Membership card instead of human rights: Christian employers can now discriminate against trans people forever

The agency that is supposed to protect employees from discrimination has given up its power to do so for an entire part of the working world, and permanently. In an August 18 settlement, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EEOC, agreed never again to investigate members of the Christian Employers Alliance for discrimination based on gender identity. The lawsuit behind it targeted guidance from Joe Biden's administration and followed a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that Title VII also protects against this kind of discrimination. The watchdog puts itself on a leash and calls it a settlement. Trans and nonbinary employees are losing the protection the government once promised them.

For those affected, a door closes before it is even opened. The EEOC investigates complaints free of charge and sometimes sues on behalf of employees without costing them anything. Employees of a member company who believe they have been discriminated against because of their gender identity can no longer take this route. Whether someone is fired after coming out as trans or harassed for being nonbinary no longer matters, the agency is not even allowed to look at the complaint. All it can do is tell people they have to take their employers to court themselves. The legal route remains expensive and uncertain, especially in exactly those cases where the agency was supposed to take that burden off them. Otherwise, it investigates precisely the cases individuals cannot afford to fight on their own.

The blank check is broad and has no expiration date. It applies to the more than 20,000 employers that are already members and to anyone who joins in the future, as long as they belonged to the group at the time of the alleged discrimination. There is no end date, and the commitment survives even a change in leadership if today's Republican chair, Andrea Lucas, is later replaced by Democratic leadership. Karla Gilbride, the EEOC's former general counsel and now with the American Civil Liberties Union, says it is without precedent. She says she is not aware of any settlement that creates a permanent freedom from investigation. She has never seen an organization obtain protection for future members through a settlement. Almost every settlement has an end point and is monitored by a court for years, this one does not.

The protection is being sold like insurance. On its website, the Christian Employers Alliance advertises with the line "Protected the Moment You're In" and invites new members to stop exposing themselves to this. It is as if the group were selling an insurance policy against EEOC investigations, Gilbride says, and she is concerned about the incentive this creates for employers. The organization also advertises that an injunction allowing members to refuse coverage for contraception protects them from the moment they join as well. Discrimination becomes a benefit you get with your membership dues. Immunity becomes a membership perk. An organization that uses the end of oversight to attract customers turns discrimination into a sales pitch.

Behind the settlement are two sides that agree with each other. In its lawsuit, the Christian Employers Alliance was represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal organization that helped bring down Roe v. Wade. And the connections go deeper: In early 2025, Lucas hired Shannon Royce as her chief of staff, who immediately before that had been president of the Christian Employers Alliance and had already led the organization in 2021 when the lawsuit was filed. Normally, parties settle because neither side wants to keep fighting, Gilbride says; here, however, there appears to be a striking level of agreement, raising the question of who the settlement actually serves. Whether it serves the broader public interest or only these individuals and their cause is difficult to answer any other way.

This is far removed from the usual consideration given to religious employers. The EEOC already allows such employers to raise a religious defense, which the agency then reviews. The new settlement prevents its investigators from even looking at a complaint; every gender identity case against these employers is stopped before it starts. A categorical exclusion based solely on membership in a group is unprecedented, Gilbride says. Other employers still have to justify their religious defense, this one group no longer does. A wall has replaced scrutiny.

The settlement crowns a transformation Lucas has been carrying out since taking office. One of her first steps was to announce that the agency would defend the biological and binary reality of sex, along with instructions to focus, for example, on complaints from cis women about trans women using the same bathrooms. She eliminated harassment guidance that also protected gender identity, as well as the complaint process for federal employees. She pulled the EEOC out of lawsuits it had pursued on behalf of trans and nonbinary employees and halted the processing of all related complaints. Under her leadership, the Christian Employers Alliance already had nothing to fear, now tens of thousands of employers will have nothing to fear in the future either. What began as a series of individual decisions has become a system that pushes trans people out of the protection of employment law.

In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that Title VII also protects against discrimination based on gender identity. This settlement builds a permanent detour around that ruling, open to anyone with the right membership card. A right that ends at the door of an association is no right at all. The government that was supposed to protect the weak from the strong has sold immunity to the strong. A settlement without an end is the most refined way to make an injustice permanent. An oversight agency that promises to look away in the future has long since chosen its side.