EEOC Reverses Course, Says Federal Agencies May Bar Trans Workers From Opposite-Sex Bathrooms

On a vast Army post in the Kansas Flint Hills, a civilian IT specialist spent years using the men’s restroom at work without incident. That changed in the summer of 2025, when she told her supervisors at Fort Riley that she is a woman and asked to use the women’s restrooms and locker rooms.

The Army refused, citing a new White House directive requiring federal agencies to separate “intimate spaces” by biological sex. Her discrimination complaint eventually reached the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Late last month, the case produced a ruling that reaches far beyond one base.

A 2-1 EEOC ruling with broad reach

In a 2-1 vote on Feb. 26, the EEOC concluded that federal agencies may lawfully maintain single-sex bathrooms and similar facilities and may exclude employees — including transgender employees — from spaces designated for the opposite sex, so long as equivalent facilities are provided.

The decision, issued in the EEOC’s federal-sector appellate process, overturns a 2015 precedent that had treated denial of bathroom access consistent with gender identity as sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It applies directly to the roughly 2.3 million civilian employees of federal agencies and is binding on those agencies in handling internal discrimination complaints.

It does not change the text of Title VII, does not apply directly to private employers and does not bind any federal court. But it marks a sharp turn in how the government’s primary workplace civil rights agency interprets sex discrimination in the federal workplace — and sets up a likely clash with courts that have extended protections to transgender people over the past decade.

The Fort Riley dispute and a new executive order

The case arose after the Fort Riley employee, a transgender woman whose name has not been made public in EEOC documents, was denied access to women’s restrooms and locker rooms after informing supervisors of her gender identity. The Army cited Executive Order 14168, signed by President Donald Trump on Jan. 20, 2025, which directs federal agencies to recognize only two immutable biological sexes and to designate restrooms, locker rooms and other intimate spaces strictly on that basis.

In its press release announcing the decision, the EEOC stated that Title VII “permits a federal agency employer to maintain single-sex bathrooms and similar intimate spaces” and “permits a federal agency employer to exclude employees, including trans-identifying employees, from opposite-sex facilities.”

Overturning a 2015 precedent

The ruling explicitly overturns the portion of the 2015 decision in Lusardi v. Department of the Army that addressed bathroom access based on gender identity. In Lusardi, the EEOC had held that denying a transgender woman access to the women’s restroom, and limiting her to a single-user facility, constituted sex discrimination and contributed to a hostile work environment.

This time, the Commission’s majority reached the opposite conclusion. Chair Andrea R. Lucas, a Trump appointee who led the decision, argued that separating bathrooms and similar spaces by biological sex is consistent with Title VII, not in conflict with it.

“Biology is not bigotry,” Lucas said in a statement, adding that federal law “permits employers to recognize the real and enduring differences between men and women in intimate spaces.”

The majority reasoned that men and women are “not similarly situated” in restrooms, locker rooms and showers, and that maintaining sex-specific facilities does not constitute unlawful disparate treatment. It emphasized what it called a “vital privacy interest” in such spaces, particularly for women managing menstruation, pregnancy or lactation.

According to the decision, allowing employees to use facilities in line with their gender identity rather than their sex assigned at birth would “effectively do away with single-sex facilities,” because “all bathrooms would be mixed-sex by law.”

The ruling also leans on the absence of a Supreme Court decision directly requiring employers to grant transgender workers access to bathrooms matching their gender identity. The majority said it relied on “traditional tools of statutory construction” to interpret Title VII, focusing on what it described as the ordinary public meaning of “sex” when the law was enacted in 1964.

Commissioner Brittany Panuccio, another Trump appointee confirmed in 2025, joined Lucas in the majority. Panuccio has previously aligned with Lucas in votes rescinding Biden-era guidance that had treated misgendering and bathroom exclusion as potential forms of harassment.

Dissent warns of safety and legal conflict

The EEOC’s lone Democratic commissioner, Kalpana Kotagal, issued a forceful dissent.

