\n<\/p>\n
Dylan Bringuel isn\u2019t<\/span> sure what\u2019s worse: enduring what a federal agency identified as a \u201chostile work environment because of Bringuel\u2019s transgender status\u201d or that same agency abandoning them after committing to hold their employer accountable.<\/p>\n The first blow came in August 2022. Bringuel had just begun a housekeeping job at a Holiday Inn Express in Jamestown, New York. During the interview, Bringuel had been upfront about their gender identity and was told it wouldn\u2019t be an issue. But from the start, their manager made it one\u2014calling Bringuel \u201cit\u201d and a \u201cTransformer\u201d and, in a conversation a co-worker documented, blaming Bringuel for \u201cwhat is wrong with society.\u201d The day after reporting the harassment to supervisors, Bringuel was fired.<\/p>\n Bringuel was accustomed to such hostility, even from family members. So when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued the hotel\u2019s owner and operators on their behalf in September 2024, Bringuel was pleasantly surprised. \u201cSomebody actually listened,\u201d the now-29-year-old tells me through tears.<\/p>\n That feeling of being heard didn\u2019t last long. In February, shortly after President Donald Trump took office, the EEOC asked a judge to dismiss the harassment case it had initiated. To Bringuel, it seemed like the government was giving employers permission to openly discriminate against trans workers. \u201cIt makes me feel that at any point, somebody can just do something that hurts me physically, not just mentally or emotionally,\u201d Bringuel says.<\/p>\n Bringuel wasn\u2019t alone. Citing Trump\u2019s day-one executive order against \u201cgender ideology extremism,\u201d the EEOC submitted motions to dismiss all seven of its active cases pertaining to trans and nonbinary people. Dismissing the cases \u201cis discriminatory and directly violates the agency\u2019s core mission,\u201d warns an EEOC employee who asked to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation. \u201cWe\u2019re here trying to help people who have been discriminated against and disadvantaged.\u201d<\/p>\n Experts say the agency and the anti-discrimination laws it enforces are being weaponized to serve the interests of Trump\u2019s base.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n The EEOC receives more than 80,000 complaints<\/a> a year but only takes a few hundred to court\u2014typically the most egregious claims, says Jocelyn Samuels, a longtime civil rights lawyer and EEOC commissioner who was fired by Trump<\/a> in January. The agency\u2019s motions under Trump to dismiss these developed cases not only harmed the 14 directly involved plaintiffs\u2014people who the EEOC determined had been harassed about their genitalia, questioned about their sex lives, deadnamed, groped, or, like Bringuel, fired for reporting harassment\u2014but it signaled to institutions nationwide that the administration condones such discrimination. Experts say the shift is part of a broader trend in which the civil rights\u2013era agency and the anti-discrimination laws it enforces are being weaponized to advance the interests of Trump\u2019s long-standing base. As Karen Ortiz, an EEOC administrative judge who was fired in June,<\/a> puts it, his administration\u2019s goal is to turn the agency into a \u201cgrievance apparatus for white, straight, Christian people.\u201d<\/p>\n The racial reckoning that followed George Floyd\u2019s 2020 murder prompted institutions to make new commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Inflamed conservatives labeled the efforts as reverse racism and rushed to challenge them in court. In 2021, Stephen Miller, now Trump\u2019s deputy chief of staff, helped found America First Legal to, as he boasted, lead \u201cthe charge against racism targeting white, straight men.\u201d The organization\u2019s tactics<\/a> included sending\u2014and publicizing\u2014letters to the EEOC accusing corporations like Nordstrom, Tyson Foods, Anheuser-Busch, and Morgan Stanley of running DEI programs that purportedly discriminate against white people.<\/p>\n The conservative legal movement scored a big win in June 2023, when the Supreme Court ruled<\/a> that Harvard University could no longer weigh race in admissions. While the case was ostensibly about ensuring Asian students were treated fairly, groups like Miller\u2019s seized on the decision to go after DEI in the corporate sector. According to Michael Yelnosky, an employment law expert at Roger Williams University, their targets include efforts that are \u201clawful and that don\u2019t raise the issues that concerned the court\u201d in the Harvard case.