been preparing for what was to come. We were pulling out the documents that were used under the former Trump administration. We were creating what we understood to be our boundaries of work and that we had previously engaged on. We had a pretty good sense of what that could be, based on where the Trump administration had previously engaged. We were looking at previous statements that had been made.

For example, the Trump administration issued the first-ever Global Magnitsky sanction for LGBTQI-related human rights violations in Chechnya. Global Magnitsky is a public law in the United States which applied financial and visa restrictions for gross violations of human rights. It’s run by [the Department of the] Treasury in consultation with the Department of State. DRL plays a really big role in that work. Under Trump 1, they had moved forward with a designation of Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader who was imprisoning gay men. They did eventually sanction [him]. Ambassador Nikki Haley talked about the horrifying situation at a UN Security Council meeting. There was also a claimed decriminalization agenda, set by Ambassador Ric Grenell, a gay Trump appointee, and President Trump even made statements opposing criminalization of consensual, same-sex conduct at the UN General Assembly.

That’s the type of work we were looking to return to. Responding to criminalization of consensual same-sex sex and violence was our true north stat and something we felt everyone could agree to, even under the new Trump administration. And when you’re looking at a map where more than sixty countries continue to have criminalization statutes, and more countries are introducing harsher criminalization statutes, that’s more than enough for one full-time person to cover.

As an example, we were thinking about priority countries like Uganda that had passed the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023. That was a huge concern for us given the significantly higher levels of violence we were seeing in the country following the passage of the bill. There were also new countries passing criminalization statutes that had never had them in statute before, like Iraq, where we were monitoring violence and implementation of the law. And then, of course, DRL was watching Russian-style propaganda laws proliferate across the globe. These laws seek to censor public information and content related to sexual orientation and gender identity, claiming that it runs against public morality or national security.

And then we received our first political appointee, Sam Samson, who was a senior advisor in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. He had little to no background in foreign policy, having recently graduated from university. When we looked him up, all we really found online were some of the blogs he had written. Few, if any, were focused on foreign policy. And for myself, I noticed that he frequently wrote on anti-trans topic, particularly pertaining to Lia Thomas, who is a transgender swimmer. It was clear from this that it would be very hard to engage on issues related to the human rights of transgender persons.

Then so many executive orders came out that first week. The anti-trans executive order and anti-DEI executive order came out on day one. I didn’t know or understand what those would mean in practice. Then came the firings. They were starting to get rid of anyone who worked on DEI, and I didn’t know if my position would be lumped into that category or if I would be cut under the anti-trans executive order. But it was a big concern, because we understood that they were reviewing job descriptions and my job used some of the key terms they were looking for, like “gender identity,” “transgender,” “gender,” and “inclusive.” These were words that the Trump administration was now trying to delete, despite the fact that they were long-agreed to and on.

I think that first week federal employees were wondering: Are we all going to get expunged from the building? Our Bureau leadership know the importance of our roles, and they wanted to make sure we were still able to do the long-standing work that existed, so they worked to address the new political reality. Like the Gender Equality Advisor, my title and scope had to change. I went from being the Senior Advisor for the Human Rights of LGBTQI+ Persons to the Senior Advisor for Persons Targeted on the Basis of Sexual Orientation.

I struggled with this new title, recognizing that it erased gender identity and sex characteristics from not only the scope of my work, but even more so, it was a clear indicator of the direction the administration was taking writ large to the lives and humanity of transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people. Looking back, I know we were trying to save some of the work in the LGBTQI+ portfolio, but the cost was high. It was an impossible situation, where I am erasing, within my title, an entire group of people, and thus am complicit in the Trump administration’s anti-rights agenda.

The change to my title and shift in the Trump administration’s positioning on transgender issues impacted the work that we were able to do to protect the lives and dignity of all because if you’re looking at violence globally against the LGBTQI+ community, trans people are targeted at some of the highest rates. I’ll never forget that, early in 2025, there was a horrific murder in Colombia of a trans woman. People videotaped her murder and the case had national attention in the country. But I couldn’t even flag this event for our front office, because I wouldn’t be able to gender her correctly or acknowledge the fact that she was targeted because of her gender identity. Her gender identity was a key reason why she was murdered. That’s often how human rights violations or abuses occur: perpetrators of human rights abuses target a specific identity or group.

