By Associated Press’s Claire Savage
On Tuesday, legal organizations filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging that it is illegally disregarding federal workplace rights for transgender employees.
The government organization tasked with upholding anti-discrimination laws in the workplace, led by Republican Acting Chair Andrea Lucas, has acted quickly to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order designating two unchangeable sexes. The EEOC has halted development on some new claims, dismissed a number of lawsuits on behalf of transgender workers, and increased scrutiny on others under Lucas’s direction. Additionally, according to the lawsuit, the government stopped funding state and local civil rights organizations that looked into allegations of gender identity discrimination.
According to Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, which joined the National Women’s Law Center in bringing the case on behalf of Maryland LGBTQ+ advocacy group FreeState Justice, the EEOC’s mission has been to protect workers from discrimination for more than 60 years, not to arbitrarily decide who should be protected based on political meddling.
In an emailed statement, Perryman added, “The Trump-Vance administration’s illegal attempt to remove protections for transgender people is cruel, and a violation of the law and the Constitution.”
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The Associated Press was sent to the Department of Justice by the EEOC, which declined to comment on the case. A request for comment was not immediately answered by the DOJ.
One of her goals as Acting Chair, according to Lucas, who is named in the case filed in Maryland U.S. District Court in Baltimore, would be upholding the biological and binary reality of sex and related rights.
During her confirmation hearing before a Senate committee on June 18, she justified her decision to drop multiple lawsuits on behalf of transgender workers, arguing that her agency is not independent and must follow the president’s directives.
As an executive branch agency, we could not aggressively defend the workers on whose behalf we had initiated the case while also adhering to the president’s executive order, she said.
Lucas did concede, though, that a 2020 Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County did unequivocally state that terminating a transgender person or someone based on their sexual orientation was considered sex discrimination.
Plaintiffs contend that the EEOC has now excluded transgender workers from the full range of charge investigation and other enforcement protections available to cisgender charging parties and categorically refuses to fully enforce the laws protecting against workplace sex discrimination tied to gender identity, despite the Bostock precedent solidifying protections for LGBTQ+ workers that the agency had already recognized for years.
The lawsuit claims that the EEOC’s Trans Exclusion Policy violates Supreme Court precedent, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Equal Protection guarantee of the Fifth Amendment, and the Administrative Procedure Act. It cites two Associated Press reports that describe EEOC actions pertaining to LGBTQ+ employees.
In an emailed statement regarding the case, Gaylynn Burroughs, Vice President for Education and Workplace Justice at NWLC, said that the EEOC, under the leadership of Andrea Lucas, is actually encouraging discrimination rather than fulfilling its vital role of preventing it in the workplace. The EEOC is legally required to defend transgender employees from harassment because they deserve it. We are suing the Trump administration because it appears determined to intimidate transgender individuals in every manner and make sure they are excluded from all facets of public life, including their jobs.
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