Federal Judge Allows Gender Identity Lawsuit Against Trump-Appointed EEOC Chair to Proceed, Affirming Legal Rights of Transgender Workers

Federal Judge Allows Gender Identity Lawsuit Against Trump-Appointed EEOC Chair to Proceed, Affirming Legal Rights of Transgender Workers

Earlier this month, in Seawright v. Lucas, a federal judge denied Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) Chair Andrea Lucas’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed against her alleging gender identity discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. The plaintiff in the case, Marc Seawright, is a queer transgender man who served as Director of Information Governance and Strategy at the EEOC.

Federal law protects transgender and nonbinary workers from discrimination based on their gender identity. In 2020, the United States Supreme Court held that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which expressly prohibits sex discrimination in the workplace, protects against discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity “because it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.” Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644, 660 (2020).

However, on January 20, 2025, immediately after assuming office, President Trump issued Executive Order 14168, which declared it to be the policy of the United States to recognize two “unchangeable” sexes. Defining “gender ideology” as “permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa,” the Executive Order called for federal agencies to remove all internal or external messages that “promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology” and “end the Federal funding of gender ideology.” Trump appointed Lucas as Chair of the EEOC, the agency tasked with enforcing federal laws against workplace discrimination.

Lucas Targeted Transgender Employees in the Wake of Trump’s Executive Order.

As Seawright alleged in his lawsuit, following Executive Order 14168, under Lucas’s direction, the EEOC engaged in a series of actions targeting transgender employees. The agency withdrew from all active litigation it had been pursuing on behalf of transgender employees and directed its staff not to process new charges brought by people alleging discrimination based on gender identity. It revoked its internal “Non-Discrimination and Inclusion Policy Regarding Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation,” which had been in place since 2009, and issued a press release declaring, “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.”

Several of the EEOC’s actions impacted Seawright personally. Lucas directed the EEOC to remove all mentions of LGBTQ+ people and their rights from the EEOC’s outreach and training materials, remove the gender-neutral “Mx.” honorific option from EEOC systems, and replace the term “gender identity” with “transgender status.” As Director of Information Governance and Strategy, these changes were within Seawright’s scope of responsibility. The agency disbanded EEOC Pride, an LGBTQ+ employee resource group of which Seawright was an elected leader. And it dismantled an app that Seawright developed and implemented, which allowed employees to identify their pronouns in electronic communications. As Seawright alleged, these actions caused him distress. They took a toll on his mental and physical health, causing feelings of loss, anxiety, stress, depression, and hopelessness, and forcing him to take two weeks of personal leave. He feared for his safety at work, that he would be misgendered, and that his employer would no longer take his concerns about gender identity discrimination seriously.

In March 2025, Seawright filed an internal Equal Employment Opportunity complaint alleging discrimination and harassment based on sex, specifically gender identity and sexual orientation. He was initially unable to do so because the filing instructions no longer listed gender identity discrimination as a basis. A supervisor told him that he had “fallen out of favor” at the agency after he began discussing his concerns, and when he told another supervisor that he felt that the working environment at the EEOC had become hostile to transgender people, the supervisor responded that “it is very hostile. There is no doubt about it.” He was subjected to increasing marginalization, hostility, and exclusion after submitting his complaints, he alleged. On June 13, 2025, Seawright filed a formal Equal Employment Opportunity complaint. And on June 18^th, he announced that he was resigning from his position at the EEOC due to animus against transgender workers.

In April 2026, shortly after the EEOC issued its final agency decision on his complaint, Seawright filed his lawsuit in federal court alleging violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act: hostile work environment harassment, discrimination, and retaliation.

The Court Rejected Lucas’s Attempts to Dismiss Seawright’s Claims.

At the outset, Lucas argued that Seawright’s claims should all be dismissed because he had not suffered any concrete injury, calling his allegations “unactionable generalized grievances” and mere disagreements with the EEOC’s policy decisions. Lucas cited several cases to make this argument, including two where courts rejected the attempts of third parties to challenge EEOC policy under Lucas. However, as the court noted, Seawright’s “employment relationship with the Agency distinguishes his case from those relied upon by [Lucas], all of which involved citizens or third-party groups challenging government policies.” The court found that Seawright’s allegations provided examples of actions that personally and individually affected him, and that his injuries, which included emotional distress and lost wages, were concrete.

