A judge has ruled this month that the anti-discrimination agency under President Donald Trump engaged in discrimination against a transgender employee, which the former worker called "devastating."
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, was formed under the 1964 Civil Rights Act to enforce anti-discrimination laws in American workplaces, Mother Jones reports. But a judge's ruling this month determined that under the Trump administration, "the federal agency tasked with helping workers who experienced hostile work environments became a hostile work environment itself."
EEOC Director of Information Governance and Strategy Marc Seawright, who identifies as a queer trans man, was “forced to resign because EEOC leadership engaged in discrimination against transgender employees, including the claimant,” administrative judge Mary Shea of the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board wrote in a ruling this month.
Shea found that Seawright had "good cause" to resign from his position in June. And due to the discrimination, he is eligible for unemployment benefits while the complaint is under review by the EEOC.
"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," Mother Jones reports. "Among Seawright’s proudest contributions was an app he developed that enabled colleagues to display their pronouns across agency systems."
Seawright was also the board leader of the agency's employee-elected LGBTQ+ employee resource group, but that changed when the Trump administration's new EEOC chair, Andrea Lucas, disbanded the group in January.
He was then instructed to develop a technological process for the EEOC to scan or censor agency materials for "any mention of transgender, non-binary, or sexual orientation."
In Seawright's complaint, he wrote:
“What made it more disturbing was my forced involvement in making it happen.”
“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.
He described getting pushed out of meetings and the network system he needed to access.
“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.
