Texas Senate passes controversial transgender ‘bathroom bill’
The Texas Senate just passed a controversial transgender “bathroom bill.” The document now goes to Governor Greg Abbott’s desk for signature.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has announced that federal agencies can ban employees from using restrooms based on their gender identity, the latest in a series of moves by the Trump administration to boost transgender rights in the workplace.
The ruling reversed part of an earlier ruling that denied transgender federal employees access to the restroom that corresponds to their gender identity, a form of sex discrimination and harassment.
The committee’s Republican majority (2-1) cited President Donald Trump’s executive order recognizing only two genders: male and female. The order directed federal agencies to ban transgender individuals from same-sex spaces that match their gender identity.
Federal law “allows federal employers to maintain single-sex restrooms and similar intimate spaces; and permits federal employers to exclude employees, including those who identify as transgender, from opposite-sex-only facilities,” the ruling said.
Kalpana Kotagal, the committee’s only Democrat, disagreed.
“This decision is based on the false premise that transgender workers do not deserve government protection from discrimination and harassment,” Kotagal wrote.
Bathroom access is an unresolved legal issue
Whether employees should have access to restrooms that match their gender identity is an open legal question.
Kathryn Oakley, senior director of legal policy at the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group, said the decision acknowledged the lack of legal precedent for such decisions. He also said transgender federal employees are at risk of being barred from using restrooms, locker rooms and other private spaces consistent with their gender identity.
“Everyone should be able to go to work and provide for their families without facing discrimination or harassment just because of who they are,” Oakley said in a statement. “But it is precisely these hostile workplaces that this ruling encourages.”
Roger Severino, Vice President for Economic and Domestic Policy at the Heritage Foundation, praised the EEOC’s finding that “Federal Federal Reserve employees who identify as transgender do not have special access to restrooms, showers, or lockers of the opposite sex.”
“This is a huge victory especially for common sense, the rule of law and women’s spaces,” he wrote on social media platform X.
EEOC reverses position on transgender bathrooms
For more than a decade, the EEOC has maintained that discrimination based on an employee’s transgender identity is illegal. In 2020, the Supreme Court extended federal workplace protections to LGBTQ+ employees, ruling that discrimination based on transgender status “inevitably involves discrimination on the basis of sex.”
But siding with three employees who were fired because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, the country’s top court said it did not address “toilets, changing rooms, or anything like that.”
“Whether other policies or practices constitute unlawful discrimination is a matter for future litigation,” Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote.
During the Biden administration, the EEOC issued guidance stating that unlawful harassment in the workplace includes denying access to restrooms and other gender-segregated facilities based on a person’s gender identity.
Some courts agreed, but last May a federal judge in Texas watered down the guidance, saying the EEOC exceeded its statutory authority in “defining discriminatory harassment as not accommodating a transgender employee’s bathroom, pronoun, or clothing preferences.”
How office toilets joined the culture wars
The office bathroom, a mundane fixture of daily work life with its industrial metal cubicles and fluorescent lights, has become a major battleground in this country’s culture wars.
In recent years, bills challenging civil rights gains for LGBTQ+ Americans have swept through red state legislatures across the country. In 2016, North Carolina became a hub for the movement, passing a bill known as the “bathroom bill.” According to the Movement Advancement Project, one in three transgender people currently live in states with some level of bathroom restrictions.
After campaigning against what he called “transgender insanity,” Trump issued a directive during his second term rolling back protections and workplace policies for people who identify as transgender.
EEOC President Andrea Lucas said her top priority is to “protect the biological and binary realities of sex and related rights, including women’s rights to exploit homosexual spaces in the workplace.”
“This decision is consistent with the clear meaning of ‘sex’ as Congress understood it when it enacted Title VII, and with the long-standing civil rights principle that similarly situated employees should be treated equally,” Lucas said in a statement.
The Justice Department warned that “federally funded agencies” that allow men who identify as women to access same-sex spaces risk “compromising the privacy, safety, and equal opportunity of women and girls” and creating a hostile work environment.
This legal position has drawn pushback from former EEOC and Labor Department officials who have served in multiple presidential administrations and formed a group called EEO Leaders. EEO leaders have criticized efforts to “hide” all references to harassment based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
Although the Supreme Court took no position on these issues, EEO Leaders previously stated, “It is a serious misreading of the decision to argue that the court’s silence on these specific issues means that all harassment based on sexual orientation or gender identity is not prohibited discrimination.”
Some legal experts expect the Trump administration to extend bathroom regulations to the private sector, affecting about 2.1 million transgender adults, who make up less than 1% of the population.
Most employers prohibit harassment based on gender identity and strive to create an inclusive environment for transgender employees.
Lawyers say they are now faced with the conundrum of whether transgender individuals have the right to use the restroom of their choice, or whether there are co-workers who object to that when deciding which employees to admit.
