Texas Judge Ends EEOC Protections for Trans Workers

Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an infamous Trump-appointed federal district judge in the state of Texas, has cherry-picked out sections of an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) guidance document that were written to protect trans people in the workforce.

The guidance document, issued last year, clarified that existing EEOC policies on harassment would include misgendering and otherwise discriminating against trans workers, providing hypotheticals of what was considered to be harassment on the basis of gender. Per the Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), discrimination on the basis of sex extends to gender identity as well, which allows for discrimination against trans people to be persecuted in a court of law. The document references Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination of employees on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

However, in his ruling, Kacsmaryk states that Bostock only prevents trans employees from being fired based on their gender identity, and he believes that there are no protections against harassment of trans people in the workplace within legal precedent. He said in his decision that the guidance document is contradictory to existing precedent set in Title VII, as it attempts to “(expand) the definition of ‘sex’ beyond the biological binary and requiring employers to accommodate an employee’s dress, bathroom, or pronoun requests.”

Kacsmaryk issued summary judgement—sending the case straight to judgment with no formal trial—on the lawsuit against the document, placed by the state of Texas and the Heritage Foundation (who authored the Project 2025 documents). He also vacated much of the language protecting trans people in the document, such as “(a)ll language defining ‘sex’ in Title VII to include ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity.'”

While this won’t impact any federal laws, it has effectively removed protections against anti-trans discrimination in the workplace from the American worker rights lexicon, and therefore, trans people bringing legal action against their employers through the EEOC will have a harder time pulling together a case to do so.

This isn’t the first time that Kacsmaryk has denied a “liberal” push for protections of the oppressed—In fact, it seems like he’s always at the scene of the crime, so to speak. In 2023, he suspended state approval for the abortifacient drug mifepristone, following the overturn of Roe v. Wade and the subsequent abortion ban in Texas in 2022. He also was at the forefront of rolling back Title IX protections for trans women in Texas last summer.