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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merely feeble would be generous.
                                 C
    While Americans in 1964 would have been shocked to
learn that Congress had enacted a law prohibiting sexual
orientation discrimination, they would have been bewil-
dered to hear that this law also forbids discrimination on
the basis of “transgender status” or “gender identity,” terms
that would have left people at the time scratching their
heads. The term “transgender” is said to have been coined
“ ‘in the early 1970s,’ ”28 and the term “gender identity,” now
understood to mean “[a]n internal sense of being male, fe-
male or something else,”29 apparently first appeared in an
academic article in 1964.30 Certainly, neither term was in
common parlance; indeed, dictionaries of the time still pri-
marily defined the word “gender” by reference to grammat-
ical classifications. See, e.g., American Heritage Diction-
ary, at 548 (def. 1(a)) (“Any set of two or more categories,
such as masculine, feminine, and neuter, into which words
are divided . . . and that determine agreement with or the

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