Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.
Recommended Videos
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton returned to court on Thursday to press his case against the Biden administration’s workforce protections for transgender employees.
Texas’s lawsuit, filed in federal court on Thursday against the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the U.S. Justice Department, argued that the agency’s guidelines were unlawful and asked that the court permanently block them.
The EEOC’s guidance, released in April, seeks to clarify what constitutes harassment under federal law. It states that denying employees accommodations for their gender identity — such as by prohibiting an employee from using the bathroom of their gender identity or repeatedly and intentionally using a name and pronoun that is inconsistent with a person’s gender identity — is unlawful workplace harassment.
“Harassment, both in-person and online, remains a serious issue in America’s workplaces,” Charlotte Burrows, the agency’s chair, said at the time. “The EEOC’s updated guidance on harassment is a comprehensive resource that brings together best practices for preventing and remedying harassment and clarifies recent developments in the law.”
The Texas suit said that the guidance “purports to preempt the State’s sovereign power to enact and abide by its workplace policies” and raises the “forced choice of either changing their policies at taxpayer expenses or ignoring the Guidance and accepting impending enforcement actions and increased costs of litigation and liability.”
“The Biden-Harris Administration is attempting yet again to rewrite federal law through undemocratic and illegal agency action,” Paxton said in a statement. “This time, they are unlawfully weaponizing 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 along 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 is one of dozens of suits Texas has brought against the federal government since Biden stepped into the White House in January 2021, legal steps that seek to advance some of the highest-priority conservative issues of the day.
In July, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk rejected an earlier request by Texas that it 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. The lawsuit on Thursday was that new complaint, and Paxton’s latest effort to stymie the Biden administration’s agenda.
In 2021, Texas sued the Biden administration over earlier EEOC guidance on how to determine what constitutes harassment in the workplace. Those guidelines — which included many of the same directives as the agency’s May guidance — were implemented after the Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that Title VII of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars employment discrimination on the basis of sex, applies to gay and transgender workers as well.
In that 2021 lawsuit, Kacsmaryk ruled in Paxton’s favor, deciding that the Biden administration’s protections for LGBTQ employees went too far beyond the high court’s ruling.
Paxton filed Thursday’s lawsuit again 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 Plano-based conservative Christian law firm, where he frequently litigated cases involving abortion, contraception and gender identity.
The full program is now LIVE for the 2024 Texas Tribune Festival, happening Sept. 5–7 in downtown Austin. Explore the program featuring more than 100 unforgettable conversations on topics covering education, the economy, Texas and national politics, criminal justice, the border, the 2024 elections and so much more. See the full program.