Microsoft Celebrates Pride While Making Bank From the Trump Administration
The software company, along with its subsidiary LinkedIn, is ostensibly going all in on Pride. But as they ditch DEI and LGBTQ hate speech protections, is it just pinkwashing?
Julius Shan remembers sitting at his desk last August and opening an email that caught him by surprise: “Please find attached the memo terminating your employment with Microsoft, effective immediately.”
“It was kind of a shock, but it was also kind of a relief to be fired,” he told Uncloseted Media.
Shan, a 28-year-old gay man, had been on the outs with his employer for over a year. When he joined Microsoft in 2020, it felt like a good environment for LGBTQ employees. But over time, he grew disillusioned as he watched the company ignore criticisms from him and his colleagues about the troubling relationships Microsoft has with anti-LGBTQ figures like Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
“It’s convenient to say that you are protecting and trying to champion LGBTQ rights … while on the other hand taking money from one of the most corrupt administrations there is,” Shan says.
Microsoft’s handling of LGBTQ issues wasn’t the only concern he had with the company’s values. Shan says the final straw came when he discovered that Microsoft was supporting a mass surveillance project that helped the Israeli military intercept millions of civilian phone calls in Palestine. Outraged, he joined an occupation protest at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters. The next week, the company fired him, accusing him of “misconduct in violation of company policy.”
“I think it really helped me understand where Microsoft’s values really were in terms of its stated values versus how those values actually play out in day-to-day-life,” he says.
Microsoft isn’t alone. Because of pressures from the Trump administration, many corporations have stopped expressing outward support for the LGBTQ community. On the surface, Microsoft seems like an exception: It has continued its annual pride campaigns and remains a platinum partner of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC).
But the company has also kowtowed to pressure from the Trump administration to roll back Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) commitments and has removed some hate speech protections on LinkedIn, which Microsoft owns.
“It’s obvious to me that they are trying to play both sides,” Ray Acheson, a writer and researcher at Princeton University focused on military uses of technology, told Uncloseted Media. “It really shows the ways in which queer folks are expendable to these companies.”
The Rise and Fall of Microsoft’s Pro-LGBTQ Stance
Throughout history, Microsoft has been ahead of the curve on LGBTQ issues. It added sexual orientation to its nondiscrimination policies in 1991 and gender identity in 2004, well before these became industry standards in corporate America. Since then, it has received perfect scores on HRC’s Corporate Equality Index, a tool to track pro-LGBTQ employee policies at major companies. And since at least 2013, it’s participated in pride events every year.
But over the last few years, Microsoft has backtracked. In July 2024, the company eliminated one of its DEI teams. A team leader wrote in an email to employees that DEI is “no longer business critical.”
It was around this time when many corporations made similar moves to scale back DEI efforts following pressure campaigns from right-wing think tanks.
“The landscape has shifted in a landslide,” Mike Wilke, the founder of AdRespect, a nonprofit advocating for LGBTQ inclusion in advertising, told Uncloseted Media. “[Right-wing activists] seemed to get a lot of traction very quickly across multiple companies, and there was synergy with the different leaders in the Republican party who started to pile on.”
Microsoft’s rollbacks have intensified under Trump, who signed an executive order on his second day in office pushing companies to remove their DEI policies.
In 2025, Microsoft announced that it would no longer publish an annual report on diversity and inclusion, which it had been doing since 2019. The report contained statistics on the representation of women, LGBTQ people and racial and ethnic minorities in leadership and at the company overall, as well as info on Microsoft’s efforts to promote greater diversity and equity in its offices and products.
“They got rid of that … without really any direct pressure from the Trump administration,” Shan says. “It felt like it was happening in advance.”
Microsoft claims that it pulled the plug on the report because it had “evolved beyond” the report and would replace it with “stories, videos and insights that show inclusion in action.”
