Federal judge strikes down workplace protections for transgender workers
Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas on Thursday determined that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission exceeded its statutory authority when the agency issued guidance to employers against deliberately using the wrong pronouns for an employee, refusing them access to bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity, and barring employees from wearing dress code-compliant clothing according to their gender identity because they may constitute forms of workplace harassment.
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects employees and job applicants from employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.
The EEOC, which enforces workplace anti-discrimination laws, had updated its guidance on workplace harassment in April of last year under President Joe Biden for the first time in 25 years. It followed a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that gay, lesbian and transgender people are protected from employment discrimination.
Texas and the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, in August challenged the guidance, which the agency says serves as a tool for employers to assess compliance with anti-discrimination laws and is not legally binding. Kacsmaryk disagreed, writing that the guidance creates 'mandatory standards … from which legal consequences will necessarily flow if an employer fails to comply.'
The decision marks the latest blow to workplace protections for transgender workers following President Donald Trump's Jan. 20 executive order declaring that the government would recognize only two 'immutable' sexes — male and female.
Kacsmaryk, a 2017 Trump nominee, invalidated all portions of the EEOC guidance that defines 'sex' to include 'sexual orientation' and 'gender identity,' along with an entire section addressing the subject.
'Title VII does not require employers or courts to blind themselves to the biological differences between men and women,' he wrote in the opinion.
Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts commended the decision in an emailed statement: 'The Biden EEOC tried to compel businesses — and the American people — to deny basic biological truth. Today, thanks to the great state of Texas and the work of my Heritage colleagues, a federal judge said: not so fast.'
He added: 'This ruling is more than a legal victory. It's a cultural one. It says no — you don't have to surrender common sense at the altar of leftist ideology. You don't have to pretend men are women.'
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton also touted the victory against 'Biden's 'Pronoun Police' Rule' in a Friday press release, saying: 'The federal government has no right to force Texans to play along with delusions or ignore biological reality in our workplaces.'
The National Women's Law Center, which filed an amicus brief in November in support of the harassment guidance, blasted the decision in an emailed statement.
'The district court's decision is an outrage and blatantly at odds with Supreme Court precedent,' said Liz Theran, senior director of litigation for education and workplace justice at NWLC. 'The EEOC's Harassment Guidance reminds employers and workers alike to do one simple thing that should cost no one anything: refrain from degrading others on the job based on their identity and who they love. This decision does not change the law, but it will make it harder for LGBTQIA+ workers to enforce their rights and experience a workplace free from harassment.'
Kacsmaryk offered a more narrow interpretation of Bostock v. Clayton County, the landmark Supreme Court case that established discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ workers, saying in his decision that the Supreme Court 'firmly refused to expand the definition of 'sex' beyond the biological binary,' and found only that employers could not fire workers for being gay or transgender.
Employment attorney Jonathan Segal, a partner at Duane Morris who advises companies on how best to comply with anti-discrimination laws, emphasized that legal minds may disagree on the scope of Bostock, and Kacsmaryk's decision is just one interpretation.
'If you assume that a transgender employee has no rights beyond not being fired for transgender status, you are likely construing their rights too narrowly under both federal and state law,' which would put employers in a risky position, Segal said.
And regardless of whether explicit guidance is in place, employers still need to address gender identity conflicts in the workplace, according to Tiffany Stacy, an Ogletree Deakins attorney in San Antonio who defends employers against claims of workplace discrimination.
'From a management perspective, employers should be prepared to diffuse those situations,' Stacy said.
The EEOC in fiscal year 2024 received more than 3,000 charges alleging discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, and 3,000-plus in 2023, according to the agency's website.
The U.S. Department of Justice and the EEOC declined to comment on the outcome of the Texas case.
EEOC Acting Chair Andrea Lucas, a Trump appointee, voted against the harassment guidelines last year but has been unable to rescind or revise them after Trump fired two of the three Democratic commissioners, leaving the federal agency without the quorum needed to make major policy changes.
