Meta quietly scrapped all mentions of LGBTQ-affirming care for its employees from its public-facing benefits page, Gazetteer SF has learned. After we reached out, Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton said via email it was “removed in error.”
As of Monday, mentions of support to help Facebook workers navigate finding “LGBTQ+ affirming providers” and programs that support “gender-affirming services” on the benefits section of the company’s careers website had been scrubbed.
The removals were recent: An archived version on the Wayback Machine from late last December shows Meta advertising such support, suggesting that the references were removed in tandem with Meta’s loosening of its content moderation and the gutting of its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
Some employees posting on the company’s internal forum expressed concern that this would affect healthcare for LGBTQ individuals, according to screenshots viewed by Gazetteer. The company’s internal benefits page still lists gender affirmation surgery as covered by the company’s insurance.
Clayton, Meta’s spokesperson, said the company “is in the process” of republishing that information and clarified that Meta has “NOT made any changes to our gender-affirming benefits.”
Meta, up until this month, had emphasized, and even championed, diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts for about a decade. Even if erasing LGBTQ benefits from public-facing recruiting pages, while still keeping those benefits intact, is merely virtue signaling, it’s proven to be disheartening for some employees at the company.
"It feels like LGBTQ identities are being erased,” said one Meta worker who spoke to Gazetteer SF on the condition of anonymity. “It's a betrayal of the values that brought me to the company to begin with."
The Human Rights Campaign, a prominent critic of the company’s recent moderation shifts, recently placed Meta in its latest Equality 100 list of LGBTQ-inclusive companies, heralding the firm for its inclusive benefits and workforce protections for LGBTQ employees.
The move by Meta, erroneously or not, follows a similar move by Amazon to scrub mentions of support for Black and LGBTQ employees on public-facing web pages.