To erase gender identity, or sex characteristics in the case of intersex people, manes that you miss many reasons why an individual or a law specifically targets someone. We used to write these daily activity reports for our front office on key human rights violations that we were tracking or had learned about from a civil society organization. The Colombia case was one where we didn’t even flag it, because we’d have to misgender the individual. She deserved dignity in death. She deserved dignity in life, too.

My job also became harder because so much of the work at headquarters relies on information being passed to you from embassies. Because of the language that was coming out, including from Secretary Rubio, human rights officers didn’t know what they could say. There was no information other than so-called “woke ideology” is gone. People were scared to send updates. We used to compile cables from embassies that had updates on LGBTQI-specific information. They would be meeting with LGBTQI-specific groups. We would pull all these cables in a daily roundup, and send it out to folks who were points across the State Department on this work. That reporting just cratered after the [second] Trump administration came into power. People didn’t know what they could and could not say.

In DRL, I was desperately trying to find what the boundaries were myself. I don’t like using LGB, because there’s an LGB Alliance. Do you know the LGB Alliance? They’re not pro-lesbian, gay, and bisexual. They exist to be anti-trans. I had a huge aversion to using LGB. I was desperately trying to get people to not say LGB, encouraging everyone in our bureau and beyond to use “persons targeted on the basis of sexual orientation.” We were trying to find language, but embassies were not reporting as much. If I found some reporting in a cable, I emailed the human rights officer to say: Thank you for providing this update. Please know I’m reading these. Many were grateful to learn that I still had a job and was reading their reporting.

On top of that, the U.S. paused and then canceled U.S. foreign assistance programs. Now you’re dealing with an emergency crisis, where human rights organizations that used to have a good relationship with the United States are now laying off all of their staff and are unable to run the human rights monitoring programs they had been doing previously. And U.S. staff working on human rights are in no position to ask anything of any human rights organization, at a point where we cut off all of their funding. You can’t ask people questions because you don’t want to put more work on their plate. They’re in survival mode, just trying to keep their staff employed and to keep their community having services in a limited manner.

You’re dealing with both of these things, and the U.S. is starting to roll out new terrible policies and you’re dealing with how to message about them. Civil society organizations don’t know what they can and can’t send you. They’re worried about safety and security, because the State Department released the names and information of everyone who had been receiving funding from the U.S. government, including people in authoritarian countries that had significant safety and security concerns. [Why?] Rife incompetence. Cruelty was the point. There’s this refrain that we shouldn’t be funding anything that countries don’t agree with. But human rights violations occur because their governments are targeting them. I believe that we were experiencing the rife incompetence of people who had no business serving the American people in our U.S. foreign policy infrastructure. The document that was released put people’s lives at risk. Someone should have been fired for that, and they weren’t.

A common thing you’ll hear from folks who were there at the beginning is that we lost contact with so many civil society people. I heard from human rights officers: We don’t know that we can meet with LGBTQI+ groups anymore. We don’t know if we can meet with women’s groups anymore. That’s really concerning because, regardless of whether or not an organization supports every single policy of the United States government, the United States government has always been about freedom of expression and having tough conversations and engaging with all groups to understand the full scope of the problem. U.S. embassies always met with the opposition. You can’t analyze a situation without not talking to as many stakeholders as possible.

We also lost trust-building that takes years and years to build. That’s a horrific loss. If you think about LGBTQI+ groups, they’re already struggling with the fact that it’s sometimes not safe for them to go to the U.S. Embassy. Many human rights defenders used to have human rights officers come meet them at a safe third location, because their governments were trailing them. It wasn’t safe for them to be seen going to the U.S. Embassy. Or, the U.S. Embassy maybe was the safest place for them to hold a meeting that wouldn’t be raided by police. Now we’ve lost all of those safe meeting locations for LGBTQI+ groups.

In my portfolio, you had DOGE flag these small, public diplomacy grants and use them as examples of so-called “waste, fraud, and abuse.” They would post pictures of these organizations online. That is not safe for any LGBTQI+ organization. I was raising deep concerns about this within my bureau, hoping that we could tamper down the temperature, but I was repeatedly told that this wouldn’t be possible despite the safety and security threats.

Those first few weeks, in particular, were really hard, because as soon as you thought you were starting to get your feet under you, something else would happen. In DRL, our priority became educating our front office on the issues that we worked on. Unfortunately, we had a Ugandan human rights defender in town and no politicals were able to join that meeting at the time. I wish that they had, because they would have heard about the human rights abuses that were targeting LGBTQI people because of the Anti-Homosexuality Act. They would have understood why DRL stood up for people whose governments rejected them.