But earlier this month, Trump tapped an assistant U.S. attorney in Florida, Brittany Panuccio, to fill one of the vacancies. If Panuccio is confirmed by the Senate, the EEOC would regain a quorum and establish a Republican majority 2-1, clearing the path to fully pivot the agency toward focusing on Trump's priorities.
'It is neither harassment nor discrimination for a business to draw distinctions between the sexes in providing single-sex bathrooms,' Lucas wrote in a statement expressing her dissent to that aspect of the guidelines.
In her four-month tenure as Acting Chair, Lucas has overhauled the agency's interpretation of civil rights law, including abandoning seven of its own cases representing transgender workers alleging they have experienced discrimination, and instructing employees to sideline all new gender identity discrimination cases received by the agency.
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Vox
25 minutes ago
- Vox
How conservatives help their young thinkers — and why liberals don't
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy,, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here. Attendees look on during Turning Point USA's Culture War event at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, on October 29, 2019. Megan Jelinger/AFP via Getty Images Last week, two young liberals asked for help finding a job in the ideas industry. And I didn't have a great answer. It made sense that they were asking: We were at a conference for liberals, dedicated to building a version of the doctrine that works in the 21st century. They were interested in studying ideas professionally, and I was there to moderate a panel about political philosophy. Yet I found myself struggling to give good advice. Sure, they could try for an internship at a liberal publication or think tank, but those are fiercely competitive and don't pay much. They could apply for a PhD program, but teaching jobs were scarce even before President Donald Trump took a hammer to American academia. What's really missing are programs of a specific kind — ones that help college students and recent grads engage with Big Ideas and connect with Important People. If my young acquaintances were right-wing, I might have told them to apply for National Review's Buckley and Rhodes journalism fellowships — multiyear paid opportunities to write for a national audience straight out of college. For a lesser commitment, they could have tried for the Claremont Institute's Publius Fellowship — a three-week program where you receive $1,500, a $700 travel stipend, free housing, paid meals, and an opportunity to study with some of the most influential (and radical) figures of the Trump era. On the Right The ideas and trends driving the conservative movement, from senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Those are two examples of numerous well-funded programs explicitly designed to usher as many bright young people into the institutional conservative world as possible. If you're an ambitious young college grad, and anywhere on the spectrum from libertarian to hardcore Trumpist, you've got tons of options to get into the ideas game. My young acquaintances really wanted a liberal version of such a thing. But as far as I can tell, it doesn't seem to exist. Where there should be a talent pipeline from universities to liberal public intellectualism, there is a giant sucking sound instead. And, increasingly, it's giving the right a leg up in winning the future. The right's winning formula for training youth It is true, as conservatives have long alleged, that America's intellectual institutions are pretty left-leaning places. They often overstate the case — professors are more likely to be Elizabeth Warren Dems than 'globalize the intifada' socialist revolutionaries — but data confirms that liberals outnumber conservatives in academia and the media by pretty significant margins. This is, of course, not at all new. One of the founding texts of the postwar conservative movement, William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, is all about how academia is full of socialists who are chipping away at the eternal truths of capitalism and Christianity. Buckley founded National Review as an antidote to what he saw as the liberal tilt of the mainstream American press. The legacy of Buckley-style thinking is the rise of a conservative ideas industry. A young person nowadays could attend college at right-wing Hillsdale, build their law school life around membership in the Federalist Society, and then get a job writing right-wing papers for the Heritage Foundation — all while getting their news from Fox News and Mark Levin's radio show. As part of these pipeline programs, older right-wingers get to know young up-and-comers as people, and thus develop a personal stake in their success. At the same time, the right also invested in the kinds of 'pipeline' programs our young liberals are desperate for. These aren't designed to replace traditional education or media institutions, but rather to identify young people interested in ideas and expose them to the right-wing alternatives. These work, in large part, by being intellectually exciting. It's not just that you get to go on all-expenses-paid trips with nice meals; it's that you are put in an environment where you're