Last week, on the third day of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, a number of directors at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received an e-mail with a seemingly routine subject line: “Materials and Website Reviews.” Staff at the E.E.O.C., the federal agency that enforces Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and other anti-discrimination laws for millions of private- and public-sector workers, knew to expect fresh guidance on matters of policy, even on wording, during a Presidential transition. But this e-mail was different. It threatened the very mission of the agency and its workforce.
Thomas Colclough, who leads the E.E.O.C.’s Office of Field Programs and reports to the Republican appointee Andrea Lucas, the acting chair of the agency’s five-member bipartisan commission, wrote, “As you may know, the recent executive order eliminating D.E.I.A. and Gender Ideology require several updates and adjustments to our current practices.” He linked to two of Trump’s new executive orders: one calling for the termination of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility personnel and programs, and another citing “the biological reality of sex” to argue that trans and non-binary people need not be protected under civil-rights laws. Since the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, in which the Court ruled that it was unlawful to fire an employee for being gay or transgender, the E.E.O.C. had interpreted workplace non-discrimination laws to cover all L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ individuals. This meant, for instance, that anyone who believed that they’d been harassed, underpaid, or passed over for a job because of their gender identity or sexual orientation could come to any of the E.E.O.C.’s fifty-three offices and file a charge that would then be investigated—just as one could for being a woman or being blind. (In order to sue in court for federal workplace discrimination, a plaintiff must first “exhaust” the E.E.O.C. process.) The E.E.O.C. also trained government entities, employers, employees, and the general public on how to prevent harassment and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Now that seemed to be going away.
The e-mail instructed staff to “avoid discussions about, and remove all references, slide decks, and handouts on transgender status and gender transition”; to limit the “use of pronouns and etiquette”; to tell “outside presenters that these topics may not be discussed or used in any case materials.” Staff were also told to “limit discussions” of a pivotal E.E.O.C. document: an enforcement manual on workplace harassment that had been updated in 2024 to include “harassment based on gender identity.” It appeared that Lucas, the acting chair, was intent on the E.E.O.C. being among the first agencies to implement Trump’s orders, even though they ran counter to the basic tasks of the agency. “I think she thinks that other agencies are looking to the E.E.O.C. because we have subject-matter expertise. Like, ‘This is how you clamp down on trans people, enforce the gender binary,’ ” a former lawyer at the E.E.O.C. told me.
Separately, staff who had worked on diversity-and-equity initiatives were prohibited from doing anything related to D.E.I.A. It wasn’t clear what that meant. Where did D.E.I.A. end and basic enforcement of civil-rights laws—which the E.E.O.C. was founded to carry out, in 1964—begin? Several current employees, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, said that they were confused about the extent to which they were allowed to complete their everyday duties: opening investigations into alleged discrimination or harassment, conducting training, even doing intake interviews with complainants. In the fiscal year 2023, the E.E.O.C. received more than eighty-one thousand charges of discrimination or harassment, some twenty-five thousand of which were based on sex. There was an abiding sense that “our mission has been inverted,” one current staff member told me. “All of the signals we’re getting is that we’re now going to be stopping the enforcement we did before and actively going against protecting people.”
Two days later, various employee affinity groups that are permitted by federal regulation and had been encouraged under the Biden Administration—including E.E.O.C. Pride, military veterans (who make up about a third of E.E.O.C. staff), Blacks in Government, Peace Corps alumni, E.E.O.C. Employees with Disabilities—were called into a last-minute meeting, via Microsoft Teams. They were told that all such groups would have to disband and cease their activities, which included outreach to employers and employees. They were told that a software feature that enabled workers to have their preferred pronouns appear after their name in Teams meetings and Outlook e-mails would be eliminated. Someone asked whether Black History Month could still be celebrated; the answer was no.
Over the weekend, agency staff exchanged calls and texts with one another, trying to make sense of the chaos. Those who are queer and transgender wondered whether they would be forced out of their jobs. “People aren’t sure they are allowed to say their pronouns,” the current employee said. “I don’t even think they can use the word ‘trans’ safely at work.” Those with trans spouses and kids worried about losing access to gender-affirming health care. (This week, Trump signed an order prohibiting minors from accessing such care, which he called “chemical and surgical mutation.”) The State Department, citing Trump’s executive order on gender identity, announced that it would no longer issue passports with the non-binary gender marker “X.”
On Monday, as Trump signed an order effectively banning trans people from the military, E.E.O.C. enforcement staff were under the impression that they should no longer investigate complaints of discrimination based on gender identity, and that existing cases would be “frozen.” Late that night, the Administration fired the E.E.O.C’s general counsel, Karla Gilbride, and two Democratic commissioners who were well known for their advocacy on L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ issues—Charlotte Burrows and Jocelyn Samuels. It is common for a new President to replace the general counsel, but there is really no precedent for commissioners being fired on partisan grounds. (Trump had, in fact, appointed Samuels to the commission during his first term. When I asked the White House about the firings, an official said in an e-mail, “These were far-left appointees with radical records of upending longstanding labor law.”) Removing two of the four commissioners did away with the quorum that allows the E.E.O.C. to fulfill many of its functions. “One of the things that firing me and Commissioner Burrows does is attempt to turn the E.E.O.C. into something more like a Cabinet agency, run by a single person from the Administration who dictates what policy is going to be,” Samuels told me. “And by fiat, this Administration is trying to erase the existence of trans people.”
Acting Chair Lucas put out a press release on Tuesday evening, making official the points in Colclough’s e-mail from the previous week. Under her leadership, she stated, the E.E.O.C. would make it a priority “to defend the biological and binary reality of sex.” She condemned the commission for “unlawfully expanding past Bostock’s dictates” by enforcing trans workers’ right to access bathrooms and other facilities of their choosing and to be safe from bullying in the workplace. But according to Kate Redburn, the director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School, in Bostock, “The Supreme Court said unequivocally that Title VII’s protections against workplace discrimination based on sex include discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.” (A spokesperson for the E.E.O.C. told me that Lucas reads Bostock as holding that discrimination based on “being homosexual or transgender,” but not based on “gender identity,” constitutes “sex discrimination.”)
By the time Lucas posted her statement, the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human-resources agency, had sent a mass e-mail pressuring all federal workers to fully embrace Trump’s agenda or resign. O.P.M. also issued guidance requiring all agencies to immediately amend all documents to “list male or female only” and to designate “intimate spaces . . . by biological sex and not gender identity”—in effect calling for the government to change its workplaces in a way that would likely have been judged unlawful by the E.E.O.C. two weeks ago. Staffers at the E.E.O.C. were alarmed, but those I spoke to were hoping to stay. “I’ve met with people just this week who’ve been through unspeakable things in their workplace,” another current employee said. “If people can be brave enough to come through our doors, and do a scary thing by speaking out against something they know is wrong, then we should be brave enough to keep doing our jobs.” ♦
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