I want to talk about something that does not get discussed enough in corporate DEI conversations: the weight your employees are carrying before they ever log into their first meeting of the day.
There is a widespread assumption in organizational culture that people leave their personal lives at the door when they come to work. That a professional is a professional, and whatever is happening in the world outside — the news, the legislation, the fear — stays outside. This assumption has always been a fantasy. For historically excluded employees, it has never been anything but.
I have spent years working with LGBTQ+ employee resource groups, advising organizations across the country on inclusive culture, and coaching underrepresented professionals through careers that require them to navigate spaces that were not built with them in mind. And what I can tell you, with certainty, is this: you cannot lead, innovate, collaborate, or perform at your highest level when you are in survival mode.
Right now, a significant portion of your workforce is in survival mode. And the data backs that up.
The Legislative Climate Is Not Background Noise
I say this not to be political, but to be precise: what is happening in state legislatures and at the federal level right now is not abstract. It is landing in your employees’ bodies, their families, their sense of safety, and their ability to show up fully at work.
In 2025 alone, over 850 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were introduced across the United States — the most in recorded history.¹ The overwhelming majority target transgender people specifically. Of those 850+ bills, 867 were aimed at trans lives: banning healthcare, stripping legal identity recognition, criminalizing bathroom use, and in some states, classifying gender-affirming care or even social transition as child abuse.²
In 2020, there were just over 100 such bills. In five years, we went from 100 to over 850. That trajectory does not happen by accident. It is organized, funded, and strategic.¹
The specific consequences are significant:
• Twenty-seven states now ban some form of gender-affirming healthcare for transgender children. Six of those states make providing that care a felony crime.³
• More than half of all transgender youth aged 13–17 in the U.S. — roughly 382,800 kids — live in states that have enacted laws restricting their healthcare, sports participation, bathroom access, or pronoun use.⁴
• Federal executive orders have directed agencies to eliminate funding for schools that incorporate what is being called “gender ideology,” and have encouraged the prosecution of teachers who support students in their gender transitions.³
Your LGBTQ+ employees have family members, children, and community members living under these laws. Your trans employees may be directly affected themselves. This is not theoretical for them. This is Tuesday.
And It Does Not Stop with the LGBTQ+ Community
If you lead people — and especially if you lead diverse teams — the full scope of what is happening matters to you. Because the legislative pressure is not targeted at one community. It is targeted at anyone who has historically been excluded, marginalized, or underrepresented.
Anti-DEI Legislation:
At least 42 states have introduced over 440 bills attacking DEI across government, education, and the private sector.⁵ As of late 2025, 22 of those states have passed anti-DEI legislation into law.⁶ These laws are eliminating DEI offices, banning diversity training, defunding identity-based scholarships, and restricting any acknowledgment of systemic inequality. The downstream impact on talent pipelines is already measurable: at Harvard Law School, Black student enrollment dropped from 43 first-year students to 19 in a single year following the 2023 Supreme Court ruling ending race-conscious admissions.⁷ That is not a data point. That is a generation of professionals who did not get a seat at the table.
Anti-Black Civil Rights Rollbacks:
It is worth pausing here for a moment, because I think many people — particularly those who have not had to track this history closely — do not fully grasp how recent some of these protections are. The United States did not federally outlaw lynching until 2022. The Emmett Till Antilynching Act was signed into law after more than 200 failed attempts over the course of a century.⁸ That is not ancient history. And now, federal agencies have dismantled Black History Month resources, gutted the civil rights enforcement functions of the DOJ and EEOC, and advanced an agenda that would reorient the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division away from protecting communities of color and toward prosecuting organizations that engage in DEI practices at all.⁹¹⁰
Anti-Immigration Legislation:
In the first half of 2025 alone, 37 states enacted over 100 immigration-related laws, with Republican-led states passing three-quarters of them.¹¹ These laws criminalize aid to undocumented immigrants, expand police cooperation with immigration enforcement, and restrict access to basic public services. The human consequences are not hypothetical: in Tennessee, a six-month-old died after a caregiver who was undocumented was too afraid to call for emergency services.¹² Your Latino employees, your immigrant employees, your employees with undocumented family members — they know stories like this. They are living adjacent to this fear every day.
