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.