In most of New England, the question of whether transgender people may use bathrooms consistent with their gender identity has largely been settled. In New Hampshire, lawmakers are reopening it.

The Republican-controlled New Hampshire House voted 181–164 on Wednesday evening to pass House Bill 1442, legislation that would allow schools, government buildings, and some businesses to restrict bathrooms and locker rooms based on sex assigned at birth rather than gender identity. The bill now heads to the state Senate.

If enacted, the measure would place New Hampshire further out of step with the rest of the Northeast, where protections for trans residents in public accommodations remain broadly intact.

House Bill 1442 would require bathrooms and locker rooms in public schools and municipally owned buildings to be designated for male or female use based on sex. The bill also allows businesses and other places of public accommodation to require that multi-user restrooms be used according to what the legislation defines as a person’s “biological sex.”

The proposal goes further than many similar measures elsewhere by creating a new legal mechanism tied to restroom use. Under the bill, entering an area designated for females while classified as male under the statute could be considered “willful trespass.”

The legislation also establishes a statutory definition of sex that centers on biological characteristics such as chromosomes and reproductive anatomy, stating that a person’s gender identity does not determine access to spaces designated for males or females.

Supporters argue the legislation protects privacy in intimate spaces. Opponents say it singles out transgender people for exclusion and undermines civil rights protections that the state adopted less than a decade ago.

The vote follows several years of legislative attempts to pass similar restrictions, which repeatedly ran into gubernatorial vetoes.

Weeks ago, Gov. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican, vetoed a comparable proposal that would have allowed transgender people to be excluded from bathrooms, locker rooms, jails, and other gender-segregated spaces. It was the third time in as many years that a New Hampshire governor rejected similar legislation.

Ayotte said the earlier proposal was overly broad and risked creating an exclusionary environment.

Her predecessor, Chris Sununu, who is also a Republican, vetoed a similar measure in 2024, writing that lawmakers were attempting to address problems “that have not presented themselves.”

Yet the issue has returned to the legislature year after year.

Advocates say the persistence reflects a broader campaign targeting transgender rights in the state. According to the advocacy group 603 Equality, several bills introduced during the current legislative session attempt to regulate public facilities based on what lawmakers describe as “biological sex,” part of a wider slate of proposals affecting bathrooms, sports participation, and identification documents.

The group says House Bill 1442 is among the most “sweeping and cruel” of those proposals.

In 2018, New Hampshire added gender identity to its nondiscrimination law, becoming the final state in New England to extend those protections. At the time, the move appeared to complete a regional consensus on LGBTQ+ equality.

In recent years, however, that consensus has begun to fracture.

In 2025, Ayotte signed legislation banning gender-affirming medical care such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender minors, making New Hampshire the first state in New England to enact such a restriction.

Neighboring states, including Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, maintain broad protections for transgender residents across public accommodations and health care.

Even Maine, which, like New Hampshire, has long been politically competitive and regularly elects Republicans to statewide office, has not enacted comparable restrictions on transgender rights. Instead, Maine has become the focus of a separate political fight: a proposed ballot measure backed by national conservative donors that would bar transgender girls from school sports and require schools to separate bathrooms and locker rooms based on sex assigned at birth.

Advocates say such policies place transgender people in untenable situations, forcing them to choose between using facilities inconsistent with their gender identity or risking confrontation.

Every afternoon, when Saoirse Stone gets home from her job as a teacher in Florida, she performs a small ritual.

She changes out of the clothes she wore to school. She sets aside the bag that holds her lesson plans. She places everything she will need for the next day near the door, then tries to stop thinking about the classroom. It is, she says, the only way to keep herself intact.

“You have to have a clear division,” Stone, who is transgender, told The Advocatein an interview. “I change clothes immediately. I set my work stuff down. And then I don’t touch it. I don’t look at it. I don’t think about it.” For the rest of the evening, she tries to inhabit the life that feels real — the one she shares with her wife, Dani, in Orlando. The one where she reads books, plays tabletop games with friends, and occasionally loses herself in the sprawling universe of X-Men comics.

But the next morning, the other version of her life begins again.

