Section 7

Citation: Section 7
Parent Document: Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644 (2020)
Jurisdiction: United States (federal)
Effective Date: 2020-06-15
Original Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4760997/bostock-v-clayton-county/ ↗

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equally. So an employer who fires a woman, Hannah, be-
cause she is insufficiently feminine and also fires a man,
Bob, for being insufficiently masculine may treat men and
women as groups more or less equally. But in both cases
the employer fires an individual in part because of sex. In-
stead of avoiding Title VII exposure, this employer doubles
it.
                              B
   From the ordinary public meaning of the statute’s lan-
guage at the time of the law’s adoption, a straightforward
rule emerges: An employer violates Title VII when it inten-
tionally fires an individual employee based in part on sex.
It doesn’t matter if other factors besides the plaintiff ’s sex
contributed to the decision. And it doesn’t matter if the em-
ployer treated women as a group the same when compared
to men as a group. If the employer intentionally relies in
part on an individual employee’s sex when deciding to dis-
charge the employee—put differently, if changing the em-
ployee’s sex would have yielded a different choice by the em-
ployer—a statutory violation has occurred. Title VII’s
message is “simple but momentous”: An individual em-
ployee’s sex is “not relevant to the selection, evaluation, or
compensation of employees.” Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins,
490 U. S. 228, 239 (1989) (plurality opinion).
   The statute’s message for our cases is equally simple and
momentous: An individual’s homosexuality or transgender
status is not relevant to employment decisions. That’s be-
cause it is impossible to discriminate against a person for
being homosexual or transgender without discriminating
against that individual based on sex. Consider, for exam-
ple, an employer with two employees, both of whom are at-
tracted to men. The two individuals are, to the employer’s
mind, materially identical in all respects, except that one is
a man and the other a woman. If the employer fires the
10             BOSTOCK v. CLAYTON COUNTY Opinion of the Court

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