EEOC Rolls Back Trans Protections Following Trump’s Executive Order

Trump-appointed Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) Acting Chair Andrea Lucas announced earlier this week that the agency will be “rolling back” enforcement of anti-discrimination policies that protect transgender Americans.

Lucas stated in a press release that, in accordance with President Donald Trump’s anti-trans Executive Order 14166, which mandates that federal agencies recognize only two unchangeable sexes assigned at conception, her “priorities — for compliance, investigations, and litigation — is to defend the biological and binary reality of sex and related rights, including women’s rights to single-sex spaces at work.”

She also announced the removal of the agency’s “pronoun app,” a Microsoft 365 feature that allowed employees to display their pronouns alongside their name on platforms like Outlook and Teams, making them visible to both internal and external contacts. This change further contributes to a hostile environment for transgender employees at the EEOC, aligning with the broader wave of anti-trans measures introduced by the Trump administration, such as a federal bathroom ban, targeted crackdowns on DEI initiatives, and the reported cancellation of LGBTQ Pride observances within federal agencies.

Additionally, Lucas has ended the use of the “X” gender marker in the intake process for filing discrimination charges, and directed changes to official forms to eliminate “Mx.” from the list of prefix options for discrimination claims, further erasing recognition of nonbinary identities and creating additional barriers for transgender employees seeking legal recourse for employment discrimination.

Lucas also announced a review of the EEOC’s “Know Your Rights” poster, which all covered employers are legally required to display in workplaces. She further stated that the commission has “removed materials promoting gender ideology” from its internal and external websites, as well as from agency documents such as webpages, statements, social media platforms, forms, and training materials.

Executive Order 14166, which the EEOC says it is complying with, defines “gender ideology” as “the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex.” However, leading medical and scientific organizations reject this narrow definition. The American Psychological Association and the World Health Organization recognize that gender identity is distinct from biological sex and exists on a spectrum. Furthermore, research shows that approximately 1.7 percent of people worldwide are born with sex characteristics — such as chromosomes, hormone levels, or reproductive and sexual anatomy — that do not fit the Trump administration’s binary definition of sex.

The agency’s review and removal process is ongoing. Any changes to the EEOC’s existing “Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace” — which affirms that employers may be in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act if they misgender employees or deny them access to restrooms that align with their gender identity — would require a commission vote and cannot be made unilaterally. However, Trump recently dismissed two of the three Democratic commissioners from the agency and will likely replace them with conservatives, and has made it clear that his administration intends to weaponize women’s rights by promoting anti-trans “single-sex spaces” as a means to restrict restroom access for transgender and nonbinary people.

“Because of biological realities, each sex has its own, unique privacy interests, and women have additional safety interests, that warrant certain single-sex facilities at work and other spaces outside the home,” Lucas said in a press release. “It is neither harassment nor discrimination for a business to draw distinctions between the sexes in providing single-sex bathrooms or other similar facilities which implicate these significant privacy and safety interests.”

Defending her anti-trans stance, Lucas then argued: “the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County does not demand otherwise: the Court explicitly stated that it did ‘not purport to address bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything else of the kind.’”

In Bostock, the Supreme Court affirmed that Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination in employment includes protections for sexual orientation and gender identity. However, the Trump administration has deliberately misrepresented this decision to justify rolling back anti-discrimination protections for transgender Americans. The administration’s distortion of Bostock “could allow federal agencies to refuse to acknowledge discrimination against the full LGBTQ+ community in the workplace, education, housing, health care, and more,” the Human Rights Campaign said in a press release.