Signaling a major shift in civil rights enforcement, the federal agency that enforces workplace anti-discrimination laws has moved to dismiss six of its own cases on behalf of workers alleging gender identity discrimination, arguing that the cases now conflict with President Donald Trump’s recent executive order, court documents say.
The requests by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission mark a major departure from its prior interpretation of civil rights law, and a stark contrast to a decade ago when the agency issued a landmark finding that a transgender civilian employee of the U.S. Army had been discriminated against because her employer refused to use her preferred pronouns or allow her to use bathrooms based on her gender identity.
Just last year, the EEOC updated its guidance to specify that deliberately using the wrong pronouns for an employee, or refusing them access to bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity, constituted a form of harassment. That followed a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that gay, lesbian and transgender people are protected from employment discrimination.
Nearly all workplace discrimination charges must pass through the EEOC — at least initially — and the agency’s decision to drop at least six of the cases raises serious questions about whether its protections will continue to extend to transgender and gender nonconforming people going forward.
The EEOC is seeking to dismiss three cases in Illinois as well as one in Alabama, New York and California. In each instance, the original complaints allege discrimination against transgender or gender nonconforming workers. The agency cites Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order declaring that the government would recognize only two “immutable” sexes — male and female — as the reason for why it no longer intends to pursue the cases.
The EEOC’s requests to dismiss the cases come just weeks after Trump dismissed two Democratic commissioners of the five-member EEOC before their terms expired, a decision that removed what would have been a major obstacle to his administration efforts to upend interpretation of the nation’s civil rights laws. Had the commissioners been allowed to carry out their terms, the EEOC would have had a Democratic majority well into Trump’s term. The administration also fired Karla Gilbride as the EEOC’s general counsel, replacing her with Andrew Rogers as acting counsel.
Shortly after their dismissals, acting EEOC chair Andrea Lucas, a Republican, signaled her intent to put the agency’s resources behind enforcing Trump’s executive order on gender. She announced in a statement that one of her priorities would be “defending the biological and binary reality of sex and related rights.” Later, she ordered that the EEOC would continue accepting any and all discrimination charges filed by workers, although complaints that “implicate” Trump’s order should be elevated to headquarters for “review.”
“Biology is not bigotry. Biological sex is real, and it matters,” Lucas said in her statement. “Sex is binary (male and female) and immutable. It is not harassment to acknowledge these truths — or to use language like pronouns that flow from these realities, even repeatedly.” She removed the agency’s “pronoun app,” which allowed employees to display their pronouns in their Microsoft 365 profiles, among other changes.