Texas is suing Biden again to block federal protections for transgender workers

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton returned to court Thursday to press his case against the Biden administration’s workforce protections for transgender employees.

The Texas lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court against the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice, claimed the agency’s guidelines were illegal and asked the court to block them permanently.

The EEOC’s guidance, released in April, aims to clarify what constitutes harassment under federal law. It states that denying employees accommodation for their gender identity – such as not allowing an employee to use the bathroom with their gender identity or repeatedly and intentionally using a name and pronoun that is inconsistent with their gender identity of a person – is illegal workplace harassment.

“Harassment, both in person and online, remains a serious problem in America’s workplace,” Charlotte Burrows, the agency’s president, said at the time. “The EEOC’s updated guidance on harassment is a comprehensive resource that brings together best practices for preventing and remediating harassment and clarifying recent developments in the law.”

The Texas lawsuit said the guidance “purports to preempt the state’s sovereign power to adopt and enforce its workplace policies” and raises “a forced choice to change its policies at taxpayer expense or ignore the Guidance and accept impending enforcement actions and increased costs. of litigation and liability.”

“The Biden-Harris administration is once again trying to rewrite federal law through undemocratic and illegal agency actions,” Paxton said in a statement. “This time, they’re illegally arming the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in an attempt to force private businesses and states to implement ‘transgender’ mandates — and Texas is suing to stop them.”

The lawsuit, which Texas filed with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, is a continuation of Paxton’s legal challenges to the Biden administration’s gender-affirming policies. It’s one of dozens of lawsuits Texas has filed against the federal government since Biden took office in January 2021, legal actions aimed at advancing some of the highest-priority conservative issues of the day.

In July, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk rejected an earlier request by Texas to block the EEOC’s May guidance without ruling on the merits of the request, saying the state’s challenge required a new complaint because it was filed against a new document. Thursday’s lawsuit was that new complaint and Paxton’s latest effort to block the Biden administration’s agenda.

In 2021, Texas sued the Biden administration over the EEOC’s previous guidance on how to determine what constitutes workplace harassment. Those guidelines — which included many of the same directives as the agency’s guidance in May — were implemented after the Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that Title VII of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination based on sex, applies to homosexuals. and transgender workers, too.

In that 2021 trial, Kacsmaryk ruled in Paxton’s favor, ruling that the Biden administration’s protections for LGBTQ employees went too far beyond the high court’s ruling.

Paxton filed the lawsuit again Thursday in Amarillo, where Kacsmaryk, an appointee of President Donald Trump, hears nearly all cases. Kacsmaryk was the first judge to be appointed directly from a religious liberty law firm. He previously worked at First Liberty, a conservative Christian law firm based in Plano, where he frequently litigated abortion, contraception and gender identity cases.

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