Lucas made similar arguments regarding Seawright’s hostile work environment harassment claim specifically, asserting that “what [Seawright] describes are policy directives and administrative decisions, not harassment, and such conduct is categorically outside the inquiry.” The court disagreed. In the Ninth Circuit, the test for harassment is whether the plaintiff was subjected to verbal or physical conduct connected to a protected characteristic. Okonowsky v. Garland, 109 F.4th 1166, 1178 (9th Cir. 2024). The court explained that this is “a description of the kind of conduct Title VII reaches, not a filter that excludes communications because they take the form of a written directive rather than a spoken remark.” Furthermore, as the court pointed out, many of the actions Seawright challenged were “verbal in the ordinary sense,” including the statements by supervisors and the EEOC’s press release. “That these statements were made during agency business does not remove them from the analysis,” the court held. Additionally, Seawright was not required to allege that Lucas’s actions targeted him specifically, because harassment “need not be directly targeted at a particular plaintiff in order to pollute a workplace and give rise to a Title VII claim.” Sharp v. S&S Activewear, LLC, 69 F.4th 974, 977 (9th Cir. 2023). In this case, the court held:

[The actions] at issue—allegations regarding Defendant’s denial of the legitimacy of transgender identity, condoning of misgendering, removal of the ability to identify pronouns and nonbinary honorifics in the EEOC’s systems, and actions to erase the existence of transgender people from the EEOC’s materials and block transgender complainants from obtaining the EEOC’s services—affect transgender people in a “unique and especially offensive way” and can reasonably be construed as expressions of anti-transgender hostility. See Sharp, 69 F.4th 974, 981.

The court also rejected Lucas’s argument that the challenged actions were not sufficiently “severe or pervasive” to affect Seawright’s working conditions, a requirement for a hostile work environment harassment claim. The court found that the challenged actions were “necessarily pervasive” as alleged, because they affected his daily working conditions: “he was no longer protected by any EEOC policy from harassment, he no longer had an employee resource group for support, all traces of the existence of the protected groups he belongs to were removed from EEOC materials, he could not use the App to identify his pronouns in electronic communications, and it became unclear whether he was permitted to use the men’s restroom at work.” See Lopez v. Mountain View Care & Rehab. Ctr., LLC, 2022 WL 202955, at *10.

Lucas made similar arguments regarding Seawright’s discrimination claim, which the court also rejected. Lucas argued that Seawright failed to show constructive discharge (i.e., that the working conditions were so intolerable that a reasonable person would be forced to resign), claiming that his resignation was values-based. But as the court noted, Seawright alleged “not only disagreement with Agency policy but escalating workplace conditions that personally affected him.” Lucas also asserted that Seawright’s discrimination claim failed because he did not identify similarly situated cisgender employees who were treated more favorably. The court disagreed, observing for instance, that the app Seawright developed and implemented was “disabled on the stated premise that pronoun display was unnecessary, a directive he alleges burdened transgender and nonbinary employees who, ‘unlike cisgender employees, face the daily fear of being misgendered.’”

Regarding Seawright’s retaliation claim, Lucas argued that Seawright’s “own timeline shows that most of the challenged Agency-wide policy conduct… predate[s] Plaintiff’s March 2025 internal report and complaint by weeks … and therefore cannot plausibly have been caused by that protected activity.” However, as the court observed, two of the challenged actions occurred one or two days after Seawright’s internal complaint, and the last occurred just over two months later. The court held that this was sufficient to show that each of these actions “was implemented close or on the heels of his complaints.” Ray v. Henderson, 217 F.3d 1234, 1244 (9th Cir. 2000).

California Workers Remain Protected from Gender Identity Discrimination Under Federal and State Law.

As mentioned above, in the wake of Executive Order 14168, the EEOC withdrew from its active litigation on behalf of transgender workers. In February 2025, the agency moved to withdraw from seven cases alleging gender identity discrimination, all of which were filed in 2024. Outside lawyers representing the workers quickly stepped up, lodging intervention petitions on behalf of the workers in each of the seven cases between February and April 2025. The ACLU intervened in one case, the Gender Equality Law Center in another, and plaintiff-side law firms took on the rest.

In one case, a transgender employee at a hog farm suffered harassment based on her gender identity. The court allowed the EEOC to exit the case and for the worker to intervene, holding that she “has an interest in her claims that [the employer] violated the law when she was employed there, and she deserves a fair opportunity to litigate them. The court will not allow the EEOC to deprive her of that opportunity by taking her on a dive along with it.” The parties ultimately reached a settlement in September 2025.

On July 10, 2025, the Washington Post reported that the EEOC would resume processing discrimination complaints filed by transgender workers, perhaps under pressure from Congress, although they would be subject to a heightened standard of review. The agency is unlikely to file any new lawsuits on behalf of transgender workers, at least with Lucas at the helm. Nevertheless, workers can still pursue federal gender identity discrimination claims after processing them through the EEOC. And state agencies, like California’s Civil Rights Department, will continue their administrative enforcement efforts. California has broad protections against discrimination based on “gender, gender identity, [and] gender expression.” Cal. Gov. Code § 12940.

If you believe that you have experienced discrimination in the workplace based on a protected class, such as your gender identity or sexual orientation, contact us at Bryan Schwartz Law, P.C.