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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male employee for no reason other than the fact he is at-
tracted to men, the employer discriminates against him for
traits or actions it tolerates in his female colleague. Put
differently, the employer intentionally singles out an em-
ployee to fire based in part on the employee’s sex, and the
affected employee’s sex is a but-for cause of his discharge.
Or take an employer who fires a transgender person who
was identified as a male at birth but who now identifies as
a female. If the employer retains an otherwise identical
employee who was identified as female at birth, the em-
ployer intentionally penalizes a person identified as male at
birth for traits or actions that it tolerates in an employee
identified as female at birth. Again, the individual em-
ployee’s sex plays an unmistakable and impermissible role
in the discharge decision.
   That distinguishes these cases from countless others
where Title VII has nothing to say. Take an employer who
fires a female employee for tardiness or incompetence or
simply supporting the wrong sports team. Assuming the
employer would not have tolerated the same trait in a man,
Title VII stands silent. But unlike any of these other traits
or actions, homosexuality and transgender status are inex-
tricably bound up with sex. Not because homosexuality or
transgender status are related to sex in some vague sense
or because discrimination on these bases has some dispar-
ate impact on one sex or another, but because to discrimi-
nate on these grounds requires an employer to intentionally
treat individual employees differently because of their sex.
   Nor does it matter that, when an employer treats one em-
ployee worse because of that individual’s sex, other factors
may contribute to the decision. Consider an employer
with a policy of firing any woman he discovers to be a
Yankees fan. Carrying out that rule because an em-
ployee is a woman and a fan of the Yankees is a firing
“because of sex” if the employer would have tolerated the
same allegiance in a male employee. Likewise here.
                  Cite as: 590 U. S. ____ (2020)           11 Opinion of the Court

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