Saoirse Stone and her wife are leaving Florida and moving to Maryland because of the hostile climate for transgender people in the state.Saoirse Stone

Stone is a high school English teacher in Orlando. She teaches 11th-grade English, AP Seminar, AP Research, and Cambridge General Paper, an advanced writing and critical thinking course in the Cambridge Advanced International Certificate of Education program, a college prep curriculum developed by the University of Cambridge and widely offered in Florida public schools.

She also coaches the school’s eSports team.

“I love teaching,” she said. “There is something really wonderful about helping students realize literature and language are powerful things.” For years, she believed that staying in the classroom, even under difficult circumstances, mattered.

Her hope, she said, was that simply existing as herself in front of students might mean something to teenagers quietly trying to understand their own lives. “My hope was just the fact that I’m there,” she said. “Even if I can’t say everything I want to say, even if I can’t do everything I want to do, I’m here, I’m alive, I’m happy.”

Now she is preparing to leave.

Stone, who is 32, says she began transitioning in 2022. At the time, she planned to come out publicly at work the following spring.

Then the political climate in Florida shifted dramatically.

In 2022, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education law, widely known by critics as the “don’t say gay” law. Initially, it restricted classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in early grades. Subsequent rules expanded the restrictions across grade levels unless the material is considered age-appropriate or part of state standards.

Another Florida statute governs the use of pronouns and personal titles in public schools. The law states that sex is “an immutable biological trait” and says it is “false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such person’s sex.” It also says that a public school employee “may not provide to a student his or her preferred personal title or pronouns” if they do not correspond with that person’s sex assigned at birth.

Saoirse Stone says that she she gets home she sheds her daytime persona and becomes a whole person until she returns to work the next day.Saoirse Stone

For Stone, the legal language translates into something far more personal. Before she became a teacher, Stone studied the law. She attended law school in Virginia and completed her degree, but she never pursued a career as an attorney. Instead, she found herself drawn to education, first through tutoring and academic support work, and eventually through the classroom.

Teaching, she said, offered something the legal profession did not.

“In law school, a lot of what you’re doing is theoretical,” she said. “Teaching is immediate. You can see the effect of what you do right in front of you.”

After graduating, she returned to Florida, where she had grown up, and entered the profession she now says she still loves despite everything that has changed around it.

Now, though, the laws she once studied as a student have become the rules governing her daily life in the classroom.

She says she cannot discuss being transgender with her students. She cannot provide pronouns that match her gender identity. And when students refer to her incorrectly, whether accidentally or deliberately, she says she must let it pass.

“I cannot provide pronouns other than the ones that correspond with the gender I was assigned at birth,” she said. “If I do that, I could have my teaching certificate revoked.”

Some of the misgendering is accidental.

Sometimes, she says, it isn’t. “Sometimes kids get wise [and figure out that I’m trans] and they do it intentionally,” she said. “And there is nothing that can be done.” Sometimes the moment is as small as a word or a laugh.

But Stone cannot respond. “I can’t even speak up for myself,” she said. “I can’t defend myself.”

The compromise she arrived at was linguistic. If she could not use “Ms.” and would not use “Mr.,” she would use neither. Because of her coaching gig, she figured out an alternative. “What they can’t do under the law as they’ve created it is mandate that I describe myself as ‘mister,’” she said. “So I refuse. I became a coach.”

The solution works — mostly.

Stone says that her school serves a large Hispanic student population, where students often default to calling teachers Mr. or Miss. When it happens, she gently reminds them of her preference to be called coach. But the boundaries of what she can say are always present.

“I’m constantly having to self-police everything I say,” she said. “Is this going to be the thing that gets me on Fox News and gets my teaching certificate revoked?”

Stone said what frightens her most is not simply the possibility of discipline, but the sense that she might have little protection if it were to happen. “If I do something that somebody decides violates the law, I don’t believe I’ll get due process,” she said. In the current political environment, she added, she believes officials who would ultimately judge her case are already predisposed against people like her.

“There is so much hostility toward trans people from the conservatives who are in power right now,” she said. “I don’t think I’d be treated fairly.” The constraints she describes come at a time when Florida is struggling to staff classrooms. The irony is that Florida schools need teachers like her.

A recent Florida Department of Education report identifying high-demand teaching areas shows that thousands of English courses statewide are taught by instructors who are not certified in the subject. English remains one of several fields where districts struggle to staff classrooms with qualified teachers.

