The Supreme Court has rendered only one major decision on transgender rights: Bostock v. Clayton County.
That ruling, issued in 2020, said that a landmark civil rights law protects gay and transgender workers from workplace discrimination.
“An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, President Donald J. Trump’s first appointee to the court, wrote for the majority in the 6-to-3 ruling. He was joined by another conservative, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and what was then the court’s four-member liberal wing.
That majority opinion and two dissents spanned 168 pages. In remarks to reporters, President Donald J. Trump said he accepted the ruling. “I’ve read the decision,” he said, “and some people were surprised, but they’ve ruled and we live with their decision.” He added that it was a “very powerful decision, actually.”
The question for the justices was the meaning of a statute, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars employment discrimination based on race, religion, national origin and sex. They had to decide whether that last prohibition — discrimination “because of sex” — applied to many millions of gay and transgender workers.
Justice Gorsuch wrote that it did.
“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,” he wrote.
In dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that “the arrogance of this argument is breathtaking,” adding that “there is not a shred of evidence that any member of Congress interpreted the statutory text that way” when the law was adopted in 1964.
That law prohibited workplace discrimination “because of sex.” The case argued on Wednesday, by contrast, concerns the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, which is written in general terms and has been interpreted to establish an analytical framework rather than categorical rules. Still, Justice Alito wrote in 2020, “the court’s decision may exert a gravitational pull in constitutional cases.”
The post A 2020 decision protecting transgender workers is a major precedent. appeared first on New York Times.
