More State Lawmakers Threaten Transgender Job Bias Ban Repeals

Workplace bias and harassment protections for transgender and non-binary employees are becoming targets of a renewed round of rollbacks in GOP-sponsored bills popping up from Florida to Utah.

The legislative proposals generally follow the lead of the Trump administration’s policy shifts and previous red-state measures halting recognition of gender identity as a protected trait, including in employment discrimination.

The recent moves deepen the division between red states and blue states on LGBTQ+ legal rights and safeguards. They also further complicate compliance efforts for employers that simultaneously face the threat of discrimination lawsuits related to gender identity and the pressure to adhere to ideology that recognizes only two sexes.

“The state activity tracks the national polarization on this issue,” said James A. Paretti, an attorney with Littler Mendelson PC and former chief of staff for Victoria Lipnic, acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission during the first Trump administration.

Bills introduced this year in New Hampshire (HB 1564) and Utah (HB 183) would largely imitate Iowa’s 2025 first-of-its-kind repeal of gender identity as a protected trait in its civil rights statute. Similar bills were introduced last year and remain eligible in Illinois (SB 2078) and Michigan (HB 4777), but they face long odds given Democrats’ full or partial majorities in those statehouses.

Until last year’s Iowa law, there was no precedent for a state removing a protected trait from its anti-discrimination statutes, said Logan Casey, director of policy research at the Movement Advancement Project.

“The bigger picture here is that over the last five, going on six years now, there have been escalating attacks on LGBTQ people across all areas of life,” he said, pointing to an onslaught of legislation ranging from bathroom usage restrictions to gender-affirming health care bans.

Narrow View of Bostock

The state-level action doesn’t erase the federal ban on workplace bias under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But there’s ongoing debate about how far that protection reaches for LGBTQ+ workers following the US Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Ga.

The EEOC under Trump, led by Republican Chair Andrea Lucas, has taken the position that Title VII protections for gender identity apply to discriminatory actions such as employee terminations, but not misgendering or bathroom usage restrictions.

The Republican majority on the EEOC voted Jan. 22 to rescind Biden-era guidance that called for the agency to enforce those kinds of harassment claims as potential Title VII violations. The EEOC already had backed away from enforcing transgender bias claims within the first weeks of Trump’s second term.

It isn’t clear yet whether federal courts will agree with the agency on interpreting Bostock’s gender identity protections or side with the Biden administration’s broader view.

The issue is up in the air “unless and until the Supreme Court clarifies what its holding meant in Bostock,” particularly for employers in red states that lack state-level protection for gender identity, Paretti said.

Businesses face legal risks whichever way they approach this issue, he said. LGBTQ+-friendly workplace policies around bathrooms usage and preferred pronouns risk lawsuits from employees alleging those rules infringe on their personal privacy or create a hostile work environment by asking them to violate their religious beliefs. On the other hand, transgender and non-binary employees could sue employers that restrict their bathroom choice or allow colleagues to misgender them.

“You sort of have to choose one side or the other, and you risk offending someone either way,” Paretti said, adding the current Supreme Court majority has tended to favor protecting religious freedom.

Florida lawmakers are trying to reinforce the EEOC’s interpretation in their state. Their 2026 proposal (HB 641), which imitates a failed 2025 bill, would ban state and local government agencies and businesses that contract with them from penalizing employees who fail to use a coworker’s preferred pronouns or who express their “deeply held religious, moral, conscience-based, or biology-based beliefs against gender ideology,” according to the bill text.

22 State Laws

The Florida bill also would ban businesses that receive state funding from requiring employees to attend workplace training that covers sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. It would add definitions of sex and gender identity to state law that mirror the Trump administration’s policy of recognizing only two sexes.

“A lot of trainings around respect in the workplace, violence prevention, they do touch on these topics, so this bill threatens to make workplaces more dangerous and less respectful,” said Quinn Diaz, public policy associate at Equality Florida.

After Iowa’s repeal last year, 22 states plus Washington, D.C., explicitly ban workplace discrimination on the basis of gender identity in their civil rights statutes. State agencies in a handful more, including Florida and Pennsylvania, issued guidance following Bostock affirming sexual orientation and gender identity are protected classes.

The list of states with explicit protections against gender identity bias would shrink further if New Hampshire and Utah pass their proposals. The Utah bill also would narrow the definition of “sex” in state statutes to exclude gender.

Workers sometimes opt to file state-level bias claims alongside or instead of their federal claims, partly because some state laws offer a longer timeframe for filing suit, potentially higher damage awards, and less restrictive size thresholds for which employers are covered.

Many major cities also have local nondiscrimination ordinances that ban LGBTQ+ bias in the workplace.

“Unfortunately we have seen efforts to roll those back as well,” Casey said.

A sweeping Texas preemption law could override local bias bans in the nation’s second largest state and inspire similar preemption efforts elsewhere.

The variations among states and the ongoing rollbacks of bias protections “create a much broader environment of fear and confusion about what is protected and what isn’t protected,” Casey said. Employers “may not be clear on what they are legally empowered to do or enforce.”