Removing Gender Ideology and Restoring the EEOC’s Role of Protecting Women in the Workplace

WASHINGTON -- Today, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) Acting Chair Andrea Lucas announced that the agency is returning to its mission of protecting women from sexual harassment and sex-based discrimination in the workplace by rolling back the Biden administration’s gender identity agenda.

One of President Trump’s first executive orders was Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” Among other things, the executive order directed federal agencies to enforce laws governing sex-based rights, protections, opportunities, and accommodations to protect men and women as biologically distinct sexes, and to remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages promoting gender ideology.

Pursuant to Executive Order 14166, Acting Chair Lucas has taken the following actions to date:

• Announced that one of 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.
• Removed the agency’s “pronoun app,” a feature in employees’ Microsoft 365 profiles, which allowed an employee to opt to identify pronouns, content which then appeared alongside the employee’s display name across all Microsoft 365 platforms, including Outlook and Teams. This content was displayed both to internal and external parties with whom EEOC employees communicated.
• Ended the use of the “X” gender marker during the intake process for filing a charge of discrimination.
• Directed the modification of the charge of discrimination and related forms to remove “Mx.” from the list of prefix options.
• Commenced review of the content of EEOC’s “Know Your Rights” poster, which all covered employers are required by law to post in their workplaces.
• Removed materials promoting gender ideology on the Commission’s internal and external websites and documents, including webpages, statements, social media platforms, forms, trainings, and others. The agency’s review and removal of such materials remains ongoing. Where a publicly accessible item cannot be immediately removed or revised, a banner has been added to explain why the item has not yet been brought into compliance.

When issuing certain documents, the Commission acts by majority vote. Based on her existing authority, the Acting Chair cannot unilaterally remove or modify certain “gender identity”-related documents subject to the President’s directives in the executive order. Those documents include the Commission’s Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace (issued by a 3-2 vote in 2024); the EEOC Strategic Plan 2022-2026 (issued by a 3-2 vote in 2023); and the EEOC Strategic Enforcement Plan Fiscal Years 2024-2028 (issued by a 3-2 vote in 2023).

Acting Chair Lucas voted against each of these documents. In particular, Acting Chair Lucas has been vocal in her opposition to portions of EEOC’s harassment guidance that took the enforcement position that harassing conduct under Title VII includes “denial of access to a bathroom or other sex-segregated facility consistent with [an] individual’s gender identity;” and that harassing conduct includes “repeated and intentional use of a name or pronoun inconsistent with [an] individual’s known gender identity.”

Although Acting Chair Lucas currently cannot rescind portions of the agency’s harassment guidance that are inconsistent with Executive Order 14166, Acting Chair Lucas remains opposed to those portions of the guidance.

“Biology is not bigotry. Biological sex is real, and it matters,” Lucas said. “Sex is binary (male and female) and immutable. It is not harassment to acknowledge these truths—or to use language like pronouns that flow from these realities, even repeatedly.”

Lucas emphasized, “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. 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. And 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.’”

Lucas contended that the EEOC betrayed its mission by issuing the “gender identity” portions of the Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace: “The same agency that in the 1960s and 70s fought to ensure women had the right to their own restrooms, locker rooms, sleeping quarters, and other sex-specific workplace facilities—and established that it would be sex discrimination not to provide such women-only facilities—betrayed women by attacking their sex-based rights in the workplace. That must end.”

“The Commission’s harassment guidance was fundamentally flawed,” said Lucas. “It ignored biological reality, effectively eliminated single-sex workplace facilities, and impinged on all employees’ rights to freedom of speech and belief. In unlawfully expanding past Bostock’s dictates, the EEOC exceeded its authority. The EEOC must rescind the guidance and protect the sex-based privacy and safety needs of women.”

The EEOC is the sole federal agency authorized to investigate and litigate against businesses and other private employers for violations of federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination, including sexual harassment. For public employers, the EEOC shares jurisdiction with the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division; the EEOC is responsible for investigating charges against state and local government employers before referring them to DOJ for potential litigation. The EEOC also is responsible for coordinating the federal government’s employment antidiscrimination effort. More information about the EEOC is available at www.eeoc.gov. Stay connected with the latest EEOC news by subscribing to our email updates.

Source: U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC.gov)