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Most workdays LeAnne Withrow skips breakfast, has a granola bar or a spoonful of peanut butter for lunch and drinks as little water as possible. 

A transgender civilian employee of the Illinois National Guard, Withrow follows this restrictive regimen to limit how many times she has to use the bathroom at work.

No one raised concerns about her use of women’s restrooms in National Guard facilities or in federal buildings until, in one of his first acts in office, President Donald Trump issued an executive order recognizing only two sexes, male and female, and directed federal agencies to ban transgender and intersex people from single-sex spaces that match their gender identity.

Now Withrow is suing, alleging the bathroom ban violates her civil rights. The proposed class action lawsuit seeks to represent all federal employees affected by the order.

“An executive order micromanaging which bathroom civil servants use is discrimination, plain and simple, and must be stopped,” Michael Perloff, senior staff attorney at the ACLU in Washington, DC, said in a statement. 

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Another lawsuit was filed last month by a transgender transportation security officer at Dulles International Airport. Danielle Mittereder accused the Department of Homeland Security of sex discrimination for barring transgender officers from performing security screening pat-downs and from accessing Transportation Security Administration restrooms that correspond with their gender identity.

The Office of Personnel Management in January ordered federal agencies to ensure that restrooms and other “intimate spaces” are “designated by biological sex and not gender identity.” The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment. 

The cases are the first challenges to the Trump administration's bathroom ban as unlawful sex discrimination, setting up a showdown that could decide essential rights for transgender people in the workplace. 

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Whether employees should have access to a bathroom that matches their gender identity is an unsettled legal question at the national level. 

“It’s just now beginning to work its way through the courts,” said Mark Girouard, an employment lawyer and business litigator with the Nilan Johnson Lewis law firm. “My sense is the administration is hoping to get the issue before the Supreme Court and get a favorable ruling.”

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Restrooms are 'powerful political lever'

How did the office bathroom – that prosaic fixture of everyday work life with its industrial-grade metal stalls and fluorescent lighting – become a major battleground in the nation’s culture wars?

Historian Neil J. Young said for generations bathrooms have been a proxy for political fights “on almost every major issue in American life.”

From the Industrial Revolution to Jim Crow, “Americans have imparted bathrooms with their deepest anxieties about changing social norms and practices,” he wrote in Politico.

Over the years, “bathrooms have proven a surprisingly powerful political lever,” Young said. 

The ladies room emerged in the 19th century as a safe space for the growing number of women working in factories. Massachusetts enacted a statute in 1887 mandating separate bathrooms for men and women. It was the first in a wave of state laws rooted in the "separate spheres" ideology that women working outside the home needed protection − safety concerns that are still prevalent and controversial today.

Trump made these concerns a key part of his platform during the 2024 presidential campaign. Now his administration is leveraging federal authority to reverse what it says are liberal gender policies.

A study by UCLA’s Williams Institute found no evidence that allowing transgender people access to bathrooms corresponding to their gender identity jeopardizes safety and privacy. Rather, said Jody Herman, a Williams Institute scholar of public policy, "when trans people are made to use restrooms according to their sex assigned at birth, it would put them at added risk of harm.”

A hot spot for anti-trans movement

In recent years, legislation has swept red statehouses across the country, contesting the civil rights gains of LGBTQ+ Americans. In 2016, North Carolina became ground zero for the movement when it passed what became known as the “bathroom bill.” Today 1 in 3 transgender people live in states with some bathroom restrictions, according to the Movement Advancement Project. 

After campaigning against what he called “transgender insanity,” Trump in his second term issued directives to restrict the rights of people who identify as transgender, including in the workplace. 

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Andrea Lucas has said her top priority is to “defend the biological and binary reality of sex and related rights including women’s rights to single-sex spaces at work.” 

The Justice Department has warned that “federally funded institutions” that allow men who identify as women to access single-sex spaces “undermine the privacy, safety and equal opportunity of women and girls” and risk creating a hostile work environment.

It has also pledged to defend religious freedoms.This week, the DOJ filed legal action against a Virginia county school board for permitting a transgender child to use the locker room that corresponds with their gender identity and then punishing two Christian students who complained – the latest in a series of actions over the gender identity policies at schools across the country.

"Loudoun County’s decision to advance and promote gender ideology tramples on the rights of religious students who cannot embrace ideas that deny biological reality,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said in a statement.

The board previously said denying children access to the bathroom of the gender they identify with conflicts with federal court precedent.

Bathroom access is unsettled legal question

For more than a decade, the EEOC has held that discrimination based on an employee’s transgender identity is illegal. And in 2020, the Supreme Court extended federal workplace protections to LGBTQ+ employees, ruling that discrimination based on transgender status “necessarily entails discrimination based on sex.”

But in siding with three employees who were fired because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, the nation’s highest court said it was not addressing "bathrooms, locker rooms or anything else of the kind."

“Whether other policies and practices might or might not qualify as unlawful discrimination," Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote, "are questions for future cases."

During the Biden administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued guidance that unlawful workplace harassment includes denying access to a bathroom or other sex-segregated facility consistent with the individual’s gender identity.

Some courts agreed, but in May a federal judge in Texas gutted that guidance, saying the EEOC exceeded its statutory authority in "defining discriminatory harassment to include failure to accommodate a transgender employee’s bathroom, pronoun and dress preferences."

After the ruling, the EEOC revised the enforcement guidance. Former officials of the EEOC and the Labor Department who served in a number of presidential administrations and formed a group called EEO leaders criticized the move to "shade out" all references to harassment on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

While the Supreme Court took no position on those issues, “it is a gross misreading of the decision to assert that the court’s silence on those particular issues means that all harassment based on sexual orientation or gender identity is not prohibited discrimination,” they said.

Still, lawyers expect the EEOC to withdraw the guidance. What’s more, the Trump administration may seek to extend the bathroom ban to the private sector. 

Should the administration's bathroom rules spread to the private sector, they would affect about 2.1 million transgender adults in the country who make up less than 1% of the population.

“We’ve seen a heavy focus on transgender issues in the president’s executive orders this year, and with a Republican-controlled House and Senate, the issue could gain traction in Congress,” said Christy Kiely, an employment lawyer with the Seyfarth Shaw law firm. 

What are your bathroom rights?

Most employers have prohibitions against harassment on the basis of gender identity and have made efforts to create an inclusive environment for transgender employees. Now they face a quandary when deciding which employee to accommodate: a transgender individual's right to use the bathroom of their choice or a co-worker who objects to it, lawyers say.

It’s an open question whether employers “can or should limit access to bathrooms and locker rooms based on biological sex,” the Jackson Lewis law firm recently told clients.

“It does leave employers guessing or attempting to balance rights,” said Nonnie Shivers, an employment lawyer with the Ogletree Deakins law firm. “We are going to get these concerns. What do we tell people? We have an obligation to provide safe bathroom access for everybody.”

Making matters more complicated for employers is the legal patchwork of state laws and city and town ordinances governing restroom use across the country, lawyers say. 

According to the Movement Advancement Project, 20 states have laws prohibiting transgender people from using bathrooms and facilities. In 2025, nine states passed new laws or expanded existing laws. But many states have laws that protect LGBTQ+ employees and access to “vital services,” according to executive director Naomi Goldberg. 

“Employers in multiple jurisdictions have to walk a very fine line in making the business decision of how to handle this thorny issue,” said Susan Desmond, an employment lawyer with the McGlinchey Stafford law firm.