We were sending up information about Tunisia that has had, over the last year, a horrific crackdown on LGBTQI+ persons. The government had conducted a wave of arrests and we confirmed the use of forced anal exams at the end of 2024. That was a huge concern, and the government of Tunisia had previously said that they would stop performing forced anal examinations. These are things that the United States government had worked on for years and had been tracking for decades. It was not a Biden-era issue. Violence against any person was always something that the U.S. Department of State agreed was unacceptable. The fact that we even felt like we had to be in education mode to get people to agree to that basic fact was honestly exhausting.

I think what’s really hard is that I disagreed with a lot of Trump appointees from Trump 1 on policy grounds. But a lot of them had experience working in government before and serving the American people. You just don’t have that same cadre of folks this go-around. You had new people who were approved by Project 2025 who had no concern for long-standing American values, or who had a very distorted understanding of what the new American values were. My old bureau, which is a shell of itself, is a true sign of that, because — if you’re the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor — why are you using the term “natural rights” all the time?

We started seeing [the term natural rights] pop up in DRL back in February or March of 2025 to say: Some people have been afforded special rights. As someone who’s been working on closing civic space in authoritarian regimes, they always say that LGBTQI+ people are claiming special rights, when in fact we are claiming the very same rights that aren’t afforded to us because of our sexual orientation or gender identity. LGBTQI+ persons have the full recognition of human rights afforded to them by virtue of all of the other rights that people have, like freedom of expression, freedom of association, assembly, speech, among others. Saying that human rights have been captured by the woke mobs to create new special rights is exactly the type of language that China and Russia want you to fall into, because it’s the same language they use to crack down on democratic dissent. It’s basically saying: There are some people who have rights and some people who don’t.

I think anything that you see coming out of the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor [now] has only focused on a very small subset of issues that seems to be around freedom of expression for certain types of people in Europe. People who espouse very similar Christian values to individuals within the Trump administration. Those people who also have conservative voices who feel they are being targeted by hate speech laws. This sentiment is echoed in the State Department Substack in an article that Sam Samson wrote regarding the need for so-called “civilizational allies.”

Around the same time that the article came out, we learned that the human rights reports were going to be stripped. Over the last few decades, there has been an established section [in the State Department human rights reports] for LGBTQI human rights violations — under Obama, Trump 1, and Biden. Under Trump 1, the section focused on violence and criminalization targeting sexual orientation and gender identity. Special Envoy Stern [under the Biden administration] built out that section to be very robust, because the State Department human rights reports were the strongest compendium of information about the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons globally. We knew that the reports would likely need to be changed based on executive orders coming out of the Trump administration, but what we didn’t expect was that whole sections would be erased. We were instructed to delete sections related to any specific subpopulation. The women’s section was gone, children were gone, disabilities were gone, racial and ethnic minorities were erased, and LGBTQI+ persons were erased, from the Human Rights Reports in 2024.

To be clear, those reports had already been written and finalized for the most part under the Biden administration. The Trump administration went through all the reports and edited them, wasting taxpayer dollars. The Special Envoy’s Office reviewed every single human rights report for every single country. When they were finally released, not only did they erase groups of people, but political appointees had also claimed that there were no significant human rights concerns in El Salvador — and prison conditions in El Salvador have long been a primary focus of the State Department DRL reports. Hungary’s report, if you read it, is very political now to adhere to the Trump administration’s position on the [Viktor] Orban regime.

Now the State Department is working on the 2025 reports. Reporting has shown that they’ve sent out a cable instruction on those reports, and we are expecting them to be forward leaning on anti-trans rhetoric, reporting on the so-called “chemical and surgical mutilation of children.” Our understanding is that the instructions also specifically said that the State Department does not take information from organizations that promote gender ideology and DEI to be credible. As a result, you’re going to have groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, Sex Matters, and the LGB Alliance — all known hate groups — putting forward anti-trans information that will be included in the 2025 Human Rights Reports.

That’s so damaging, because the human rights reports are used by human rights defenders in their country to say: The U.S. government saw all of these violations and we demand recognition of our human rights. Immigration and asylum organizations use the human rights reports for immigration and asylum claims in the United States. Now you’re erasing that. That creates a gap in information for anyone who comes from a repressive country like Egypt, which has long had a damaging record on LGBTQI+ issues. There’s now no U.S. government-branded human rights report that acknowledges that reality for LGBTQI+ Egyptians in the year 2025. DRL used to do that, and now the reports are going to be more politicized. They’re much shorter. They don’t have as many examples.

