EEOC Acting Chair Issues Statement on Gender Identity, Removes Guidance on Transgender Issues
On January 28, 2025, Andrea Lucas (R), the acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, issued a statement outlining her views on gender identity in the workplace, and listing a series of actions she has taken to “return” the agency “to its mission protecting women from sex-based discrimination in the workplace by rolling back the Biden administration’s gender identity agenda.” Among the actions Lucas identified that she has and will take to achieve this end include prioritizing compliance, investigations, and litigation to “defend the biological and binary reality of sex and related rights, including women’s rights to single sex spaces at work”; removing EEOC employees’ ability to indicate pronouns in their communications; eliminating the use of the non-binary “X” gender marker for charges; and removing materials “promoting gender ideology” on the Commission’s internal and external websites. Lucas’s statement comes on the heels of the president’s recent...