The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender workers from workplace discrimination.
Today’s opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia is a major victory for LGBTQ+ rights and gender justice.
“Today, Associate Justice Gorsuch’s majority opinion showed the face of justice to LGBT workers,” said WLP senior staff attorney Susan J. Frietsche. “As a matter of federal civil rights law, it is no longer legal to fire someone because of what gender they are or who they love.”
The Women’s Law Project is proud to be a part of this victory.
Last summer, we joined an amicus curiae brief filed by the National Women’s Law Center supporting the employees fired for being gay or transgender, along with 34 additional organizations that work to address and prevent sex discrimination.
In the brief, authored by the National Women’s Law Center, we argued that sex discrimination necessarily includes discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender presentation, because such discrimination is based on the perception that an LGBT person is transgressing our society’s sex-based stereotypes.
This perspective is as deeply rooted in legal precedent as it is in an understanding of the spectacular diversity of our shared humanity.
Even very early cases interpreting Title VII have held that discrimination “because of . . . sex” bars discrimination based on employers’ expectations about how employees of a particular sex will or should behave due to their sex—that is, discrimination based on sex stereotyping.
This win for LGTBQ+ rights is a triumph over the Trump Administration, whose lawyers argued Title VII did not encompass discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
How Does This Victory Affect LGBTQ+ Rights in Pennsylvania?
The victory also makes plain that supporters of LGBTQ+ rights have more to do: while the Bostock ruling speaks to federal civil rights law, our state civil rights laws still fail to protect Pennsylvanians against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity or expression.
Amending the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act (PHRA) to cover LGBTQ discrimination is critically important for at least two reasons: the Pennsylvania law applies to more people than Title VII does (the PHRA covers employers of 4 or more employees, whereas Title VII only covers larger workplaces of 15 or more employees); and the available remedies for a violation of the law are in some respects broader under the PHRA than under Title VII.
Pennsylvania needs to catch up to the standard set today by the U.S. Supreme Court. Our state lawmakers need to pass the Pennsylvania Fairness Act and extend equal state-based civil rights to our LGBTQ+ people.
The Pennsylvania Fairness Act (HB1404), sponsored by Rep. Dan Frankel, has been stalled in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives’ State Government Committee since May 2019.
The Women’s Law Project is a public interest law center in Pennsylvania devoted to advancing and defending the rights of women, girls, and LGBTQ+ people in Pennsylvania and beyond.
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