I was fired for insisting that transgender people exist

Call me an extremist — that’s what President Trump thinks I am.

Why? Because I believe that transgender people exist and deserve respect, and that, under binding Supreme Court precedent, they are entitled to protection from harassment in the workplace.

For this “extremism,” I was unlawfully fired as a commissioner of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Jan. 27, just a week into the Trump administration.

In reality, it’s Trump who has taken an extreme view by declaring that there is no such thing as a transgender person. One of his day one executive orders states that there are only two sexes, male and female. This, he said, reflects “an immutable biological classification” that vanquishes the “false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa.”

It is unfathomable that the new administration denies the existence of the approximately 1.6 million Americans who are transgender (per a 2022 Williams Institute study). Further, it is cruel and inhumane, contrary to law and bad business to deny transgender people the protections that apply when workers are harassed based on race, national origin or other forms of sex discrimination.

In 2020, the Supreme Court held that prohibitions on sex discrimination in employment cover discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. And for decades, the court has recognized that harassment that creates a hostile work environment is unlawful.

Reflecting this authority, the EEOC last year adopted a guidance barring harassment of transgender workers, including by deliberately and repeatedly ignoring a worker’s gender status. For example, routine misgendering could violate the law by creating a hostile environment. So could "deadnaming" — deliberately referring to transgender persons by the names they used before their transitions.

When, for example, Asher Lucas, a transgender manager at a Culver’s restaurant in Michigan, reported that his co-workers repeatedly misgendered him, deadnamed him, and revealed his birth name to other employees, the EEOC filed suit to vindicate his rights.

The EEOC also secured relief for Quinn Gambino, a transgender employee of T.C. Wheelers restaurant in Buffalo, New York, who was targeted with crude and derogatory references to his transgender status, including telling him that he “wasn’t a real man,” and asking invasive questions about his transition and genitalia.

These protections are at grave risk in this administration. Andrea Lucas, the new acting chair of the EEOC, has announced her view that misgendering and deadnaming are perfectly legal. In a press release, she says that sex “is binary . . . and immutable [and] it is not harassment to acknowledge these truths — or to use language like pronouns that flow from these realities.”

Lucas’s offensive views are backed by the White House: The day one executive order instructs the EEOC to prioritize investigations and litigation to enforce workers’ freedom to express the binary nature of sex, thereby effectively green-lighting workplace harassment of transgender people.

So once (or even before) the president secures a Republican majority on the commission — an outcome that would otherwise have had to wait until my term expired in 2026 — the agency will undoubtedly reject any efforts to redress the type of abuse that Gambino and Lucas endured.

And there’s more. The Office of Personnel Management has directed an end to agency programs and policies that “promote or reflect gender ideology” (that is, that recognize the existence of transgender people) and placed employees of such programs on leave.

The government will require transgender men to have passports identifying them as women and vice versa, leading to inevitable humiliation when traveling. transgender men and women will be ejected from the military. And as a practical matter, it may be impossible for transgender people to use bathrooms outside their homes: Those who present as men will not be welcome in women’s restrooms, nor will those presenting as women be comfortable entering men’s rooms.

It is perhaps hard for non-transgender people like myself to understand the threats this administration poses to some of the most vulnerable among us. But make no mistake: These directives target and dehumanize 1.6 million Americans, and they will inflict immense and gratuitous suffering.

They can fire me a million times, but it won’t change these truths: Transgender people are people. They serve our country in uniform. They serve you at the drive-through line. They have rights.

We all have a stake in rolling back this cruel assault on transgender people and on fundamental principles of civil rights.

Jocelyn Samuels was a commissioner of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 2020 until the last week of January 2025, having been confirmed by a bipartisan majority of the U.S. Senate for a term lasting until 2026. She was the acting head of the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division from 2013 to 2014 and director of the Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights from 2014 to 2017.

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