Stone is exactly the kind of teacher the state says it needs: experienced, credentialed, and teaching multiple advanced courses. 

Orange County Public Schools said the restrictions Stone describes stem from state law rather than district decisions.

Michael Ollendorff, administrator of media relations for the district, said questions about the policies should be directed to the Florida Department of Education because the concerns are “directly connected to state law, not district policy.”

“The Orange County School District is required, as a matter of state law, to follow all state laws and State Board of Education rules,” Ollendorff said.

At the same time, the district’s official school board observance calendar still includes several LGBTQ-related commemorations. The 2025–26 list designates October as LGBTQ+ Awareness and History Month, June as Pride Month, and June 12 as Pulse Remembrance Day, honoring the victims of the 2016 nightclub shooting in Orlando.

The Florida Department of Education did not respond to The Advocate’s request for comment. A request for comment sent to Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office also went unanswered.

For Stone, the pressure has not been only emotional. It has also been financial. Orlando’s housing market has surged in recent years. Rent and utilities now consume more than half of her monthly income, she said. “For the past six months,” she said, “probably 60 percent of my diet has been cheap rice, whatever vegetables are on sale, and as a treat, discount Spam.”

Her wife, who works in health care, struggled to find stable work for a time. They’ve started a GoFundMe page to help defray some of the moving costs they anticipate having. The couple began to consider leaving Florida for Maryland as the most plausible destination.

Her wife has family there. Since Stone attended law school in nearby Virginia, she still has friends across the Mid-Atlantic. Maryland, under Democratic Gov. Wes Moore, also has statewide nondiscrimination protections covering gender identity.

But leaving Florida feels like an amputation, she said. Stone was born in the state. She grew up in Lake Wales. “This is my home,” she said. “All but three years of my life have been spent in this state.”

Her plan is to move this summer when the school year ends and the couple’s lease expires. She hopes to continue teaching. 

She knows that starting over will not be easy, but she said that anything is better than the idea of continuing to be forced into the closet after having already come out. “I have done my absolute best to build something for myself here,” she said. “Respect. Credibility.” For now, she continues to teach in the classroom she plans to leave.

Each morning, she walks in knowing that the stripped-down version of the self-described “butch dyke” people get to see on most days is only part of the truth.

Each afternoon, she goes home and tries to become whole again.

The Trump administration has ordered federal prisons to begin tapering hormone therapy for incarcerated transgender people. Physicians say that it could inflict immediate psychological distress and long-term medical harm on a vulnerable population.

The guidance, issued February 19 by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, outlines how the federal prison system will treat incarcerated people diagnosed with gender dysphoria. It bars the agency from initiating hormone therapy for inmates who were not already receiving it and instructs clinicians to develop tapering plans that could ultimately discontinue treatment for prisoners who currently rely on hormones as part of their medical care.

To physicians who treat transgender patients, the directive reads less like clinical guidance than a political decision overriding established medical practice.

“From a medical point of view, this is alarming because it’s essentially saying that a form of evidence-based care will no longer be provided to people under the purview of the Bureau of Prisons,” Dr. Carl Streed, a Boston primary care physician and one of the country’s leading researchers on transgender health, told The Advocate in an interview. “That means the policy runs counter to best practices and arguably probably the law in terms of providing care to inmates because it’s setting up a different standard for them versus the standard out in the community.”

The policy follows a January 2025 executive order from President Donald Trumpbarring federal funds from being used for medical treatments intended to align a person’s physical characteristics with a gender identity different from their sex assigned at birth.

But hormone therapy is not cosmetic medicine, clinicians say. It is a core treatment for gender dysphoria, widely recognized by major medical organizations and incorporated into clinical standards of care.

Removing it can have immediate, destabilizing effects. “People are going to have changes in cognition. They’re going to experience mood changes. They’re going to see brain fog issues, difficulty concentrating,” Streed said.

Such symptoms can arise quickly when hormone levels suddenly drop, because those hormones help regulate mood, cognition, metabolism, and cardiovascular health. Over time, the consequences may become more serious.

“We’re going to see an increase in the risk of cardiovascular disease events,” Streed said, as well as bone metabolism problems and metabolic illnesses such as diabetes if hormone therapy is withdrawn. The danger may be especially acute for incarcerated people who have undergone gender-confirmation surgeries affecting the body’s ability to produce hormones naturally.