Kotagal wrote that the ruling “rests on the false premise that transgender workers are not worthy of the agency’s protection from discrimination and harassment and that protecting them threatens the rights of other workers.”

“Worse, it suggests that transgender people do not exist,” she added.

Kotagal warned that the decision “fails to grapple with the consequences” for transgender employees, including increased risks to their safety and health and the possibility that some agencies could be found liable in court even if they prevail before the EEOC. She noted that many courts have treated bathroom exclusion, combined with other conduct, as contributing to a hostile work environment.

How Bostock and Biden-era guidance fit in

The Fort Riley decision comes against the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, which held in a 6-3 opinion that firing employees for being gay or transgender is discrimination “because of sex” under Title VII. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion did not address bathrooms or locker rooms, leaving that issue for future cases.

In the years following Bostock, the EEOC and other agencies under President Joe Biden issued guidance interpreting the ruling to cover access to restrooms and other facilities consistent with gender identity. In 2024, the Commission updated its harassment guidance to state that bathroom bans and repeated misgendering could amount to sex-based harassment.

That guidance was challenged by conservative state officials and vacated in part by a federal judge in Texas in 2025. In January, the EEOC’s new majority, with Lucas as chair, rescinded the guidance altogether in a 2-1 vote over Kotagal’s objection.

Executive Order 14168 and subsequent guidance from the Office of Personnel Management have pushed federal agencies in the opposite direction of the Biden-era policy. An OPM memorandum issued in 2025 instructed agencies to redesignate multiuser restrooms, locker rooms and similar spaces based solely on biological sex and to remove references to gender identity from personnel policies.

Reaction from advocacy groups and conservatives

Advocacy organizations for LGBTQ+ people and women’s rights quickly condemned the new EEOC decision. The Human Rights Campaign said the Commission had sanctioned “anti-trans bathroom discrimination” in the federal workplace. The National Women’s Law Center released a detailed fact sheet arguing that “Title VII protects transgender workers’ access to restrooms” and that the EEOC’s ruling “does not change the rights workers have under Title VII” in court.

Civil rights lawyers point to data from the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, which found that 59% of respondents had avoided using public restrooms in the previous year because they feared harassment or confrontation. Nearly a quarter of employed respondents reported restroom-related mistreatment at work. Medical research has linked long-term restroom avoidance to urinary tract infections, kidney problems and other health issues.

“Policies that force transgender workers into the wrong restroom, or into far-away single-stall facilities, don’t just stigmatize them,” Kotagal wrote. “They can lead workers to starve and dehydrate themselves to get through the day.”

Conservative legal groups and religious organizations praised the EEOC ruling as a long-awaited correction. One group called it a “win for reality” and for “women’s spaces,” arguing that the Lusardi line of decisions had compelled women to share intimate facilities with men.

What happens next for agencies — and for private employers

The new interpretation does not compel agencies to change existing inclusive restroom policies, but it gives legal cover to those that choose to adopt or retain policies tied to sex at birth. In practice, civil rights lawyers say, the combination of Executive Order 14168, OPM’s directives and the EEOC’s stance will make restrictive policies more likely across the federal government.

For private-sector employers, the legal landscape remains unsettled. The EEOC’s federal-sector decisions do not directly apply to private workplaces, and many federal courts have held that excluding transgender employees from restrooms consistent with their gender identity can violate Title VII or state and local nondiscrimination laws. Employment attorneys say businesses, especially federal contractors, may feel political pressure to follow the government’s lead but face legal risk if they do.

The Fort Riley complainant can ask the EEOC to reconsider or file a civil lawsuit in federal court, where judges will apply Bostock and other precedent independently of the Commission’s view. Civil rights groups already suing the EEOC over its handling of transgender-related cases are expected to cite the new decision as further evidence that the agency is under-enforcing federal law.

For now, the ruling leaves transgender federal workers in a more precarious position. On paper, Title VII still prohibits discrimination “because of sex,” and Bostock still says that includes being transgender. Inside federal buildings, however, the agency that oversees their discrimination complaints has told their employers they may legally keep them out of restrooms and locker rooms that match who they are.