Around this time, it also removed requirements for employees to report their actions and future plans to support diversity and inclusion at the company. It also removed diversity from its list of “core priorities” on performance reviews. And in March, Microsoft’s chief diversity officer stepped down as part of a restructuring that diminished the company’s DEI work.
Policy changes have also been concerning at Microsoft’s subsidiary, LinkedIn. Last July, the social media platform updated its hate speech and harassment guidelines. It removed a prohibition against the “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals” as well as language specifying protections against harassment on the basis of “race or gender identity.”
As Microsoft implemented these changes, it deepened its ties with the Trump administration. It donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, twice the amount it gave to the last two inaugurations. And last year, it gave an unknown amount to Trump’s ballroom project.
In May 2025, Microsoft invited then-senior adviser to the president, Elon Musk, as a special guest at its annual Build Developer Conference. There, it announced that Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot, would run on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform, which provides cloud storage via data centers.
“It’s fantastic to have you at our developer conference,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told Musk.
This reportedly left LGBTQ employees “incensed.” Musk has a long history of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and has called his trans daughter “dead … killed by the woke mind virus.” And Grok has a history of spreading anti-trans misinformation, such as claiming that transness is a “social contagion” spread via access to the internet.
“I felt shocked and disgusted that Satya gave Elon and Grok a warm welcome,” says Shan, who watched the conference via livestream. “Microsoft insults human rights and DEI by supporting both a man and an AI chatbot infamous for their antisemitism, white supremacy, transphobia and idiocy.”
Microsoft’s Pride Pinkwashing Push
Despite all this, Microsoft is still flaunting its rainbow flag this Pride month. It’s currently touting its “Pride is Alive” campaign, where it’s asking users to show their pride with Microsoft rainbow video backgrounds and wallpapers. It’s also selling pride T-shirts, hoodies and hair ties. It’s even offering custom pride designs in Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.
On the site, it claims that “Pride endures. Because you do. This year, Pride isn’t just about showing up. It’s about choosing to live—openly, visibly, and fully. LGBTQIA+ communities at Microsoft invite everyone to gather, share, create, live, and love.”
This practice of marketing to the LGBTQ community without meaningfully backing it up has been called “pinkwashing.”
Wilke says Microsoft’s moves could be interpreted charitably or cynically. On one side, it could be read as an attempt to continue supporting the community in less risky ways while warding off attacks from the Trump administration. But on the other hand, it could be “just trying to take our money.”
“You have to show that you respect your employees and your consumers and that you’re not supporting anti-LGBTQ causes or politicians. We wanna see that your money is where your mouth is,” he says.
Despite Microsoft’s rollbacks, some of the largest LGBTQ advocacy groups have continued to support it. GLAAD hosted an LGBTQ youth event at Microsoft’s Atlanta offices and partnered with Blizzard, a video game company owned by Microsoft, on a pride campaign last year.
HRC, meanwhile, still makes bank from Microsoft donations, listing it as a “platinum partner,” the highest level of corporate sponsorship offered by the nonprofit. And this year, they awarded Microsoft and LinkedIn 100/100 scores on their Corporate Equality Index, despite the fact that it deducts points based on a company’s “responsible citizenship.”
Wilke says the index should account for issues like LinkedIn’s hate speech rollbacks.
“I don’t have insight into [HRC’s] committees … or any specific scores, but it should’ve been caught in that responsible citizenship section,” Wilke says. “People who are on these committees are themselves corporate-based typically, so you might say they bring somewhat of a conservative eye to all of it.”
Trump’s Pentagon Is a Big Customer
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Acheson says Microsoft is likely ditching its LGBTQ-friendly policies because the U.S. government makes it lots of money.
“The Trump regime … have demonstrated themselves to be quite petty in terms of who gets money and what currying their favor will get you,” says Acheson, who also works with the Stop Killer Robots campaign, which seeks to ban lethal autonomous weapons.
The Pentagon is one of Microsoft’s biggest customers. The company has landed major defense contracts since Trump took office, including one for classified AI development and another last month worth $9.7 billion.