Related: Marjorie Taylor Greene’s bill criminalizing gender-affirming care for minors passes with Democrats’ support

Related: Utah Republicans ignore study supporting gender-affirming care for trans youth. It’s research they demanded

Related: Judge rules against gender-affirming care for transgender prisoners

“They no longer produce adequate endogenous hormones to a level that would be good for their health if we were to take away their exogenous hormones,” Streed said. “Now we’re going to take away hormone therapy for them — they are put at much greater risk than anybody else.”

For clinicians inside federal prisons, the policy also presents an ethical dilemma.

“This definitely poses a challenge for clinicians because it’s taking away one of their treatment options for folks,” Streed said. The decision, he added, collides with one of medicine’s oldest principles. “One of our main tenets in medical ethics is non-maleficence — do no harm,” Streed said. “And this is going to have direct harm on people.”

The policy arrives amid a broader political push by the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers to restrict gender-affirming care nationwide.

Streed and colleagues recently warned in a New England Journal of Medicineperspective that transgender people are incarcerated at more than four times the rate of the general population and that denying medically indicated gender-affirming care in prison can violate the constitutional requirement that incarcerated people receive adequate health care. Courts have repeatedly held that deliberate indifference to serious medical needs violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Advocacy groups say the Bureau’s new guidance may also worsen conditions for transgender people already at heightened risk of violence behind bars.

“The devastating health effects of discontinuing hormone therapy for incarcerated transgender people are well-documented,” Jesse Lerner-Kinglake, communications director at Just Detention International, said in a statement to The Advocate. “People will suffer, just so that this administration can carry out its anti-trans agenda. The new BOP policies are an act of overt bigotry against the incarcerated transgender community, and place them directly in harm’s way.”

Removing gender-affirming care, Lerner-Kinglake added, could increase vulnerability to abuse in a prison system where transgender people already face disproportionate violence.

“By eliminating gender-affirming care, prison officials are sending a very clear signal that they don’t care about the safety and dignity of incarcerated transgender people,” they said. “They already had a bullseye on their back — and the federal government knows it. The rates of sexual abuse facing the transgender community were astronomical before these new policies. It’s hard to imagine this already abysmal situation getting worse. And yet it will.”

Legal advocates say the new policy may also conflict with ongoing federal litigation.

The case, Kingdom v. Trump, was filed in 2025 by three transgender people incarcerated in federal prisons who were diagnosed with gender dysphoria and had been prescribed hormone therapy by prison medical providers but were told their treatment would be stopped under the administration’s policy. 

The lawsuit, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Transgender Law Center, challenges the administration’s attempt to end gender-affirming medical care in federal custody. A federal judge later issued a preliminary injunction requiring the Bureau of Prisons to continue providing hormone therapy to incarcerated transgender people while the case proceeds.

“The February 19 guidance from the Bureau of Prisons directing tapering of hormone therapy for transgender people in custody is a direct violation of the injunction in Kingdom v. Trump, which requires the BOP to continue providing hormones to people in custody with a gender dysphoria diagnosis,” said Shayna Medley, senior litigation staff attorney at Advocates for Trans Equality.

“Our view is that this guidance is currently enjoined by the existing injunction in the Kingdom v. Trump litigation,” Medley said. “Implementation would be in direct violation of the federal court’s order to continue providing hormone therapy to transgender people in BOP custody with a gender dysphoria diagnosis.”

The Federal Bureau of Prisons did not respond to The Advocate’s request for comment.

Federal prisons house roughly 150,000 people nationwide. Only a small fraction identify as transgender, but physicians and advocates say policies governing their medical care can have profound consequences.

For Streed, the stakes of the new guidance are difficult to overstate.

“Withdrawing hormone therapy,” he said, “is a dangerous thing to do.”

A new report is raising questions about how U.S. law enforcement agencies across the South classify the deaths of transgender women, arguing that some cases ruled suicides may warrant deeper scrutiny.

The story, in too many Southern towns, begins with speed.

A body is found. Authorities announce no foul play. A ruling is entered. The case, advocates argue, was closed before it was ever truly opened.

