A federal judge in Texas has completed a guidance of a government agency, which set protection against harassment at the workplace based on gender identity and sexual orientation.
Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk from the US district court for the northern district of Texas found on Thursday that the Commission for Equal Employment Opportunity in the United States exceeds its legal authority when the authority consciously meets the wrong pronunciation for an employee who meets them with gender that meets the employee, which the employee the employee of employees who refused after the relief of employees, after the employee of employees, after the damage with the employee who corrected them with the employee, after the move of clothes that refused by the employee.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act from 1964 protects employees and applicants from discrimination against discrimination based on employment discrimination based on breed, color, religion, gender and national origin.
The EEOC, which forces anti -discrimination laws at the workplace, had updated its instructions for harassment at the workplace in April last year as part of President Joe Biden for the first time in 25 years. This was followed by a judgment of the Supreme Court of 2020 that gays, lesbian and transgender are protected from discrimination based on the employment relationship.
The Texas and the Heritage Foundation, the conservative Think Tank behind Project 2025, questioned the instructions in August, which the agency says that employers assess compliance with the anti -discrimination laws and are not legally binding. Kacsmaryk disagreed and wrote that the instructions “mandatory standards … from which legal consequences are necessarily flowing if an employer does not comply.”
The decision marks the latest blow to protect the workplace for transgender workers after President Donald Trump was stated on January 20 that the government would only recognize two “unchangeable” sexes – male and female.
Kacsmaryk, a Trump candidate from 2017, has made all parts of the EEOC guidelines invalid, which includes “sex” as “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as well as an entire section that deals with the topic.
“Title VII does not require that employers or courts blind the biological differences between men and women,” he wrote in the statement.
The President of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, praised the decision in an e -mail declaration: “The EEOC of Biden EEOC tried to force companies – and the American people – to refuse the basic biological truth. Today, thanks to the Great State of Texas and the work of my cultural colleagues, a federal judge said.”
He added: “This decision is more than a legal victory. It is a cultural. It means no – you don’t have to give common sense to the altar of the left ideology. You don’t have to pretend that men are women.”
The Attorney General of Texas, Ken Paxton, also announced the victory against “bidens” pronoun “pronoun” pronoun “rule” on Friday: “The Federal Government has no right to force Texans to play together with delusions or to ignore biological reality at our jobs.”
The National Women’s Law Center, which submitted an Amicus letter in November to support the harassment instructions, gave the decision in an explanation given by e -mail.
“The decision of the district court is outrage and in contradiction to the precedent of the Supreme Court,” said Liz Theran, Senior Director of Litigation for Education and Workplace Justice at NWLC. “The nuisance instructions of the EEOC reminds the employer and employee to do an easy thing that should not cost anyone: refuses to be used, based on their identity and what they love. This decision does not change the law, but it will be for LGBTQIA+ workers to enforce their rights and to experience their rights and to experience a work that freely get from work.”
Kacsmaryk offered a closer interpretation of Bostock against Clayton County, the Landmark case of the Supreme Court, the protection of discrimination for LGBTQ+ employee, and said in his decision that the Supreme Court “had refused to expand the definition of” sex “beyond the biological binary date and only found that workers did not Firefighters for gays or transgay systems or transgelate lawyers or transgogies could not be.
The occupational lawyer Jonathan Segal, a partner at Duane Morris who advises companies, how the anti -discrimination laws can best comply with, emphasized that legal minds could not agree to the scope of Bostock, and Kacsmary’s decision is only an interpretation.
“If you assume that a transgender employee has no rights that are not released for the transgender status, you will probably interpret your rights closer to both federal and state law”, which would put employers in a risky position, said Segal.
And regardless of whether express instructions are available, employers must continue to address the employers in conflicts of gender identity at work, according to Tiffany Stacy, a lawyer of Ogletre Deakins in San Antonio, who defends employers against claims due to the workplace.
“From the management’s point of view, employers should be willing to spread these situations,” said Stacy.
In the 2024 financial year, the EEOC received more than 3,000 charges for discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity and over 3,000 each, over 2023, according to the agency’s website.
The US Ministry of Justice and the EEOC refused to comment on the result of the case in Texas.
The incumbent chairman of EEOC, Andrea Lucas, a Trump representative, voted against the harassment guidelines last year, but could not withdraw or revise after Trump released two of the three democratic commissioners and left the Federal Authority without Quorum to make crucial political changes.
But at the beginning of this month, Trump typed on an assistant US lawyer in Florida, Brittany Panuccio to fill one of the vacancies. If Panuccio is confirmed by the Senate, the EEOC would regain a quorum and build up a republican majority with 2: 1, which clears the way to completely turn the agency in order to concentrate on Trump’s priorities.
“It is neither harassment nor discrimination against the fact that a company gives distinctions between the sexes in the provision of individual gender baths,” wrote Lucas in a statement in which she expressed her contradiction to this aspect of the guidelines.
In her four-month term as deputy chairman, Lucas revised the interpretation of the Civil Rights Act by the agency, including the submission of seven of his own cases, in which transgender workers claim to instruct discrimination based on discrimination, prevent all innovations received by the agency.
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