The Supreme Court issued a landmark victory for LGBTQ equality on Monday, ruling 6-3 that the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibiting workplace discrimination on the basis of race, religion, national origin, or sex also protects gay and transgender employees. “Today, we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender. The answer is clear,” wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch, who joined John Roberts and the court’s liberal justices in the majority ruling. “An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.”
The decision—which makes it illegal to discriminate against employees or prospective employees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity—came in response to a pair of cases: Gerald Bostock, a social worker, and Donald Zarda, a skydiving instructor who has since died, had filed lawsuits arguing they were terminated over their sexual orientation, and Aimee Stephens, who passed away from kidney failure last month, was fired from her position at a Michigan funeral home after telling her employer and coworkers that she was transitioning. In a statement, the ACLU said that “This landmark victory is the work of decades of LGBTQ people—led by Black trans women—fighting for our community. It belongs to our clients Aimee, Don, and another plaintiff Gerald Bostock, and countless other individuals who spoke out when they experienced discrimination.”
It’s a somewhat surprising ruling from a court the administration has gradually helped push to the right. Of the nine justices, three dissented, including Brett Kavanaugh, whom Donald Trump helped install in 2018 after he was accused of sexual misconduct as a teenager. (He has vehemently denied the accusation.) The Trump administration had sided with the employers, arguing last year that Title VII “does not bar discrimination because of sexual orientation.” And indeed, the decision followed the White House’s own rollback last week—in the middle of Pride month, and on the four-year anniversary of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting—of Obama-era healthcare protections for transgender Americans.
The juxtaposition underscored the precarious nature of recent progress, and reinforced the need for concrete LGBTQ protections at the federal level. The Human Rights Campaign, the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal’s Transgender Rights Project all told the New York Times that they’re planning to sue to have the healthcare policy reinstated. As the ACLU noted in its statement on Monday, “Our work is not done.”
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