Jill Collen Jefferson has spent years in the gap between what official records say and what families believe happened. The founder of social justice organization JULIAN, she has reviewed hundreds of deaths across seven Southern states, and her conclusion is unsparing: a pattern of deliberate misclassification is concealing bias-motivated killings of transgender women. These killings, she argues, are, by any honest accounting, modern-day lynchings.

JULIAN’s new, “A Crimson Record: Seven State Modern-Day Lynching Report 2000–2025,” catalogs more than 150 deaths across Mississippi, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee, and Alabama. More than 50, or roughly one-third of the cases, involve transgender women.

That proportion stands out when placed against federal hate crime data. According to the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer, there have been 2,726 anti-transgender hate crime incidents nationwide from January 2000 through February 2026, totaling 3,076 offenses. LGBTQ+ victims overall account for roughly 17 percent of reported hate crime victims nationally. Jefferson argues that transgender women’s overrepresentation in her Southern dataset reflects the intersection of racism and transphobia in regions historically shaped by racial terror.

Even those federal figures come with caveats. Hate crime reporting is voluntary under the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, and participation varies by agency. The result is a statistical landscape that is both incomplete and periodically paused.

Jefferson contends that what cannot be fully counted can be more easily dismissed.

The mechanisms she describes are bureaucratic as much as they are violent: crime scenes left unsecured, witnesses uninterviewed for days, cause of death determinations entered before investigators have spoken to anyone in the house.

In one case, that of Willie Andrew Jones Jr., the first case JULIAN says it helped solve, authorities ruled the death a suicide within 40 minutes of arriving on the scene. “They didn’t interview the people who were in the house that night until four days later,” Jefferson said. “So they had four whole days to get their story together.”

During the Reconstruction era documented by journalist Ida B. Wells, lynchings were routinely recorded as suicides, a designation, Jefferson said, that shielded perpetrators and neutralized outrage. Jefferson argues the reflex persists, adapted to contemporary conditions.

“Back in the day, a lynching was called a suicide with a wink and a smile,” she said. “In the present day, they’re still called suicides. But now people take that seriously.” What makes these cases particularly resistant to justice, she argues, is structural. “Lynchings are different than other hate crimes in that you have to disprove one thing before you can actually prove what it is,” Jefferson said.

She explained that a family cannot argue bias until they have first overturned an existing official classification; a high bar, made higher by the investigative failures that produced the classification in the first place. “It’s like taking a bad photograph,” Jefferson said, recounting what an FBI agent once told her. “If you mess it up in the beginning, there’s really no way to go back and fix it.”

The landscape these claims enter is genuinely complicated. A 2025 commentary in Mental Health Science by researchers at George Washington University found that 59 percent of Black transgender and nonbinary youth reported active suicidal ideation in 2023, and 26 percent reported a past-year attempt — rates significantly higher than among their cisgender Black LGBTQ+ peers. The authors link these disparities to compounding stressors like racism, discrimination, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, violence, and inadequate mental health infrastructure for this population.

Jefferson does not dispute any of that. Her argument is narrower: that documented vulnerability should not be used as a substitute for actual investigation. “You still have the situation where there is this deliberate effort to find another reason, other than the obvious reason that’s right in front of you, to name this something else” — gang activity, robbery, in some cases, erotic asphyxiation. The alternative explanation changes; the function, she argues, remains the same.

Jefferson describes a spectrum of institutional failure across the cases she has reviewed: incompetence at the scene, indifference at the precinct, and, at the prosecutorial level, what she characterizes as harder to excuse.

“I have sat with DAs,” she said, “and I’ve given them evidence that shows this was not a suicide, this was a lynching, and they will still refuse to press charges.”

Her policy prescriptions are specific. She wants the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act amended to create a separate federal cause of action for lynching, with life imprisonment as a potential penalty. She wants independent federal prosecutors assigned to these cases, removing them from local authorities, whom she argues are compromised by community relationships and personal bias. And she points to the qualification standards for coroners in states like Mississippi — a high school diploma and a passed test — as a systemic vulnerability that no one has adequately addressed.

“I could be a coroner right now,” she said, “and I have absolutely no medical training.”

