‘Biology is not bigotry’: Civil rights chief urges women to challenge trans policies
Women who have experienced transgender-identifying males invading their private spaces at work have grounds to file a claim with the government’s civil rights agency, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Andrea Lucas told The Daily Signal.
“I do think that it’s important for women to realize that they could have a claim if they are in a workplace, and they find that a male is in their private space,” she said. “That’s something I would take really seriously if someone was to file a charge about that.”
Women who have experienced males in their spaces should know the EEOC welcomes all charges, Lucas said.
“They should feel confident that there’s sanity at the federal level who aren’t gonna gaslight them,” she said.
The commission in January rescinded the “Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace.” That Biden-era document directed employers to allow males identifying as females to access women’s locker rooms, bathrooms, and private spaces.
“President Trump, when he came in, one of the first things he did was the defending women executive order, and one of the documents that he identified for rescission was this harassment guidance,” she said.
“It had taken the position that basically turned harassment law on its head and said that it not only was it not harassment to deny a man access to a woman’s space,” she added, “but that it would be harassment if you didn’t let that man into a woman’s space as long as the man self-identified as a woman.”
This deeply troubled Lucas, who saw it as an abuse of the limits of the commission’s authority.
“Between those concerns and the president’s executive order, it was time for the commission to take action,” she said. “And so at a public meeting, um, we chose to rescind it.”
Lucas, the mother of two girls, stands by the president’s position that “biology is not bigotry.”
“To take the position that women can’t actually have their own spaces at work, like locker rooms, changing rooms, bathrooms, showers, lodging places, is the definition of insanity,” she said. “And it’s absolutely not the law in my opinion.”
The civil rights board chair thinks the EEOC never had the authority to issue such guidance. Lucas doesn’t think the commission should issue new guidance to replace the Biden-era policy.
“While I certainly have my own personal opinions about how harassment law should be shaped, I don’t think in this particular context, we should be issuing guidance documents,” she said.
[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]