The Pentagon began deploying AI tools run on Microsoft’s data centers in the Iran War. Acheson says these technologies are often specifically used against queer people. In 2025, Israel—which pioneered the use of these AI tools in their assault on Gaza—struck the transgender wing of an Iranian prison, leaving about 100 people missing or presumed dead.
“[Big tech companies] claim to support the queer community whilst actually developing, deploying and selling technologies that harm us,” Acheson says.
The Pentagon has also instituted anti-LGBTQ policies at home. A week into his second term, Trump signed an executive order banning transgender troops from serving in the military. And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has pressured Scouting America to abandon pro-LGBTQ policies to maintain their contract with the Pentagon.
ICE Also Pays Microsoft
Microsoft Azure also powers ICE’s surveillance and mass deportations. Since 2023, ICE has spent more than $94 million on Microsoft products.
The agency’s technical operations team uses Azure to monitor Americans through “telephone, video, audio, tracking, radio frequency technologies and associated surveillance systems.” As of January, ICE has used facial and fingerprint recognition software in the field over 100,000 times and has access to the driver’s license data of 3 in 4 adults.
Last February, the Department of Homeland Security, to which ICE belongs, began allowing agencies to gather surveillance data from people solely based on their LGBTQ identity.
They have also deported or threatened to deport queer people to countries where it is illegal to be gay, including Cameroon and Iran. And a 2024 report found widespread abuse of LGBTQ people in ICE detention centers, with nearly a third of those interviewed having been sexually assaulted or physically abused.
“It can sound quite bureaucratic, but really [Microsoft’s technology] is facilitating the daily operations of these institutions that are acting unlawfully and committing grave human rights violations,” Acheson says.
Organizing Against Microsoft
Amid all of this pinkwashing, three groups are calling for a boycott of Microsoft.
“We all know that their [Pride month] logo change is nothing more than just symbolism,” Victor Rivera, cofounder and executive director of Beyond the Ballot, a Gen Z-led progressive political organization, told Uncloseted Media. “The key important thing is not supporting administrations who do harm to [the LGBTQ] community.”
While major LGBTQ advocacy groups have largely been silent on Microsoft’s activities, there’s precedent for successful pressure campaigns to change that. Last November, HRC cut ties with defense contractors Northrop Grumman and Raytheon after two years of pressure from activists.
“Boycotts and divestments are really important because money does matter to these companies, and so if they’re being shamed for their contracts and their collaboration with militaries or ICE, that’s very effective,” says Acheson.
In an email, a Microsoft spokesperson wrote: “Our commitment to our mission, values, and culture is core to who we are at Microsoft. We’re focused on creating an environment where every employee can contribute, grow, and do their best work, including LGBTQIA+ employees around the world. This shows up not just in what we say, but more importantly in how we support our people, and partner with customers every day.”
HRC did not respond to a request for comment.
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While I understand feeling the need for corporate sincerity when it comes to assuring LGBTQ rights, I can't help but pragmatically, perhaps even cynically accept that our rights as a frequently maligned minority are always at high risk of erosion. It could be that Microsoft is simply trying to make money-- it could be that they are trying to play politics while sincerely maintaining a longstanding commitment to LGBTQ rights-- maybe there's elements of both. Either way, I am glad that in the face of enormous pressure they haven't abandoned their commitment to us altogether.
In the meanwhile, it sucks and is stressful, but we need to remember that in a world that is built by and for cishet people, we will probably always be on the underside of society. While we can and should fight for broader acceptance, the likelihood is that the road to it will be a very long one, with many backslides like we are experiencing under Trump, and truthfully may never be fully realized. A little grit, patience and radical acceptance as a community will help us go a long way toward weathering the orange storm.
Besides, I am not sure I *want* complete acceptance by society. So long as there's a power structure, there's a need for people to resist it-- and power is often built on the control of the deepest of human relationships and identities. Queerness by its nature serves as a tremendously powerful check on power.
Hypocrites! Microsoft I mean.