The EEOC’s Identity Crisis

Reveal

The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX

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4.7 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 31 May 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

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Summary

Dylan Bringuel remembers the exact moment they got hired by the Holiday Inn Express in Jamestown, New York. It was late August 2022, and Bringuel—who uses they/them pronouns—had recently moved across the country and was struggling to find work.

Bringuel is transgender and was upfront about their gender identity during the job interview. “ I was like, ‘Just so you're aware, I am transitioning from female to male,’” they remember saying. “And they said, ‘Okay, we respect that. We’ll do our best to make sure you fit and you're comfortable here.’”

That wasn’t the case. Bringuel said that the first day on the job, the housekeeping manager called them an “it” and a “transformer” and said people like Bringuel are “what is wrong with society.”

Bringuel reported the harassment to hotel management. Within a day, they were fired. In 2024, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission stepped in to help Bringuel sue the hotel for workplace discrimination.

But earlier this year, something unusual happened. The EEOC dropped Bringuel’s case, not because their allegations lacked merit, but because of President Donald Trump’s executive order on “radical gender ideology.”

This week on Reveal, Mother Jones national politics reporter Abby Vesoulis walks through how the anti-DEI movement evolved from a niche legal fight to an all-out culture war—and what that means for the EEOC and the marginalized people it has historically protected.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	From the Center for Investigator reporting in PRX, this is Reveal.
0:05.6	I'm out Let's see.
0:07.6	Let me take you back to January, when President Donald Trump began his mission to overhaul
0:12.9	the federal government and brought in Elon Musk to scour government databases and slash line
0:19.0	items that didn't align with Trump's vision for MAGA 2.0.
0:23.4	Musk, the world's richest man, with billions of dollars in federal contracts, has been given
0:28.2	enormous power, his Department of Government efficiency already accessing at least 15 agencies.
0:34.5	It was a huge story, and journalists from all sorts of news outlets set out to find
0:39.5	federal workers. They wanted to know which jobs and programs were being eliminated and get
0:45.2	firsthand accounts of which websites were being scrubbed in the name of ending wokeness. Mother
0:51.2	Jones National Politics reporter Abby Vassoulis was one of those journalists searching for sources.
0:57.0	There are so many federal workers, so I just put posts on LinkedIn X, Blue Sky, looking for federal
1:06.3	workers who might be willing to talk to me anonymously or on background. I was expecting people from like
1:13.3	the State Department or USAID, but I was surprised that a lot of them were from the EEOC or the Equal Employment
1:22.0	Opportunity Commission. It's this sort of small niche government agency that deals with workplace discrimination complaints,
1:30.3	but it was not what I was expecting.
1:32.4	It felt like most of the TV reports I was seeing were related to Elon Musk and Doge,
1:37.4	but the people from the EEOC weren't reaching out to me about that.
1:41.4	They wanted to talk about something entirely different.
1:44.5	Workers were complaining to Abby about their new boss, Andrea Lucas.
1:48.7	They said she was making drastic changes that didn't make sense.
1:53.1	Lucas isn't exactly a household name,
	...

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