Trans bathroom discrimination OK, says Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

This ruling will serve as a blank check to any federal agency looking to segregate trans people from the appropriate bathrooms.

By Jane Migliara Brigham

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) ruled yesterday that there is no legal precedent to barring trans people from single-sex bathrooms and other facilities.

The EEOC is the federal agency tasked with ensuring that employment discrimination does not occur in workplace practices.

The finding applies narrowly to federal agencies which are subject to the EEOC appeals process, covering millions of employees.

This ruling was based on last year’s executive order which defined biological sex as being immutable from birth. Since existing sex discrimination does not include a working definition of the term sex, that executive order is the highest standing source of such a definition. This means that trans people who change their sex and/or gender are not legally recognized to have done such, and as a result, can be barred from the relevant single-sex facilities.

This overturns the previous EEOC ruling on this topic, Lusardi v. McHugh, which held that sex discrimination rules applied to trans people in regards to how they currently lived, rather than how they were born, and that as a result, trans people have a right to use the bathrooms associated withe their current sex/gender.

This ruling will serve as a blank check to any federal agency looking to segregate trans people from the appropriate bathrooms.

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