Trump-Era EEOC Wants to Protect Anti-Trans Businesses
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has started dismissing cases they have previously filed against businesses, which have been accused of discriminating against trans and nonbinary employees, in accordance with the violently anti-trans Trump administration.
Federal court records show that the EEOC moved to dismiss four different cases, all related to discrimination based on employee gender identity, this past week. A slew of EEOC staff members have reported that they and their coworkers have been told not to look into any complaints pertaining to gender identity. This is a harrowing concept, as there are currently seven open cases related to gender identity under the EEOC.
For instance, one case involves a worker at a Holiday Inn Express in New York, who said that they were discriminated against using derogatory language such as “it” and “transformer” by their boss. When they reported it, they were told they weren’t a “good fit” for their role in the inn’s housekeeping service and shortly after, received notice that they’d been terminated from their position. The EEOC made motion to dismiss this case, citing “recent Administration policy changes” as their reasoning for doing so. Similarly, another case involved was a dismissal of a lawsuit from employees of a Wendy’s that said they experiences “pervasive sexual harassment including repeatedly subjecting the transgender employees to misgendering, graphic sexual comments, unequal access to bathrooms, intrusive questions, and degrading conduct based on gender identity”, and had their hours tacked down after expressing distaste to management.
It is worth noting that these motions to dismiss these gender identity-related cases go against a 2020 Supreme Court case decision headed by Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch. Bostock v. Clayton County concluded that firing an employee based on their sexual orientation or gender identity is a violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in a six-to-three majority. However, the treatment of these cases show, in writing and legal precedent, that the Trump administration is adamantly transphobic and reflects this harmful attitude in their policies, which ripples outwards and causes detriment to the country as a whole.
