Activists rally in support of LGBTQ rights at New York City Hall on October 8, 2019 in New York City. On Tuesday the U.S. Supreme Court will hear three cases on whether it is legal to fire workers because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
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The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that workers cannot be fired for being gay or transgender in a major win for members of the LGBT community.
The 6-3 holding, authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, a conservative appointed by President Donald Trump, is a blockbuster development in the history of gay rights in the United States.
“An individual’s homosexuality or transgender status is not relevant to employment decisions,” Gorsuch wrote. “That’s because it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”
While workers in about half the country were protected by local laws that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, there was no federal law that explicitly barred LGBT workers from being fired on that basis.
“This decision sends an unambiguous message that equal protection under the law applies to all and that an employee’s failure to adhere to an employer’s gender stereotype is not a licence to discriminate,” Kristen Browde, co-chair of the National Trans Bar Association, said in a statement.
The court’s opinion, which was released only online as a precaution against Covid-19, did not immediately load in its entirety, possibly a result of high traffic to the Supreme Court’s website.
The cases were brought by three workers who said they were fired from their jobs because they were gay or transgender. They argued that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which says that employers may not discriminate based on “sex,” also applies to sexual orientation and gender identity.
Gorsuch wrote that discriminating against an employee because they are gay or transgender is by definition discrimination on the basis of sex.
“It doesn’t matter if other factors besides the plaintiff ‘s sex contributed to the decision. And it doesn’t matter if the employer treated women as a group the same when compared to men as a group,” Gorsuch wrote.
“If the employer intentionally relies in part on an individual employee’s sex when deciding to discharge the employee—put differently, if changing the employee’s sex would have yielded a different choice by the employer—a statutory violation has occurred,” he wrote.
The workers who brought the cases are Gerald Bostock, a gay man who was fired from his job as a child welfare services coordinator in 2013 after joining a recreational gay softball league; Donald Zarda, who was fired from his job as a skydiving instructor after revealing his sexual orientation to a female client; and Aimee Stephens,a transgender funeral director who was fired after announcing her intention to present as a woman.
Only Bostock lived to see the cases decided. Zarda passed away before the case was argued and his challenge was pursued by his family. Stephens passed away last month at her home in Detroit, from kidney failure, according to her attorneys.
The cases are Gerald Lynn Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia; Altitude Express v. Melissa Zarda; and R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
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