An administrative judge in California has ruled that a senior technology official at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had good cause to quit, finding he was driven out by discrimination against transgender employees. The ruling, reported by Mother Jones, concerns Marc Seawright, the agency’s Director of Information Governance and Strategy.
Judge Mary Shea of the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board wrote in October that Seawright was “forced to resign because EEOC leadership engaged in discrimination against transgender employees, including the claimant.” He resigned in June. The finding makes him eligible for unemployment benefits while the EEOC reviews his formal discrimination complaint.
The complaint
Seawright, who identifies as a queer trans man, spent eight years on projects that supported the EEOC’s work against discrimination. He is proud, he has said, of an app he built that let colleagues display their pronouns across agency systems. He was also an elected leader of the agency’s LGBTQ+ employee resource group, until Andrea Lucas, the newly appointed EEOC chair, disbanded it in January.
That same month, he wrote in a March complaint, staff were told any recognition of transgender and non-binary people had to be “systematically erased” from internal and external materials. He was told to build a technological process to scan agency materials and censor “any mention of transgender, non-binary, or sexual orientation.”
“Being forced to create the information technology that would systematically erase all EEOC references to transgender, non-binary, or other LGBTQ+ people, given that I am a queer transgender man, was personally devastating and contributed to a hostile work environment,” he said in the complaint.
He also says he was removed from network systems he needed to do his job and left off invitations to meetings about initiatives he was meant to lead. The EEOC’s internal non-discrimination and inclusion policy on gender identity and sexual orientation, in place since at least 2009, was rescinded by Lucas, according to the complaint.
Wider changes at the agency
Mother Jones reported that EEOC staff were also told to stop processing complaints from workers alleging LGBTQ+ discrimination, and that the agency moved to dismiss its own active lawsuits against companies accused of discriminating against trans and non-binary workers.
Seawright’s lawyer, Rebecca Peterson-Fisher, argues this conflicts with the Supreme Court. In its 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, a majority opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch held that discrimination based on transgender identity or sexual orientation is discrimination based on sex, which Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits. “Andrea Lucas’ actions refusing to process charges of gender identity discrimination and harassment is directly contrary to the Supreme Court’s interpretation,” Peterson-Fisher said.
Seawright must give the EEOC until December to finish reviewing his complaint before he can sue in federal court. His attorneys could then ask a jury to decide whether the agency was a hostile work environment. In her ruling, Shea wrote that his working conditions “were so onerous as to constitute a threat to the physical wellbeing of the claimant,” and that he “had no alternative but to quit for the sake of his own health and safety.”
