A New York Times report last week revealed that the Trump administration’s assault on transgender, non-binary, and intersex people has escalated. According to a memo circulating since last spring and recently obtained by the Times, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is at the helm of an effort to define gender as either male or female, immutable and determined by the sex assigned at birth — a move that would dramatically roll back protections and recognition of people who fall outside the gender binary. The legal definition would fall under Title IX, the federal law that bars gender discrimination in government-funded education programs.

The change marks the latest development in the administration’s campaign to revoke preexisting US gender-recognition policies, particularly regarding employment. In 2017, Trump rescinded an Obama-era executive order designed to prevent discrimination against LGBTQ employees from federal contractors. That same year, Attorney General Jeff Sessions argued that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a federal workplace-equity law, did not protect transgender workers from discrimination. The Department of Justice would thus no longer side with transgender workers who sued their employers for discrimination on the grounds of the 1964 law.

Now, activists fear that HHS’s proposed definition may further corrode protections for transgender, intersex, and gender-nonconforming people in the workplace. Non-discrimination law is already fractured and deficient: according to the LGBTQ rights nonprofit the Movement Advancement Project, 48 percent of LGBTQ people live in states that do not prohibit employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.