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The State Department announced on Monday a new policy that will ban trans employees from using the restroom that matches their gender identity.

Right-wing news site, The Daily Signal, reports that they obtained a memo from the State Department titled “Updates Regarding Biological Sex and Intimate Spaces, Including Restrooms.” The memo says, “ACTION: Post must abide by the President’s directive in E.O. 14168, ensuring intimate spaces are designated by biological sex.”

The memo is designed to update the State Department’s policies in line with Donald Trump’s January 2024 anti-trans executive order, which declared that there were only “two sexes” and that they were immutable. While not a legal action in its own right, an executive order instructs the federal government on how Trump would like laws to be implemented.

Several federal agencies had already implemented an anti-trans bathroom ban, but the State Department had not previously made its own policy.

In July of 2025, the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent out a memo instructing all federal agencies to bring themselves in line with the executive order, with the stated goal of “Ending Gender Ideology in the Federal Workplace and Protecting Women.”

That order included a note that all agencies should have “ensured that intimate spaces (such as bathrooms, locker rooms, and lactation rooms) at Federal worksites designated for women, girls, or females (or for men, boys, or males) are designated by biological sex and not gender identity.”

The State Department’s delay in implementing a bathroom ban likely doesn’t stem from Secretary of State Marco Rubio having empathy for the trans community, but rather from a case before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

Last summer, a transgender person filed a complaint with the EEOC after being denied access to the appropriate restrooms and “intimate spaces.” A decision was reached by the commission in February, which upheld that “Title VII permits a federal agency employer to maintain single-sex bathrooms and similar intimate spaces,” and “permits a federal agency employer to exclude employees, including trans-identifying employees, from opposite-sex facilities.”

Title VII is the federal law that bans job discrimination on the basis of sex. In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled in Bostock v. Clayton Co. that Title VII’s ban on sex-based discrimination also bans anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, since it’s impossible to discriminate against trans or queer people without taking their sex assigned at birth into account.

The guidance goes against previous recommendations from OSHA, which stated: “The core belief underlying these policies is that all employees should be permitted to use the facilities that correspond with their gender identity. For example, a person who identifies as a man should be permitted to use men’s restrooms, and a person who identifies as a woman should be permitted to use women’s restrooms.”

Those guidelines were removed from the Department of Labor’s website at some point between January 15, 2025, and February 1, 2025.

The Daily Signal touted the new policy under the headline “Rubio Cracks Down on Men in Women’s Restrooms.” That can be added to his resume, alongside defunding USAID so that thousands will suffer from HIV and changing the State Department’s default font because the old typeface was too “woke.”

“Banning transgender people from using facilities in alignment with their gender identity deprives them of the ability to participate in public life,” Advocates for Trans Equality’s website notes. “Without the ability to use a public restroom, trans people are less able to live their lives and travel outside their home. Trans employees need to be able to use the restroom at work to keep their jobs without risking their health and safety.”

“Transgender people cannot safely use the bathroom of the gender they were assigned at birth just because the law requires them to. Trans people are routinely subjected to harassment and assault in bathrooms. Sixty-eight percent of trans people have been verbally harassed, and 9% have been physically assaulted when using a public restroom in the past 12 months. And sadly, 8% of trans people have faced a kidney or urinary tract infection from having to avoid restrooms for their safety.”