What the Research Tells Us About Psychological Safety and Performance
This is where I want to speak directly to organizational leaders, because the business case here is not soft. It is measurable.
When employees do not feel safe — when they are managing fear, discrimination, or existential threat to their identity or their family’s wellbeing — cognitive bandwidth narrows. Creativity declines. Risk tolerance drops. Engagement falls. Retention suffers. This is not opinion. This is how human beings function under stress.
The data on LGBTQ+ mental health alone should give every people leader pause. According to the largest national survey of transgender adults in the U.S., 81% reported seriously thinking about suicide in their lifetime, and 40% reported actually attempting it.¹³ Studies have found that approximately 30% of transgender youth attempted suicide in the past year.¹⁴
And critically: the research is equally clear about what reduces that risk. Access to gender-affirming care. Family support. Community acceptance. Inclusive environments.¹⁴ When organizations create genuinely inclusive workplaces, they are not just doing the right thing. They are, in a very real and documented sense, keeping people alive.
This is what is at stake when DEI gets treated as a line item to cut or a political liability to avoid.
The Intersectionality Your Organization Cannot Afford to Ignore
One of the most persistent gaps I see in corporate DEI work is the tendency to treat marginalized identities as separate, siloed categories. LGBTQ+ initiatives in one bucket. Racial equity in another. Immigration support somewhere else entirely.
But your employees do not experience their identities in silos. An employee who is Black and LGBTQ+ is navigating two historically excluded identities simultaneously — and the intersection of those identities creates a level of complexity and compounded risk that a one-size-fits-all approach will never address.
An employee who is Black, LGBTQ+, and transgender — specifically a trans woman of color — is operating in an environment where physical safety, legal recognition, healthcare access, and workplace inclusion are all under simultaneous threat. The legislative landscape described above does not affect her the way it affects a white, cisgender, gay man. The burden is categorically different.
If your DEI strategy does not account for that difference, it is incomplete. And incomplete strategies produce incomplete results.
What This Means for Your Organization Right Now
I am not writing this to overwhelm you. I am writing this because the organizations that will retain and develop the best talent over the next decade are the ones that take this moment seriously — not performatively, but substantively.
Here is what that looks like in practice:
• Audit your benefits. Do your healthcare plans include gender-affirming care? Do they cover mental health services that are culturally competent for LGBTQ+ employees and employees of color? Gaps here are not neutral. They communicate belonging — or the absence of it.
• Create explicit, funded support structures. Employee Resource Groups are a start, not a finish line. Are your ERGs resourced? Do they have executive sponsorship with actual authority? Are their recommendations being implemented?
• Train your managers, not just your HR teams. The experience your LGBTQ+ employees, Black employees, and immigrant employees have at work is shaped most directly by their immediate managers. Manager-level inclusion training is not optional. It is infrastructure.
• Get legislation-literate as an organization. Know what is happening in the states where your employees live and work. Know how it affects them. Communicate clearly about where your organization stands and what protections you are committed to, regardless of what legislators do.
• Invest in intersectional strategy. Stop treating DEI as a checklist of separate initiatives and start treating it as an integrated organizational capability. Bring in practitioners who understand how identities layer and compound. Build strategies that reflect that complexity.
Your employees who belong to historically excluded communities are not asking you to solve the legislative crisis. They know you cannot. What they are asking — what they need — is to know that when they walk into work, this is one place where their full humanity is not up for debate.
That is not a small ask. But it is an achievable one. And it is exactly the kind of work I do.
A Note to My Fellow Members of the Community
If you are reading this as someone who is LGBTQ+, Black, an immigrant, or any combination of identities that puts you in the crosshairs of what is described above — I see you.