reading and debating classic works of political thought and literature with other people who share those interests. If you're the kind of nerd who wants to debate the finer points of Locke and Hamilton during undergrad summers, you're the kind of nerd who might one day be someone who matters in US politics — and the right's fellowships are there to help make sure you're mattering on their side. The people these young people are meeting are important and famous (well, DC famous). In a 2021 episode of the Know Your Enemy podcast, Nate Hochman — a radical young conservative writer who later staffed both Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Eric Schmitt — talks at length about 'the masterful things the conservative movement institutionally has done in terms of mentorship.' Hochman, who was raised in a liberal household and moved to the right in college, describes how the movement's fellowship programs brought him in direct and meaningful contact with conservatism's leading lights. 'All of a sudden, you're at dinner with people you've looked up to for years, staying up until 1 am drinking wine with them and asking them questions and getting to talk to them. And they're taking you seriously,' Hochman says. As part of these pipeline programs, older right-wingers get to know young up-and-comers as people, and thus develop a personal stake in their success. When you stay up late drinking with someone, talking about shared ideas, you come to care about them in a way you don't if they sent you a cold email. When they come looking for help getting a job writing about conservative ideas, you'll work that much harder to place them in one. And the right has built its institutions to ensure that such positions are available. Right-wing publications and think tanks are much more open to debating big-picture questions — say, what kind of a nation is America? — than their left-wing peers (more on that in a second). Claremont, for example, was founded by students of conservative political philosopher Harry Jaffa, and it shows in the kind of work they put out (even when it strikes me as substantively ridiculous). Liberals are suffering from success There is no parallel culture in American liberalism — a function, in part, of liberalism's longtime intellectual dominance. There wasn't much of a need for liberal donors to create programs to cultivate liberal thought, as people interested could simply go get a PhD or an entry-level reporting job. However, these institutions were not avowedly liberal in character. They styled themselves as politically neutral, focused more on quality research and reporting, than as contributing to a particular ideological cause. This means that while liberals in such fields were in left-leaning environments, many were trained to see themselves primarily as professionals working a craft. So while there are plenty of internships available to young liberals, they're mostly focused on professional training (or coffee-fetching) rather than staying up late swapping ideas with big names. More broadly, the liberal professional approach also produced a kind of intellectual siloing. If you were a young liberal interested in political philosophy, odds are that you end up going to a PhD program and pursuing a career in academia. If you're interested in policy, odds are that you ended up studying a set of applied skills (like law or economics) that prepared you for very specific policy discussions in your area of expertise. But the conservative intellectual model bridges the philosophy-policy gap. It trains young people in the big-picture ideas, like conservative visions of political morality and religion, and teaches them to connect those things to everyday policy discussions. You aren't learning about abstract ideas or concrete policy, but rather learning a comprehensive worldview that treats policy issues as downstream of specific values. You are, in short, learning an ideology. Liberalism has plenty of brilliant theorists who work at a largely abstract level, and policy wonks who work on the most applied issues. But in the middle area of ideology, one bridging the gap between principle and policy, they've basically ceded the field to conservatism. The pipeline problem for young people is a symptom of the movement's blind spot: liberals, as a collective, don't care to cultivate a youth ideological cadre. This might not have been a problem in the past — and maybe even a benefit. Ideological thinking tends to produce rigidity, an unwillingness to adjust one's policy thinking based on new evidence. The right's longtime insistence that tax cuts can reduce deficits, or addiction to proposing military solutions to foreign policy problems, are two examples of curdled ideology. But we're at a moment where liberalism is in a particular kind of crisis: under threat from new ideologies that challenge not specific liberal policy ideas, but the basic premises of a liberal political system. Liberals need a new and compelling vision: one that explains why our ideas are not merely a defense of an unpopular status quo, but a broader politics that can be used to address cardinal problems of the 21st century. At this moment, liberals lack the personnel to articulate such a vision — while the right's radical thinkers, at places like Claremont, seize the field.
