Justice Department:
Attorney General Jeff Sessions says the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not protect transgender workers.
WASHINGTON— Federal civil rights law does not protect transgender people from discrimination at work, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a memo released Thursday that rescinds guidance issued under the Obama administration.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 bars workplace discrimination between men and women but does not extend to gender identity, Sessions said. The Justice Department will take that position in “all pending and future matters,” the memo said.
Sessions called the interpretation a “conclusion of law, not policy,” and said the move should not be construed to condone mistreatment of transgender people. “The Justice Department must and will continue to affirm the dignity of all people, including transgender individuals,” Sessions wrote in the memo to the nation’s federal prosecutors.
But LGBT-rights advocates assailed the reversal as the latest in series of Trump administration actions targeting their constituency.
“Today marks another low point for a Department of Justice which has been cruelly consistent in its hostility toward the LGBT community and, in particular, its inability to treat transgender people with basic dignity and respect,” said James Esseks, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBT & HIV Project.
The Obama Justice Department viewed Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act as a prohibition against workplace discrimination against transgender people.
Also Thursday, the Justice Department asked a federal court to dismiss a lawsuit challenging Trump’s moves to curtail military service by transgender people.
Trump tweeted in July that the federal government “will not accept or allow” transgender individuals to serve “in any capacity” in the military.