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/ ↗

Full Text

2,138 chars

wasn’t the only factor, or maybe even the main factor, but
it was one but-for cause—and that was enough. You can
call the statute’s but-for causation test what you will—ex-
pansive, legalistic, the dissents even dismiss it as wooden
or literal. But it is the law.
   Trying another angle, the defendants before us suggest
that an employer who discriminates based on homosexual-
ity or transgender status doesn’t intentionally discriminate
based on sex, as a disparate treatment claim requires. See
post, at 9–12 (ALITO, J., dissenting); post, at 12–13
(KAVANAUGH, J., dissenting). But, as we’ve seen, an em-
ployer who discriminates against homosexual or
transgender employees necessarily and intentionally ap-
plies sex-based rules. An employer that announces it will
not employ anyone who is homosexual, for example, intends
to penalize male employees for being attracted to men and
female employees for being attracted to women.
   What, then, do the employers mean when they insist in-
tentional discrimination based on homosexuality or
transgender status isn’t intentional discrimination based
on sex? Maybe the employers mean they don’t intend to
harm one sex or the other as a class. But as should be clear
by now, the statute focuses on discrimination against indi-
viduals, not groups. Alternatively, the employers may
mean that they don’t perceive themselves as motivated by
a desire to discriminate based on sex. But nothing in Title
VII turns on the employer’s labels or any further intentions
(or motivations) for its conduct beyond sex discrimination.
In Manhart, the employer intentionally required women to
make higher pension contributions only to fulfill the further
purpose of making things more equitable between men and
women as groups. In Phillips, the employer may have per-
ceived itself as discriminating based on motherhood, not
sex, given that its hiring policies as a whole favored women.
But in both cases, the Court set all this aside as irrelevant.
The employers’ policies involved intentional discrimination
18             BOSTOCK v. CLAYTON COUNTY Opinion of the Court

Other Sections in This Document (1015)

Full Text