There are also no regional offices anymore in DRL. They have either been put in an office called the Office of Natural Rights or the Office of Reporting and Sanctions. There’s not as many staff, but they have to still do the human rights reports because they are required by law. They got rid of a lot of experts on human rights within specific countries, so you no longer have someone who spent seven years working on Burundi, reviewing the Burundi Human Rights Report; someone who had relationships with Burundi civil society organizations. You’re really having to rely on your human rights officer at post, which is very important, but they also weren’t receiving a lot of information about what they could and could not do, and who they could and could not meet with over the last year. It’s just a compounding challenge for the capacity of the United States to be supporting democracy, human rights, and labor globally.

While all of these changes were happening, I continued to work at the Department of State, even if it was difficult to fight for human rights. I was not fired in the first or second rounds in January and February [2025] of folks who were fired for DEI. However, I was a probationary period employee and need to work there for a year in order to finish my probationary period. There were also the executive orders on probationary period employees that made me very anxious. Both Tambria [Schroeder] and I were on our probationary periods at the time, so the gender advisor and the LGBTQI+ human rights advisor. Ultimately, the State Department did not fire any probationary period employees just on the basis of being probationary period. They fired those folks who had performance review issues, but it was a close call.

In April [2025], the State Department released information that they would be reorganizing the Department. Secretary Rubio said some very unkind things about DRL, claiming we were woke bureaucrats promoting woke ideology. I realized in that moment that DRL was in trouble. We started hearing rumblings in my office that our entire office was going to lose our jobs. There was an Excel sheet that was going around that everyone was super hush-hush about. Some people had seen it, but other people hadn’t, where every single office at the State Department was labeled in green, yellow, or red. Red was the offices that were definitely going to close, and our office was labeled red. So we kind of heard in April that things were not looking good for our office.

At the same time that they announced the reorganization, they also sent out a message about the deferred resignation program. A pathetically low number of people took the first deferred resignation program. The second round, they used a scare tactic to force people into taking the DRP by letting many of us know across the building that we were going to lose our jobs imminently. I was sitting in a position where I was a probationary period employee, in an office that was likely to be closed, on a portfolio that was very, very difficult, if not almost impossible, to work on under this administration, including morally. As someone who deeply believes in the existence of trans, non-binary, and intersex people, how long could I do that job while the anti-trans EO (executive order) was in place? It is so ridiculous because I remember someone came to my desk and asked: Can you remind me why intersex people don’t exist anymore? Those were the types of questions I was getting in my role. It doesn’t make sense, right?

I had to make a really hard decision, particularly as I was a probationary period employee. Based on my joining date, I might be summarily terminated without any notice, or if I was RIF’d, I wouldn’t receive any severance or health care. I cried for weeks, but I ended up taking the deferred resignation program in June. The agreement was that you would go on immediate administrative leave as soon as it’s approved. You would be paid through the end of September. You agreed that you are resigning, and you waived all of your rights to legal action in the case of a reduction in force.

Given the landscape and my own finances, I had to make the really difficult decision to sign the DRP. I felt like I was quitting, which was hard. I felt like I was failing all of the people that I came to the State Department to serve. That was just something that many of us had to grapple with, because we joined to serve the American people. We joined to promote the very basic American values of equality under the law — even if not fully in practice, right? The aspiration that is something we are all working toward as a global community. The faith in democratic values and principles, and that everyone has a role to play in their society.

It was a hard decision. My last day at the State Department was mid-June. The morale was so low. Across the department, people had stopped coming to work because they were all informed that their offices were closing. Why come in to do your job if you’re going to lose it? There’s no saving you. It’s all political decision-making. It’s also a waste of U.S. tax dollars.

My office did receive their RIF after the courts stepped in and said that the administration could move forward with RIFs while it worked its way through the courts. My entire office, including our director, who had worked in the State Department for nearly 35 years, lost their jobs. Seventy percent of DRL lost their jobs as well. It was utter decimation. I mean, the day RIF notices went out, I wasn’t even at the State Department, and I cried all day, because you’re getting text messages from your friends saying: I just got my RIF. I just got my notice. That’s the end of my career. It was a really hard day.

MLK: What have you been doing since then?

