Marc Seawright, a queer trans man, says he faced workplace discrimination at the federal agency that is supposed to fight it.Mother Jones; Jeff Chiu/AP
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was established by the 1964 Civil Rights Act to enforce anti-discrimination laws in workplaces across the country. But under the Trump administration, the federal agency tasked with helping workers who experienced hostile work environments became a hostile work environment itself, according to one judge’s recent ruling.
EEOC Director of Information Governance and Strategy Marc Seawright was “forced to resign because EEOC leadership engaged in discrimination against transgender employees, including the claimant,” Mary Shea, an administrative judge for the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, wrote in a ruling this month, determining Seawright had “good cause” to resign in June. As a result, Seawright is eligible for unemployment benefits while his formal discrimination complaint remains under review by the EEOC.
“Being forced to create the information technology that would systematically erase all EEOC references to transgender, non-binary, or other LGBTQ+ people, given that I am a queer transgender man, was personally devastating…”
Before his resignation, the information technology specialist had spent the last eight years working on projects that enabled the EEOC to carry out its core mission: preventing and fighting workplace discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy status, disability, and genetic information. Among Seawright’s proudest contributions was an app he developed that enabled colleagues to display their pronouns across agency systems. Seawright, who identifies as a queer trans man, has also served as an employee-elected board leader of the agency’s LGBTQ+ employee resource group; that is, until the Trump administration’s newly appointed EEOC chair, Andrea Lucas, disbanded it in January.
The same month, EEOC staff were instructed that any recognition of transgender and non-binary people needed to be “systematically erased” in both the EEOC’s internal and external materials, Seawright explained in a formal complaint against the agency in March, before his resignation.
“What made it more disturbing,” he wrote, “was my forced involvement in making it happen.”
Specifically, Seawright was instructed that he had to develop a technological process for the EEOC to scan and censor “any mention of transgender, non-binary, or sexual orientation” from agency materials.
“Being forced to create the information technology that would systematically erase all EEOC references to transgender, non-binary, or other LGBTQ+ people, given that I am a queer transgender man, was personally devastating and contributed to a hostile work environment,” he said in his complaint.
Seawright’s complaint is not only about what he was instructed to do at work, but also about what he was prevented from doing amid the EEOC’s efforts to “marginalize me and my role.” Among other things, he says he was booted from network systems he needed to do his job and left off meeting invitations about initiatives he was supposed to be leading.
“The conditions of my employment have continued to deteriorate and I expect they will become worse as Acting Chair Lucas takes further steps to discriminate against transgender employees,” his complaint said.
Meanwhile, elsewhere at the agency, EEOC staff were instructed to stop processing complaints from workers alleging LBGTQ+ discrimination. As I previously reported, the EEOC even moved to dismiss its own active lawsuits against companies that had been credibly accused of discriminating against trans and non-binary workers. Seawright’s complaint says that the EEOC’s internal non-discrimination and inclusion policy regarding gender identity and sexual orientation, which has existed since at least 2009, was also rescinded by Lucas.
These changes aren’t just ironic, given that they occurred at the government agency tasked with fighting discrimination; they are also at odds with a 2020 Supreme Court decision. In Bostock v. Clayton County, conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch (a Trump appointee) concluded that discrimination based on transgender identity or sexual orientation is inherently discrimination based on sex, and therefore prohibited by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
“Andrea Lucas’ actions refusing to process charges of gender identity discrimination and harassment is directly contrary to the Supreme Court’s interpretation,” says Rebecca Peterson-Fisher, a lawyer representing Seawright.
Before Seawright can sue in federal court, he has to give the EEOC until December to finish reviewing his complaint. After that, his attorneys can ask a jury to decide whether the EEOC was a hostile work environment. But for now, at least one judge in the US has said just that.
“The totality of evidence supports the finding that the claimant’sworking conditions were so onerous as to constitute a threat to the physical wellbeing of the claimant,” concluded Shea, the California unemployment appeals judge. “The claimant had no alternative but to quit for the sake of his own health and safety.”
