A transgender employee at the National Security Agency (NSA) is suing the Trump administration over the president’s Day One executive order, claiming there are only two “immutable” sexes, male and female.

She says his order violates federal law.

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Sarah O’Neill is a data scientist at the U.S. intelligence agency, which operates under the Department of Defense and is tasked with global information collection.

The lawsuit, filed recently in a U.S. District Court in Maryland, says Trump’s order “declares that it is the policy of the United States government to deny Ms. O’Neill’s very existence,” the Associated Press reports.

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As a result of new policies based on Trump’s order, O’Neill says the NSA no longer recognizes her trans identity and “right to a workplace free of unlawful harassment,” while “prohibiting her from identifying her pronouns as female in written communications” and “barring her from using the women’s restroom at work.”

The lawsuit contends that those policies and the executive orders that inspired them create a hostile work environment and violate Section VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The 2020 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County states that Section VII prohibits discrimination based on sex applied to gender identity.

“We agree that homosexuality and transgender status are distinct concepts from sex,” the court’s majority opinion stated. “But, as we’ve seen, discrimination based on homosexuality or transgender status necessarily entails discrimination based on sex; the first cannot happen without the second.”

The ruling made it illegal nationwide for employers to fire or mistreat employees for being gay or transgender.

“The Executive Order rejects the existence of gender identity altogether, let alone the possibility that someone’s gender identity can differ from their sex, which it characterizes as ‘gender ideology,’” O’Neil’s complaint argues.

The analyst is seeking restoration of her workplace rights and protections, as well as financial damages.

Trump has used the same executive order, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism,” across the federal government and against states in his crusade against trans identity;. However, that order focuses on revoking trans inclusion in sex-segregated spaces and public accommodations.

Currently, 16 states are suing the administration over its threats to revoke funding for schools and sexual education programs that acknowledge trans and nonbinary gender identities. Trump’s order is regularly invoked with funding threats against states allowing trans student-athletes in school sports. Trans and nonbinary identities have been stripped from passports based on the order, and U.S. diplomats have stood alone at the United Nations, defending the Trump administration’s obsession with “gender ideology.”

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