Supreme Court: Title VII Prohibits Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation/Transgender Status

The Supreme Court has held that Title VII prohibits discrimination against an employee for being gay or transgender, because that type of discrimination is necessarily based in part on the sex of the employee.  The Court’s ruling resolves a split among the federal circuit courts of appeals.

Justice Gorsuch, writing for a six-justice majority, explained that the Court’s precedents had established that a practice could be sex discrimination even if sex was only one of the bases for the discrimination.  “In Title VII, Congress adopted broad language making it illegal for an employer to rely on an employee’s sex when deciding to fire that employee.”  The Court held that prohibiting discrimination on the basis of an employee’s sexual orientation or gender identity was the “necessary consequence of that legislative choice.”

While the Court’s decision was made in the employment context, it is likely that the logic of this holding will be applied in other cases in other areas of federal law that prohibit discrimination based on sex, such as the Fair Housing Act and ECOA.  The Court expressly did not decide, however, how claims of religious liberty by an employer might affect the Title VII analysis in other cases.