<\/p>\n The EEOC\u2019s new acting chair, Andrea Lucas, has made the right\u2019s legal fight against DEI a full-blown government objective. Before she was first appointed as a commissioner at the agency intended to protect workers from harassment, Lucas worked as a litigator who helped successfully defend<\/a> Ford Motor Company against a lawsuit that included allegations it overlooked acts of racial and sexual harassment, including attempted rape, exposed genitals, racial slurs, unwanted touching, and penis-shaped objects being left on female plaintiffs\u2019 workstations.<\/p>\n On January 21, the day Trump promoted her to run the agency, Lucas vowed<\/a> her priorities would include<\/a> \u201crooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination.\u201d Within weeks, I heard from staff that she had ordered a pause on investigating complaints from LGBTQ Americans.<\/p>\n In March, she sent<\/a> public letters to 20 law firms, arguing that a photo of participants in a legal fellowship suggested the firms discriminated against white men. The picture in question, she wrote, documented \u201c20 law students, at least 14 of whom are black students, one of whom is an Asian student, and 8 of whom are women.\u201d While former EEOC officials say the agency is barred from publicizing employers it is actively investigating before filing suit, Lucas named and shamed the firms without identifying a single individual alleging discrimination. The tactics are increasingly reminiscent of America First Legal, which tried to grab headlines this summer by making an EEOC complaint against the Los Angeles Dodgers,<\/a> citing a commitment on the team\u2019s website to sponsor \u201cprograms geared to women and people of color.\u201d<\/p>\n While the EEOC did not respond to requests for comment, staffers say Lucas isn\u2019t merely perverting the agency\u2019s mission and defying established legal precedent by following in Miller\u2019s footsteps, but upending the EEOC\u2019s entire premise. \u201cI just chafe every time she sends an email out, because I know it\u2019s going to be ridiculous,\u201d Ortiz says, \u201cnot only against the mission of the EEOC, but against actual regulatory and Supreme Court holdings.\u201d<\/p>\n The landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act not only outlawed segregation in public places, but barred employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, national origin, or religion. To ensure this section\u2014known as Title VII\u2014was followed, Congress created the EEOC. It later expanded it to protect people from discrimination based on pregnancy, disability, and age; in 2020, the Supreme Court ruled Title VII also shields LGBTQ workers.<\/p>\n Title VII covers both majority groups and marginalized ones, and the EEOC has gone to bat for both. An EEOC database<\/a> tracking nearly 140 Title VII lawsuits it filed and settled over the last decade shows that the largest share, about a third, involved discrimination against Black or Hispanic people. About a quarter were sexual harassment, mostly against women. Only one settlement involved the targeting of white employees, when the EEOC won $60,000 for white workers<\/a> at a North Carolina Hampton Inn after a Black staffer repeatedly called them \u201cwhite trash\u201d and sabotaged rooms they cleaned. Those numbers make it impossible to suggest\u2014as Miller and Lucas do\u2014that white people are particularly targeted. \u201cThe vast weight of the evidence demonstrates that people still face barriers on the basis of race and sex and national origin and the existence of disability,\u201d Samuels says.<\/p>\n While it is a federal offense\u2014punishable by jail time\u2014for agency staff to leak preliminary charges to the press, an EEOC charging document targeting Harvard and issued at Lucas\u2019 sole discretion was published by the conservative\u00a0Free Beacon<\/em>\u00a0even though a formal legal complaint hadn\u2019t been filed in court. Over six pages, she accused<\/a> the university of \u201cengaging in a pattern or practice of disparate treatment against white, Asian, male, or straight\u201d job applicants and employees. Lucas cited data Harvard had made public to chart modest progress in diversifying its staff over the past decade. Those figures still show white men hold well over half of its tenured faculty positions\u2014far above their proportion in the US population.<\/p>\n Harvard academics and other job applicants who believe they\u2019ve faced discrimination over paleness or maleness can check out a how-to guide added to the EEOC\u2019s website after Trump put Lucas in charge: \u201cWhat To Do If You Experience Discrimination Related to DEI at Work.\u201d But for folks like Bringuel, who allege harassment because they are trans or nonbinary, there\u2019s little hope they\u2019ll find the Trump-era EEOC sympathetic. A staffer tells\u00a0Mother Jones<\/em>\u00a0that newly filed complaints involving harassment of a trans or nonbinary person are simply not being pursued: \u201cThey\u2019re sitting in a digital filing cabinet with no investigative steps taken whatsoever.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n