The weight of navigating a career while also navigating a world that is actively legislating against your existence is real and it is exhausting. You are not imagining it. You are not being dramatic. And you are not obligated to manage it alone or in silence.
Your career deserves the same investment, the same strategy, the same intentionality as anyone else’s. You deserve to be in rooms where you do not have to spend half your energy managing how much of yourself to reveal. You deserve workplaces that are built for you, not just tolerant of you.
That is the work. And it is worth doing.
Kimberly Tate is the founder of Tate of Mind Consulting, a career coaching and DEI consultancy dedicated to helping underrepresented professionals build careers and lives on their own terms — and helping organizations build the inclusive cultures that make that possible. If you are interested in DEI training, executive consulting, or career coaching for historically excluded professionals, reach out at tateofmindconsulting.com. or email kimberly@tateofmindconsulting.com
If you or someone you love is struggling, the Trevor Project offers 24/7 crisis support for LGBTQ+ youth at TheTrevorProject.org or 1-866-488-7386. The Trans Lifeline is available at 877-565-8860.
Sources
1. Truthout / Erin in the Morning (April 2025). Over 850 Anti-LGBTQ Bills Filed In 2025 — the Most in U.S. History.https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/over-850-anti-lgbtq-bills-filed-in
2. Truthout (April 2025). More Than 850 Anti-LGBTQ Bills Filed So Far in 2025 — detailed breakdown by category including healthcare, bathroom, ID recognition, and child abuse classification bills. https://truthout.org/articles/more-than-850-anti-lgbtq-bills-filed-so-far-in-2025-the-most-in-us-history/
3. Human Rights Watch (May 2025). Human Rights Violations Against LGBTQ+ Communities in the United States. https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/05/28/human-rights-violations-against-lgbtq-communities-united-states
4. Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law (January 2026). The Impact of 2025 Anti-Transgender Legislation on Youth.https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/anti-trans-legislation-youth/
5. Movement Advancement Project (2024). Dismantling DEI: A Coordinated Attack on American Values.https://www.mapresearch.org/2024-press-release-dei-report
6. Campus Reform Anti-DEI Legislation Tracker (September 2025). 22 states have passed anti-DEI legislation into law.https://www.campusreform.org/article/campus-reforms-anti-dei-legislation-tracker/27589
7. The EDU Ledger (2025). Six States Lead Nation in Anti-DEI Legislative Push — cites USC Critical Policy Collective report; Harvard Law Black enrollment data included.https://www.theeduledger.com/leadership-policy/article/15769708/six-states-lead-nation-in-antidei-legislative-push-new-report-finds
8. Wikipedia / Congressional Record (2022). Emmett Till Antilynching Act — signed into law March 29, 2022, after more than 200 failed attempts over a century.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till_Antilynching_Act
9. Congressional Black Caucus Foundation (2025). CBCF Executive Order Tracker: Impacts on Black America.https://www.cbcfinc.org/policy-research/cbcf-executive-order-tracker-impacts-on-black-america/
10. Civil Rights Coalition / Leadership Conference (2024). Project 2025: What’s at Stake for Civil Rights.https://civilrights.org/project2025/
11. The Marshall Project (August 2025). New Immigration Laws: See What States Passed in 2025.https://www.themarshallproject.org/2025/08/01/new-immigration-laws-search-bills-trump-ice
12. The Marshall Project (July 2025). New Immigration Laws 2025: How States Are Criminalizing Migrants and Allies — includes Tennessee felony law and La Vergne infant death case.https://www.themarshallproject.org/2025/07/25/florida-law-alabama-immigration-trump
13. Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law (2020). Suicide Thoughts and Attempts Among Transgender Adults — 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey: 81% ideation, 40% lifetime attempt rate.https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/suicidality-transgender-adults/
14. Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law (2021). Suicide Risk and Prevention for Transgender People — 30% of trans youth attempted suicide in the past year; gender-affirming care linked to reduced risk.https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Trans-Suicide-Summary-Sep-2021.pdf
