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National Guard troops in military parade, June 14, 2025
LeAnne Withrow of the Illinois National Guard says the policy has forced her to dehydrate herself at work.
A transgender member of the Illinois National Guard is suing the Trump administration over its policy barring trans and intersex federal employees from using restrooms aligned with their gender.
Plaintiff LeAnne Withrow of Springfield, Illinois, is a lead military and family readiness specialist and civilian employee of the Illinois National Guard. She filed a class action suit Thursday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, naming as defendants numerous administration officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. She is represented by Democracy Forward, the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of D.C., and the ACLU of Illinois.
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The exclusionary restroom policy violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex discrimination in the workplace, her suit contends. In its 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, the U.S. Supreme Court found that sex discrimination includes discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation.
Withrow joined the National Guard as a soldier in 2010, serving 13 years, according to the suit. Since then, she has been a civilian employee of the Guard, and she has received honors for her service, including the Illinois National Guard Abraham Lincoln Medal of Freedom. She came out as trans almost a decade ago. Until just a few months ago, she had the right to use the women’s restroom at work.
That changed when Donald Trump issued his executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” which among other things directs federal agencies to exclude trans and intersex people from single-sex spaces that align with their gender identity.
Related: Trump 'two genders' exec order will hurt millions of Americans: study
There is only one single-user restroom she can use at work, and none of the other buildings at Camp Lincoln, where she is stationed, have single-user restrooms. She worries about being called into an urgent meeting at any of them, the suit notes. Of the 12 National Guard facilities she must visit to supervise the work of other department employees, eight do not have any single-user restrooms.
To avoid having to use the restroom at work, she skips breakfast and often lunch, or eats only a granola bar or a spoonful of peanut butter, except on special occasions or when she’s reasonably sure she won’t be called away from her building, according to the suit. “And she dehydrates herself — most days drinking a single cup of coffee and drinking as little water as possible,” the suit states.
Withrow filed a complaint in May with the Army National Guard Bureau Equal Opportunity Office, then one with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but these agencies did not resolve the matter, so she filed the suit.
“No one should have to choose between their career in service and their own dignity,” Withrow said in a press release. “I bring respect and honor to the work I do to support military families, and I hope the court will restore dignity to transgender people like me who serve this country every day.”
The suit seeks to end enforcement of the restroom policy and to have the court declare that the executive order and the way it was implemented violate the federal Administrative Procedure Act. It also seeks “at least nominal damages” for Withrow, along with court costs and attorneys’ fees.
“This policy is hateful bigotry aimed at denying hardworking federal employees their basic dignity simply because they are transgender,” Kaitlyn Golden, senior counsel at Democracy Forward, said in the release.
“We look forward to demonstrating to the court that this unlawful executive order not only denies the existence of transgender and intersex employees, it is yet another attempt by the Trump administration to target and punish transgender people for simply being who they are,” added Shana Knizhnik, senior staff attorney for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project.
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