The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted 2-1 Thursday to rescind its Biden-era workplace harassment guidance. The document had faced nearly two years of legal and political scrutiny challenging its provisions protecting transgender employees and employees who seek an abortion.
EEOC adopted the harassment guidance in April 2024, incorporating changes it said were shaped by developments like the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Ga. In that case, the high court held that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits workplace discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.
Among other things, the guidance took the position that illegal harassment could include: “outing” an employee; repeated and intentional use of a name or pronoun inconsistent with an individual’s known gender identity; and the denial of access to a bathroom or other sex-segregated facility consistent with the individual’s gender identity.
“We need to understand our place,” Chair Andrea Lucas asserted at the Thursday morning meeting. “We cannot make affirmative statements of policy interpreting Title VII. We can only make procedural rules that allow us to implement what Congress has set out.”
Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal, the commission’s lone Democrat, pushed back against the decision in her remarks, arguing the agency was “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” by rescinding the entire guidance. It had spent 10 years creating the document...
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