They don't gotta burn the books they just remove em

(Video is a reading of the text below)

The first essay addresses what is a highlight right now, but hopefully someday becomes a footnote in my life: Executive Order 14168. Released on Inauguration Day, 2025. Titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”

Going into the word salad and the semantic gymnastics of what it actually says is pointless. The whole thing is just the latest version of lavender scare McCarthyism. It’s meant to act as one of the primary stochastic terrorism implements to push transgender people not only out of the government and the civil service, but out of public society in general.

I read this executive order on January 20th and realized my career at NASA was over. There’s no way to exist in an environment like that. A de facto termination by constructive dismissal. That level of hostile work environment, oppression, denigration. And yes, there have been plenty of armchair warriors who pause their Joe Rogan podcasts to let me know this doesn’t technically terminate or remove transgender people from the civil service. That’s just more word salad. That’s the point of the terror.

This, along with the other executive orders and the objectives of DOGE, is all part of Project 2025. The Heritage Foundation’s war against transgender people and the LGBTQ community. Plenty has been said about the order and its impact. I want to tell my story from the inside. It’s a short, easy story to tell.

I’m going to list the people in the federal government and at NASA who reached out to me at the time, or shortly after, and said something about this executive order. People who acknowledged it was going to end my dream career. The pinnacle of my professional life. Here are the people who reached out to me while I was still at NASA:

Zero.

Zero people had anything to say. Including my direct manager.

I won’t name them. But everybody ran scared and refused to stand up for me, or for any other transgender civil servant I knew at NASA. As the Signal chats started firing up, everyone else was worried about whether to accept the DRP, the Delayed Resignation Program. I wasn’t even eligible for it. People were asking about DOGE cuts. I have no idea if I’d have been part of them, because I was already going to be pressured out through the hostile environment the order created.

With this essay, I’m including a picture. The all-genders bathroom at NASA headquarters. I took it on the day I swore an oath on the Constitution to defend this country from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Two years later, I sat in the final Teams meeting of the Pride ERG, where leader after leader sobbed and turned off their camera, telling us we were no longer allowed to have that group. No longer allowed to display our pronouns in our email signatures, or on Teams calls.

You know what was never addressed? What people were going to call me going forward, if I’d stayed long enough for DOGE to remove me. Was I going to be Mr. Flowers? Was I going to be Sir? My legal name is Erika. You can’t call me something that isn’t my legal name. I guess I got you on that one, even though there was one brave snowflake who would only refer to me as “Flowers” and not use a name or pronoun at all.

Then, after I left, I started getting mail from the agencies that process a civil servant’s departure. They were addressed to Mr. Erika Flowers. That’s how important it was to them. To reach through systems that had nothing to do with any of this. I believe that one was from the Department of the Treasury, about my paycheck and the benefits I was owed on the way out. They went so far as to change the honorific. Not the pronoun. The honorific. To Mr. Just to add insult to the injury.

As I move forward, you might be thinking: isn’t that all behind you? The government took a turn, it probably wasn’t safe for transgender people; transgender women especially, because that’s who they really target. No. It is not behind me. Because as I went job hunting, as I talked to new employers, I asked them. Do you follow the executive orders? Are you adhering to the anti-DEI policies? Are you aware of the content of Executive Order 14168 “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”? Do you uphold those orders if you take federal money for the work you do?

I got nothing but silence.

Because that’s how this works. That’s how stochastic terrorism works. It doesn’t have to be enforced. All it has to do is put a thought in someone’s head. They start wondering. “I certainly don’t want to be lumped in with one of those transgenders. Maybe we’ll just find reasons to subtly exclude. To quietly discriminate. To do the things that leave us legally in the clear, because there’s no way to prove what can’t be proven.”

So now I re-enter the private sector, silently wondering which HR department, which leadership team, which company is bending the knee to the anti-woke, anti-DEI movement that starts with these little subtle things you think don’t affect you. Almost eighteen months since I left, and I can already tell you what I see.

But you don’t have to worry, because if you weren’t a transgender civil servant, it doesn’t affect you.

[Each essay will take a lyric from a Rage Against the Machine song. This one’s title take from “Bulls on Parade”]