TS: The summer was extremely hard, but by September, I was finally coming back to life a little bit. I started consulting with a local nonprofit in Northern Virginia, working on domestic violence issues. I’m primarily responsible for administration, operations, and financial management rather than direct client services. Nonetheless, it has been fulfilling to contribute to a mission that I believe in deeply and to support an organization that has been a staple for survivors in my local community for over four decades.

I’m also now starting a short-term contract as a Visiting Professor of the Practice at Texas A&M [University] for the semester. I’ll be teaching two undergraduate and graduate classes on women, peace, and security-related subjects. As you probably know, Texas A&M is currently grappling with a lot of similar challenges to those I faced in the Trump administration around gender and so-called “gender ideology.” That will certainly be interesting to navigate while also staying true to core tenets of our field but, oddly enough, I feel slightly more prepared knowing I found my way through similar dynamics and sensitivities in recent months.

After that, I don’t know what I will be doing yet. [Life in academia] is always something that I’ve considered so I’m excited to see how I like it. Otherwise, I’ll find my way into something new and hopefully manage to stay connected with a broad network of folks dedicated to keeping the momentum going around various gender, democracy, and WPS issues.

AG: I cried most of June. I sat on my couch crying and panicking about what was going to happen, and the broader state of the world and the broader state of human rights. I took some time to travel. I went back to Ohio. My mom and I did a mother-daughter trip, because she realized I really needed to drink wine. I did a couple of national park trips. I did a road trip across the U.S. through the Dakotas to do national parks. I went to Washington State with some friends. I went to Morocco. I needed time to decompress and just process [what had happened].

I am very lucky in the fact that, as I had just left civil society, I still had strong relationships in civil society. I landed back at the Council for Global Equality, which is a coalition of more than 45 U.S.-based human rights organizations that work at the intersection of U.S. foreign policy and the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons. I started there October 1 as their policy director, so I am helping spearhead their efforts advocating for the protection of LGBTQI+ persons in U.S. foreign policy and translating what is happening in the U.S. government to a variety of stakeholders. I am connecting human rights advocates to members of Congress to raise concerns now that we don’t have a State Department that does so in the same way. I work with international organizations, multilateral organizations, to help them understand U.S. policy.

Importantly, I still engage with the State Department. I joke that it was probably easier for them when I worked inside the State Department than outside the State Department. I don’t have to abide by their talking points, and I have very strong feelings on the trajectory they are setting. So my job is now to try to hold the U.S. government accountable for their foreign policy decisions that target LGBTQI+ persons. I have great love and respect for so many career civil service and foreign service officers. I am also very lucky that I get to work at an organization where I can do this work without moral objections. Every time I talk to someone from the State Department, it’s always important to remember that they had probably been working on a different portfolio prior to the reorganization. They’re all doing the best that they can in impossible situations. But we still need to put pressure on them, and on the politicals, because this is our government. We have a voice in it. I am going to firmly exercise my freedom of speech every single day because I am not constrained by being a federal employee.

MLK: What advice would you give to those of us who want to advance gender equality in the current context?

TS: There’s a lot that we can and should be doing. I think how we do it is maybe where it gets a little trickier. One of the things that is definitely challenging right now — but for me is so important — is that we have to keep gender in the conversation. We need to find ways to come together and protect this space as fiercely as the opposition is fighting against it. Beyond a facet of identity, it’s critical that we continue talking about gender in terms of power, structures, norms, behaviors, etc. It is shaping our world in ways that cannot be reduced to a matter of sex. We have to fight to keep the words that reflect our reality.

The other one, and this is where I think we have a lot of work to do, is the silos. Perhaps that’s a very bureaucratic way of framing it, but we must find a way to talk across sectors and communities and come together to move this work forward. There are so many new initiatives popping up from former government employees that are all worthy causes, but I’ve noticed that we are replicating many of the bubbles we found ourselves in within the government. For example, you’ve got people working on democracy and human rights, but the gender equality folks are not being included in those groups. And then you’ve got gender equality groups and sure, they sometimes have a democracy person in the room because former gender and democracy advisors are participating; however, we are being invited because of our expertise in gender, not democracy issues. We cannot have democracy without an honest conversation about gender equality or vice versa, so we need to find ways to better integrate our issue sets and build from there.

