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A federal judge in Texas has just taken a sledgehammer to queer workplace protections—striking down key parts of Title VII in a ruling that defies the U.S. Supreme Court. Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a far-right Trump appointee with a record of siding with extremist legal arguments, ruled that Title VII no longer protects LGBTQ Americans from workplace discrimination.

That flies directly in the face of the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, which found that discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity is, by definition, sex discrimination. The case was brought by the state of Texas and the Heritage Foundation, a group deeply tied to Project 2025.

Project 2025 is a radical right-wing plan that openly targets queer rights. They took issue with the EEOC’s guidance that employers can’t discriminate based on gender identity or sexual orientation. Kacsmaryk sided with them. In his ruling, he upheld a Texas Department of Agriculture policy forcing employees to dress based on their so-called “biological gender,” stating that “men may wear pants” and “women may wear dresses, skirts, or pants.”

He also backed restroom bans for trans workers, calling these policies neutral and non-discriminatory. His logic is that policies apply “equally”—even if they erase transgender identity entirely. Kacsmaryk also argued that harassment protections don’t apply to LGBTQ people, stating that Title VII only prevents firing someone for being gay or trans, not subjecting them to other forms of mistreatment.

That contradicts both the spirit and the letter of Bostock, which recognized LGBTQ identity as inherently protected under federal law. The ruling orders the EEOC to scrub all references to sexual orientation and gender identity from its Title VII guidance. That means federal employment policy can no longer define “sex discrimination” to include anti-LGBTQ+ bias. This marks one of the most aggressive judicial rollbacks of queer civil rights in recent history. For queer Americans in the workplace, the stakes just got even higher.

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Happening Out Television Network