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

Chris Rufo published the chats. Staffers say a new "lavender scare" is upon us.

Marisa Kabas
April 28, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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