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Supreme Court Delivers Major Victory to LGBTQ Employees

The Supreme Court says the federal ban on discrimination 'based on sex' also applies to gay, lesbian and transgender employees.
Nina Totenberg
Protesters rally in front of the U.S. Supreme Court as arguments are heard in a set of cases concerning the rights of LGBT people in the workforce, on October 8, 2019 in Washington, DC. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that the 1964 Civil Rights Act barring sex discrimination in the workplace protects LGBTQ employees from being fired because of their sexual orientation.

The vote was 6-to-3, with conservatives Chief Justice John Roberts and Neil Gorsuch joining the court’s four liberal justices in the majority.

The opinion is available here.

“In Title VII, Congress adopted broad language making it illegal for an employer to rely on an employee’s sex when deciding to fire that employee,” the court held in Monday’s decision. “We do not hesitate to recognize today a necessary consequence of that legislative choice: an employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law.”

The lawmakers who drafted and enacted the legislation didn’t necessarily need to envision how it might be applied in cases like the ones the court has since considered, Gorsuch wrote for the majority.

“Likely, they weren’t thinking about many of the act’s consequences that have become apparent over the years, including its prohibition against discrimination on the basis of motherhood or its ban on the sexual harassment of male employees. But the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands.”

Shannon Minter, legal director at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, called the ruling a “body blow” to the Trump administration’s policies towards LGBTQ people.

“It is a stern rebuke… to the legal theories the administration has been relying on not only in the Title VII case but in health care, education and housing,” Minter said. “And it’s extraordinary that that rebuke came from one of the most highly regarded conservative justices in contemporary history, and that is Justice Gorsuch who wrote the opinion today.”

A Group of Cases

The court’s decision came in several cases brought by gay and transgender employees.

Gerald Bostock was the child welfare coordinator for Clayton County, Ga. He contended that he was fired after he joined a gay recreational softball league in 2013.

“From that point on, my life changed,” he said in an NPR interview last October. Up until then, he said, his job evaluations had been excellent, and under his guidance, the county “reached the benchmark of serving 100 percent of the children in foster care, which was an unheard of milestone in any metro Atlanta program.”

None of that seemed to matter, however, when word got out that he had joined the gay softball league.

“I lost my livelihood. I lost my medical insurance, and I was recovering from prostate cancer when this occurred,” he said. “It was devastating.”

Transgender activist Aimee Stephens sits in her wheelchair outside the Supreme Court on Oct. 8, 2019, as the court holds oral arguments in cases dealing with workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Transgender activist Aimee Stephens sits in her wheelchair outside the Supreme Court on Oct. 8, 2019, as the court holds oral arguments in cases dealing with workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

Aimee Stephens, presented as a man for six years, worked as a funeral director for the Harris Funeral Home in Livonia, Mich. But by 2012, Stephens was in despair over her gender identity, at one point contemplating suicide.

“I stood in the back yard with a gun to my chest. But I couldn’t do it,” she told NPR last October.

Instead she decided to come out at work as a transgender woman, telling her colleagues and her employer of her decision in a letter. But two weeks after giving the letter to her boss, she was fired.

Stephens died earlier this year, but her case lived on.

Tom Rost, the owner of the Harris Funeral Home, who fired Stephens, explained his decision as one necessitated by the reaction he anticipated from “the families we serve. How would they possibly react to this?” he said, noting that Stephens was “the face of the Harris Funeral Home.”

The Supreme Court, however, seemed to have far less of a problem with Stephens’ gender identity.

The National Center for Lesbian Rights’ Shannon Minter applauded the court’s unflinching use of Stephens’ preferred pronouns.

“The fact that this court, a very conservative court, referred to Aimee Stephens as a woman, as ‘she’ with no hesitation, and talked about her decision to transition very sympathetically, that should send a huge signal to our whole country and to other federal courts.”

In a statement following Monday’s ruling, the director of the San Francisco LGBT Center heralded the court’s decision as historic, but emphasized there’s much more to be done.

“In the midst of a global pandemic, the continued murders of Black transgender women, and the administration’s efforts to roll back protections for transgender people in health care, this decision is especially encouraging,” said Rebecca Rolfe, executive director at the SF LGBT Center. “But we also must remember that until our laws remedy systemic racism and inequality, our movement’s pursuit of LGBTQ+ equality is far from done.”

This story includes reporting from KQED’s Alice Woelfle and David Marks.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit NPR.org.

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