Civil rights agency sued over handling of trans worker discrimination complaints

NBC News

6 days ago

Legal groups sued the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Tuesday, claiming it is unlawfully refusing to enforce federal workplace protections for transgender workers.
Led by Acting Chair Andrea Lucas, a Republican, the federal agency charged with enforcing laws against workplace discrimination has moved swiftly to comply with President Donald Trump's executive order declaring two unchangeable sexes. Under Lucas's leadership, the EEOC has dropped several lawsuits on behalf of transgender workers, stalled progress on some new cases, and subjected others to heightened scrutiny. The lawsuit also alleges that the agency halted payments to state and local civil rights agencies for investigating gender identity discrimination claims.
"For over 60 years, the EEOC's mandate has been to protect workers from discrimination, not to pick and choose who is deemed worthy of protection based on political interference," said Skye Perryman, the president and CEO of Democracy Forward, which alongside the National Women's Law Center brought the case on behalf of Maryland LGBTQ+ advocacy group FreeState Justice.
"The Trump-Vance administration's unlawful effort to erase protections for transgender people is cruel, and a violation of the law and the Constitution," Perryman continued in an emailed statement.
The EEOC declined to comment on the lawsuit, and instead referred The Associated Press to the Department of Justice. The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Lucas, who is named in the lawsuit filed in Maryland U.S. District Court in Baltimore, has said that one of her priorities as Acting Chair would be "defending the biological and binary reality of sex and related rights."
Last month she defended her decision to drop several lawsuits on behalf of transgender workers during her June 18 Senate committee confirmation hearing, saying her agency is not independent and must comply with the president's orders.
"It was impossible to both comply with the president's executive order as an executive branch agency, and also zealously defend the workers we had brought the case on behalf," she said.
However, Lucas acknowledged that a 2020 Supreme Court ruling — Bostock v. Clayton County — "did clearly hold that discriminating against someone on the basis of sex included firing an individual who is transgender or based on their sexual orientation."
Plaintiffs argue that although the Bostock precedent "cemented protections for LGBTQ+ workers that the EEOC had already recognized for years" the agency has now "foreclosed transgender workers from the full set 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."
The lawsuit, which cites two Associated Press reports detailing EEOC actions related to LGBTQ+ workers, alleges that the EEOC's "Trans Exclusion Policy" violates Supreme Court precedent, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Fifth Amendment's Equal Protection guarantee, and the Administrative Procedure Act.
"Instead of serving its critical role to prevent discrimination in the workplace, the EEOC, under Andrea Lucas' leadership, is actually promoting discrimination," said Gaylynn Burroughs, Vice President for Education and Workplace Justice at NWLC, in an emailed statement about the lawsuit. "Transgender workers deserve to be protected against harassment, and the EEOC is obligated to do so under law. But the Trump administration seems hellbent on bullying transgender people in every possible way and ensuring that they are pushed out of all forms of public life, including their workplaces, so we're taking the administration to court."