San Francisco Chronicle
26 minutes ago
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Letters: Recall of Supervisor Joel Engardio is a warning shot to other S.F. politicians
Regarding 'Endorsement: No on Joel Engardio recall. Yes on charter reform' (Editorials, Aug. 16): The editorial board disagrees with over 10,000 District 4 voters who signed the recall petition: San Francisco Supervisor Joel Engardio's offenses warrant an immediate vote rather than waiting until the 2026 election to remove him from office. The disconnect is not surprising: For months, the thrust of the Chronicle's news reporting and opinion writers has been that the reason for the recall is that Engardio championed Proposition K to turn the Great Highway into a park. He did not notify District 4 voters about plans to introduce Prop K. Months before submitting Prop K, he met with groups supporting the highway closure, but gave no opportunity to those opposed to lobby or argue through public meetings or other venues. He submitted Prop K at the last minute, so that no competing proposition could be placed on the ballot. He promised traffic issues would be addressed before the Great Highway was closed. Many District 4 voters disagree with the editorial board and view Engardio's 'insufficient outreach' not as a 'political misstep' but as a callous disregard for basic democratic processes. A successful recall sends a warning to politicians: They ignore and disrespect their constituents at their political peril. John Higgins, San Francisco Have hybrid elections Before the city first switched to district elections in 1977, supervisors were concentrated in a few wealthy neighborhoods. The first district elections corrected that, but without a high voter turnout, it resulted in more fringe candidates. Maybe now is the time to retain residency diversity for selecting the top two candidates per district, but make them accountable to all the city voters in a runoff. To me, this is better than adding new at-large supervisors Ann Carberry, Sacramento Trump's claims are baseless Regarding 'Oakland leaders should listen to what Trump's criticism gets right about city' (Letters to the Editor, Aug. 19): While Oakland has problems — like most cities — the headline for the letter in the print edition ('Trump's criticisms are based on reality') is wrong. For one thing, President Donald Trump did not mention and does not pretend to address the issues the letter raises — businesses closing and underfunding of schools — issues that the city government is addressing and that the president's policies are exacerbating. Trump just talks about crime, when the reality is that crime is down in Oakland. So his criticism is not based on reality at all; rather, it is based on his desire to sow fear and to establish what he hopes will be a police state through the deployment of military force in American cities. Trump doesn't care about Oakland; he cares about power. That is reality. Clyde Leland, Berkeley Penalize Sen. Schiff Regarding 'Trump's motivation for accusing Adam Schiff of fraud is clear. But the legal case is not' (Politics, Aug. 15): As the law states, you can have only one primary residence, it has zero exemptions, and the language is quite simple. You can have only one and meeting the requirements is clearly spelled out. Sen. Adam Schiff has zero special status, just like the other 534 members of the House and Senate, nor do the head of any corporation, legal firm, state, local or city government. The story's attempt to present Schiff's side on a clear violation of tax law falls on deaf ears. Schiff should pay all back taxes, penalties and be happy he's not expelled from the Senate. James Sandler, Pleasanton
Newsweek
an hour ago
- Newsweek
China Is the Big Winner of the Trump-Putin Summit
Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the interpretation of facts and data. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. The clear winner of the recent Anchorage summit was not the United States or Russia. Nor was it the European Union, NATO, or Ukraine, all directly affected by the war in Eastern Europe. The big winner, at least for the moment, is the People's Republic of China. And China's only military ally, North Korea, did not do too badly either. Both Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at their post-meeting press conference tried to create the impression of momentum toward ending the three-year-old conflict in Ukraine. Putin used the word "agreement" and Trump mentioned "great progress." Russian President Putin and President Donald Trump pose for a photo during the welcoming ceremony prior to the meeting on the