If you or someone you know needs mental health resources and support, please call, text, or chat with the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline or visit 988lifeline.org for 24/7 access to free and confidential services. Trans Lifeline, designed for transgender or gender-nonconforming people, can be reached at (877) 565-8860. The lifeline also provides resources to help with other crises, such as domestic violence situations. The Trevor Project Lifeline, for LGBTQ+ youth (ages 24 and younger), can be reached at (866) 488-7386. Users can also access chat services at TheTrevorProject.org/Help or text START to 678678.

The federal government’s chief workplace civil rights agency has reversed course on one of its most consequential transgender rights precedents, allowing federal agencies to bar trans employees from using restrooms that align with their gender identity.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has reversed a key portion of its 2015 landmark transgender rights ruling, narrowing protections for transgender federal employees and intensifying a growing clash between the Trump administration and congressional Democrats over the future of workplace equality.

In a 2–1 decision issued February 26, the EEOC ruled against a transgender federal employee who filed a discrimination complaint after being denied access to the women’s restroom at work. The policy barring her from the restroom had been adopted under President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” issued on the day of Trump’s inauguration in January 2025.

That executive order declared it the policy of the United States to recognize only binary sexes, male and female, and directed federal agencies to remove all references to “gender ideology” from policies and guidance. It called for the revision of forms, communications, and internal documents to reflect a person’s sex assigned at birth, and for protections in “intimate spaces” to be enforced on that basis.

The new federal sector appellate decision overturns a portion of Lusardi v. Department of the Army that held it was unlawful sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to prohibit a transgender employee from using restrooms consistent with their gender identity. The 2015 ruling also concluded that repeated, intentional misgendering could violate federal law. The original Lusardi decision arose from a complaint filed by a transgender civilian employee of the Army who was barred from using the women’s restroom and instead directed to use a single-user facility. 

The EEOC concluded that the agency’s actions violated Title VII’s prohibition on sex discrimination, building on its earlier 2012 ruling in Macy v. Holder, which held that discrimination against transgender people constitutes discrimination “because of sex.” The commission wrote at the time that denying restroom access consistent with a worker’s gender identity “deprived Complainant of equal status, respect, and dignity in the workplace.”

Under the new decision, federal agencies may exclude transgender employees from bathrooms aligned with their gender identity. The ruling states that a “man who identifies as a ‘transwoman’ is still a man; a woman who identifies as a ‘transman’ is still a woman,” and misgenders the employee who brought the complaint. According to the Human Rights Campaign, the commission acknowledged that existing case law did not support its new interpretation.

“This green lighting of discrimination against hardworking Americans is an egregious abdication of responsibility by the EEOC, capitulation by Chair Andrea Lucas to Donald Trump’s orders, and will make the job of keeping workers safe harder everywhere,” HRC Director of Legal Policy Cathryn Oakley said in a statement. “To transgender workers reading yet another in the long string of attacks on your dignity from this administration: We will not stop fighting for an America where you can go to work, get a paycheck, and make it home to put food on the table without having to fear that your ability to provide for yourselves and your family hinges on weathering discrimination and bigotry in the workplace.”

The decision applies only to federal agencies subject to the EEOC’s administrative complaint process. It does not extend to private employers and does not bind federal courts, which remain governed by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, holding that Title VII protects gay and transgender workers from discrimination because of sex.

Out U.S. Rep. Mark Takano of California, chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, criticized the move.

“The EEOC was created with the explicit mission of protecting American workers from discrimination—but under Trump and Chair Andrea Lucas, the Commission has abandoned its duty in order to push Trump’s radical, anti-equality, and anti-worker agenda,” Takano said in a statement. “The Supreme Court made clear in Bostock that transgender workers are protected from discrimination; the EEOC cannot [undo] those protections.”

The decision comes as Democrats attempt a legislative response. Earlier in February, Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Sen. Patty Murray of Washington reintroduced the BE HEARD Act, a workplace harassment bill that would end mandatory arbitration and nondisclosure agreements, expand civil rights protections to independent contractors and interns, extend the time to report harassment, and clarify that federal civil rights law protects against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

“Every worker should be safe and respected in their workplace; this shouldn’t be controversial,” Pressley said. “Under the Trump Administration, the EEOC is weakening protections and exposing workers to discrimination, harassment, and abuse at their jobs.”