Alongside this, we also need to bridge generational divides. We are seeing several former senior officials leading and shaping conversations about what the future of our foreign policy should look like, what we need to do to fix what’s been broken — and rightfully so to some degree. But a lot of us younger or early/mid-career professionals are not being invited to those spaces, and it can be very hard to break into them on your own. There’s a collective yearning amongst many of us to just be included in these conversations and efforts, and to have the opportunity to also contribute to shaping the future we want to see — which may look quite different from how older, more senior professionals are envisioning it. We will find and make our own paths in the meantime, but we also need to be meaningfully brought into spaces by those who currently have access and power.

Finally, we must work more consistently and strategically across social movements. People advocating for women’s rights need to be advocating for the rights and safety of LGBTQI+ people, people with disabilities, people of color, migrants, etc. Likewise, people in these movements also need to be advocating for women’s rights and gender equality. We cannot turn against one particular group in an effort to protect another — it will not work. We also need to get men and boys more actively involved in efforts to promote gender equality and understand how inequality affects them, too.

We are all multi-dimensional people, and our experiences of privilege and oppression are linked across these different axes of identity. We need to start organizing ourselves accordingly. There are so many concerted efforts to divide us right now. We need to counter them with radical inclusion. While recognizing and respecting our unique differences and life experiences, we need to start appreciating how much more we share in common with one another and use that to drive us forward.

AG: One thing I like to remind folks who have voting privileges and voting rights is that every single member of Congress needs to be hearing from their constituents non-stop. The decimation of our human rights infrastructure at the Department of State and USAID is one of the biggest losses for America, globally. I don’t think people realize that soft power is even more important than hard power. Relationships matter. Human rights defenders are some of the most incredible, tenacious people, doing some of the hardest work. Supporting them made it possible for us to better understand our very own values. The U.S. never lived up to all of its values. I am specifically thinking about human rights failures under the Biden administration. We can all point to so many — particularly Gaza, right? But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t still be standing in solidarity with other countries on a human rights response.

Calling members of Congress and saying: What has happened to our foreign assistance is unacceptable. What has happened to our human rights infrastructure is unacceptable. Demanding more from our government. We need to dream bigger and better than what we had. I love DRL, but we were routinely overruled. The Trump administration really made it out like DRL was the most powerful entity at the State Department. I really wish we were! I wish our foreign policy was always ruled by human rights at the core. That is an incredible dream that I would love to see happen. I also think we’d have a lot more respect globally if we lived up to the promise of having human rights at our core. [Safeguarding] human rights is hard. That’s why people don’t like to do it. It’s really difficult to tell Egypt — a very crucial partner on so many things — that their human rights record is bad. That’s an important relationship, but it’s okay to say hard things to people. That’s diplomacy.

As people are thinking about new things on the horizon, we should keep in mind that we can want more. We can want — instead of just a bureau dedicated to democracy, human rights, and labor at the State Department — an undersecretary for human rights. We also have to recognize that the United States is never going to be in the same position we were before. Watching what has happened with foreign assistance, I don’t want one country to dictate what happens globally. It really does need to be a joint effort. Having more voices, particularly from the Global South, is a huge opportunity for foreign policy to be more inclusive and more driven from a broader set of folks. Spreading out that support.

Our organization, the Council for Global Equality, is thinking about what we want and what we demand for a future infrastructure for human rights and making good on promises. The Summit for Democracy under the Biden administration was a nice thought, but it also didn’t deliver for LGBTQI+ people. That’s not what we want in the future. I spend a lot of time building champions, too, with members of Congress. It’s really hard to break through everything. You have Venezuela, you have Greenland, you have every single emergency in the world, but this has been one of the most dangerous moments for LGBTQI+ people. While we might not have the State Department issuing statements, we need a member of Congress to be sending a letter to the ambassador, and that matters.

One of the last things is, as we were all watching everything crumble, I had this incredible conversation with my friend who led the Global Equality Fund. Funding is key to the lives of LGBTQI+ people around the world. This is a horrible moment for LGBTQI+ organizations, but without the work that the Global Equality Fund did in the past, we would have lost so many more. That fund helped build the capacity of LGBTQI+ human rights defenders to keep doing their work. It’s important to know that the work continues. We need to be learning more from our human rights defender colleagues around the globe on how they fought authoritarianism for so long and taking some of their tactics back here. There’s a lot to learn from them. We’re dealing with so much that feels like an onslaught, but our colleagues in Hungary have lived under [Viktor] Orban’s authoritarian rule and just pulled off the largest pride parade in their history that had no violence. That’s incredible organizing. We have a lot to learn from them.