A transgender Department of Defense worker has filed a class-action lawsuit against the Trump administration over its ban on opposite-sex bathroom use, arguing that the directive violates the civil rights of “thousands of transgender and intersex federal employees.”
LeAnne Withrow, a civilian employee of the Illinois National Guard, part of the department’s National Guard Bureau, said in the Thursday complaint that the administration’s order runs afoul of the Administrative Procedures Act and Title VII, which prohibits sex discrimination in the workplace.
“It is absurd that in her home state of Illinois, LeAnne can use any other restroom consistent with her gender – other than the ones controlled by the federal government,” said Michelle Garcia, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. “The Trump administration’s reckless policies are discriminatory and must be reversed.”
The lawsuit submitted in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia asked the court to certify a class of all current and future federal civilian employees “whose gender identity differs from their ‘biological classification as either male or female.’”
The filing took issue with the Jan. 29 memorandum issued by the Office of Personnel Management directing agencies to ensure that bathrooms are “designated by biological sex,” which carried out President Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order titled, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism.”
In May, the General Services Administration followed up by withdrawing its 2016 directive requiring agencies to allow restroom use based on gender identity.
Before those actions, the lawsuit stated, “Ms. Withrow used the women’s restrooms at her workplace, other federal buildings, and other National Guard facilities. No one raised any concerns.”
“Other transgender employees and intersex employees of the United States government likewise used restrooms consistent with their gender identity without incident before the OPM memorandum and its implementation across the federal government,” the lawsuit said.
Ms. Withrow became the first openly transgender member of the Illinois National Guard in 2016, retiring from military service in 2023 but continuing to work as a civilian employee. In 2019, the Defense Department’s database was “updated to correctly reflect her sex as female,” the lawsuit said.
Camp Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois, has a single-use restroom. But even so, Ms. Withrow drinks and eats as little as possible during the day to “minimize her need to use the restroom during her workday,” said the filing.
“Ms. Withrow is a woman, dresses like a woman, and is perceived as a woman by people who interact with her,” said the complaint. “Individuals seeing her enter the men’s restroom might try to prevent her from doing so or physically harm her, as has happened to other transgender people.”
In May, Ms. Withrow filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Army National Guard Bureau Equal Opportunity Office, but both “failed to resolve the matter,” said the ACLU statement.
“Under Title VII, we can file a case in federal court after 180 days after the EEOC complaint was filed,” said an ACLU spokesperson. “The EEOC complaint will no longer be active.”
The lawsuit cited OPM’s 2023 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey that found 2,421 workers who identified as transgender. But the complaint said the survey’s 39% response rate “suggests that there were approximately 6,200 transgender federal employees as of 2023.”
Mr. Trump’s executive order declared that it is “the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”
“Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being,” said the executive order.
The lawsuit filed by attorneys from the ACLU and Democracy Forward challenged the idea of biologically rooted definitions of sex.
“Transgender and intersex federal employees are harmed by the defendants’ efforts to restrict the bathroom use of federal government employees based on so-called ‘biological sex,’” said the complaint.
