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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in enacting Title VII or certain expectations about its oper-
ation. They warn, too, about consequences that might fol-
low a ruling for the employees. But none of these conten-
tions about what the employers think the law was meant to
do, or should do, allow us to ignore the law as it is.
                              A
   Maybe most intuitively, the employers assert that dis-
crimination on the basis of homosexuality and transgender
status aren’t referred to as sex discrimination in ordinary
conversation. If asked by a friend (rather than a judge) why
they were fired, even today’s plaintiffs would likely respond
that it was because they were gay or transgender, not be-
cause of sex. According to the employers, that conversa-
tional answer, not the statute’s strict terms, should guide
our thinking and suffice to defeat any suggestion that the
employees now before us were fired because of sex. Cf. post,
at 3 (ALITO, J., dissenting); post, at 8–13 (KAVANAUGH, J.,
dissenting).
   But this submission rests on a mistaken understanding
of what kind of cause the law is looking for in a Title VII
case. In conversation, a speaker is likely to focus on what
seems most relevant or informative to the listener. So an
employee who has just been fired is likely to identify the
primary or most direct cause rather than list literally every
but-for cause. To do otherwise would be tiring at best. But
these conversational conventions do not control Title VII’s
legal analysis, which asks simply whether sex was a but-for
cause. In Phillips, for example, a woman who was not hired
under the employer’s policy might have told her friends that
her application was rejected because she was a mother, or
because she had young children. Given that many women
could be hired under the policy, it’s unlikely she would say
she was not hired because she was a woman. But the Court
did not hesitate to recognize that the employer in Phillips
discriminated against the plaintiff because of her sex. Sex
                  Cite as: 590 U. S. ____ (2020)           17 Opinion of the Court

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