war in Ukraine on August 15, 2025, in Anchorage, Alaska. Russian President Putin and President Donald Trump pose for a photo during the welcoming ceremony prior to the meeting on the war in Ukraine on August 15, 2025, in Anchorage, Alaska. Getty Images Nonetheless, it was clear that the summit was a disappointment for the American side. There was, for instance, no ceasefire, which Trump publicly said he wanted. "There's no deal until there's a deal," an uncharacteristically somber Trump said after the shorter-than-expected face-to-face with Putin. "We didn't get there." No, they didn't. And no deal is precisely what China was looking for. Beijing, from all indications, hopes that the war in Ukraine will continue indefinitely. Hong Kong's South China Morning Post reported that Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told Kaja Kallas, the EU foreign policy chief, on July 2 that China does not want Russia to lose because then the U.S. would focus on China. In addition to the continuation of the conflict, the Chinese leadership got something else on Friday. "For Beijing, the Alaska summit confirmed its core belief: The world is a stage for great-power bargains over spheres of influence," Charles Burton of the Prague-based Sinopsis think tank told Newsweek. China's regime, which has a top-down concept of the world, likes the idea of big countries, by themselves, settling the world's problems. "Now, there is a crucial precedent for a future summit between Trump and the Chinese leadership, where China would press for major concessions in East Asia," Burton said. One of those concessions would be American diplomatic recognition of North Korea, noted Burton, who was a Canadian diplomat in Beijing. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea, China's only formal military ally, also has an interest in the continuation of the war in Ukraine. "The Kim regime is likely content to see the United States diplomatically engaged on other fronts," Greg Scarlatoiu, president and CEO of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, told Newsweek. "That will buy Kim Jong Un more time to continue his for-profit exportation of instability, violence, and tools of death." Kim has filled regime coffers via the sales of artillery shells and short-range ballistic missiles to Putin—28,000 containers of weapons according to one recent count. Kim also sent soldiers, up to 12,800 troops, to the Russian-Ukrainian battlefield late last year. Moreover, the North is dispatching perhaps 30,000 more of them now. That will be on top of combat engineers and miscellaneous workers. Russia, according to South Korean intelligence, is paying Kim $2,000 per month per trooper. Russia is reportedly transferring weapons tech to the North as well. Whatever Putin is paying or bartering, the Ukraine war has been a bonanza for the Kim regime. Yet a proverb from ancient China reminds us, "No feast lasts forever." Trump can end the Chinese banquet quickly if he imposes costs on Russia and its enablers. He will, for instance, have to hit China hard to cut off its flow of cash to Moscow. No cash for Putin means no war in Ukraine. On August 6, Trump by executive order imposed a 25 percent additional tariff on India for buying Russian oil, but he did not tariff China, which purchases even more of that commodity from Russia. Trump last Friday said he did not think he had to tariff China at this time. In a conversation with Fox News' Sean Hannity immediately after his meeting with Putin, the president said, "I may have to think about it in two weeks or three weeks or something. But we don't have to think about that right now. I think, you know, the meeting went very well." Whether the meeting with Putin went well or not—we will know only later—Trump cannot entice bad actors with reason alone; he needs to give them incentives to stop doing what they're doing. For the moment, Russia and supporters are trying Trump's patience, seeing how far they can push him. As a result, the American leader is taking heat for what looks like weak diplomacy. My sense is that Trump is trying to be generous. There is, however, only so much generosity in global politics. Trump could end his indulgent policies soon, especially if Putin continues to be intransigent. "Trump is losing patience," said Burton, the former diplomat. "The Russians, Chinese, and friends should watch out. When Trump decides it's time to hit them, he is going to hit them really hard." Gordon G. Chang is the author of Plan Red: China's Project to Destroy America and The Coming Collapse of China. Follow him on X @GordonGChang. The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
