The acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is implementing Donald Trump’s “two sexes” executive order by removing many protections and information for transgender and nonbinary people.

Acting Chair Andrea Lucas “announced that one of her priorities — for compliance, investigations, and litigation — is to defend the biological and binary reality of sex and related rights, including women’s rights to single-sex spaces at work,” an EEOC press release states.

She has removed the agency’s pronoun app, which allowed employees to display their pronouns alongside their name on their Microsoft 365 profiles; ended the use of the X gender marker during the intake process for filing a discrimination charge; ordered the removal of Mx. from the list of prefix options; and removed materials that she says promote “gender ideology” from the EEOC’s internal and external websites and documents.

Lucas, who was appointed to the EEOC by Trump in 2020 and was named acting chair last week, does not have the authority to unilaterally remove references to gender identity from certain documents. These include the Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace, the EEOC Strategic Plan 2022-2026, and the EEOC Strategic Enforcement Plan Fiscal Years 2024-2028. They were all adopted by a 3-2 vote in 2023, with Lucas voting against them.

She opposed harassment guidance that said harassing conduct under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 includes “denial of access to a bathroom or other sex-segregated facility consistent with [an] individual’s gender identity” and “repeated and intentional use of a name or pronoun inconsistent with [an] individual’s known gender identity.”

“Biology is not bigotry. Biological sex is real, and it matters,” Lucas said in the press release. “Sex is binary (male and female) and immutable. It is not harassment to acknowledge these truths — or to use language like pronouns that flow from these realities, even repeatedly.”

“Because of biological realities, each sex has its own, unique privacy interests, and women have additional safety interests, that warrant certain single-sex facilities at work and other spaces outside the home,” she added. “It is neither harassment nor discrimination for a business to draw distinctions between the sexes in providing single-sex bathrooms or other similar facilities which implicate these significant privacy and safety interests. And the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County does not demand otherwise: the Court explicitly stated that it did ‘not purport to address bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything else of the kind.’”

In Bostock, the Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination in employment includes discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The case involved two gay men, Gerald Bostockand Donald Zarda, and a trans woman, Aimee Stephens. Stephens’s case started with a complaint to the EEOC.

Her case, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, dates to 2013, when the Stephens, a funeral director, informed the Michigan-based company that she would begin presenting as female at work. She was fired two weeks after handing her coming-out letter to her supervisor.

She complained to the EEOC, a quasi-independent agency of the federal government, and it found her case compelling and sued Harris Funeral Homes. The American Civil Liberties Union began handling the case during Trump’s first term, fearing the EEOC would not represent Stephens as effectively as it would have under President Barack Obama. Before the Supreme Court ruling, a federal appeals court ruled that Title VII applied in Stephens’s case. She died shortly before the Supreme Court ruled.

Also, the Trump administration fired two of the EEOC’s Democratic members, Charlotte A. Burrows and Jocelyn Samuels, Monday night. “Their ousters may leave the agency without a quorum that would allow it to take formal actions,” The New York Times reports. A third Democrat, Kalpana Kotagal, appears to still be on the commission.

Firing them, as they are Senate-confirmed commissioners and their terms are not yet up, may be beyond Trump’s authority, the Times notes. Burrows has hired a lawyer and is exploring her options, she said in a statement. All three Dems on the commission had objected to Trump’s lifting of the order banning discrimination by federal contractors, which President Lyndon B. Johnson had issued in 1965.

Trump also fired the EEOC’s general counsel, Karla Gilbride, Monday night, and the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, along with Democratic NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox. Abruzzo’s firing was expected, as presidents usually change people in that position when they come into office, but the firing of Wilcox, “confirmed by the Senate in September 2023 to a second five-year term, is without modern precedent and could prompt legal challenges,” according to the Times. She is looking into legal options. The board protects workers’ rights, including the right to form unions.