Bostock v. Clayton Cnty.

140 S.Ct. 1731

207 L.Ed.2d 218

Gerald Lynn BOSTOCK, Petitioner

v.CLAYTON COUNTY, GEORGIA ;

Altitude Express, Inc., et al., Petitioners

v.Melissa Zarda and William Allen Moore, Jr., Co-Independent Executors of the Estate of Donald Zarda;

R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, Inc., Petitioner

v.Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, et al.

No. 17–1618

No. 17–1623

No. 18–107

Supreme Court of the United States.

Argued October 8, 2019

Decided June 15, 2020

Brian J. Sutherland, Thomas J. Mew IV, Buckley Beal, LLP, Atlanta, GA, for Petitioner.

Jack R. Hancock, William H. Buechner, Jr., Michael M. Hill, Freeman Mathis & Gary, LLP, Forest Park, GA, for Respondent.

Jeffrey L. Fisher, Brian H. Fletcher, Pamela S. Karlan, Stanford CA, Ria Tabacco, Mar James D. Esseks New York, NY, Gregory Antollino, New York, NY, Stephen Bergstein, New Paltz, NY, David D. Cole, Washington, DC, Erin Beth Harrist, Robert Hodgson, Christopher Dunn New York, NY, for Plaintiff-Respondent Zarda.

Justice GORSUCH delivered the opinion of the Court.

Sometimes small gestures can have unexpected consequences. Major initiatives practically guarantee them. In our time, few pieces of federal legislation rank in significance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There, in Title VII, Congress outlawed discrimination in the workplace on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Today, we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender. The answer is clear. An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.

Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result. Likely, they weren't thinking about many of the Act's consequences that have become apparent over the years, including its prohibition against discrimination on the basis of motherhood or its ban on the sexual harassment of male employees. But the limits of the drafters' imagination supply no reason to ignore the law's demands. When the express terms of a statute give us one answer and extratextual considerations suggest another, it's no contest. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit.

I

Few facts are needed to appreciate the legal question we face. Each of the three cases before us started the same way: An employer fired a long-time employee shortly after the employee revealed that he or she is homosexual or transgender—and allegedly for no reason other than the employee's homosexuality or transgender status.

Gerald Bostock worked for Clayton County, Georgia, as a child welfare advocate. Under his leadership, the county won national awards for its work. After a decade with the county, Mr. Bostock began participating in a gay recreational softball league. Not long after that, influential members of the community allegedly made disparaging comments about Mr. Bostock's sexual orientation and participation in the league. Soon, he was fired for conduct "unbecoming" a county employee.

Donald Zarda worked as a skydiving instructor at Altitude Express in New York. After several seasons with the company, Mr. Zarda mentioned that he was gay and, days later, was fired.

Aimee Stephens worked at R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes in Garden City, Michigan. When she got the job, Ms. Stephens presented as a male. But two years into her service with the company, she began treatment for despair and loneliness. Ultimately, clinicians diagnosed her with gender dysphoria and recommended that she begin living as a woman. In her sixth year with the company, Ms. Stephens wrote a letter to her employer explaining that she planned to " live and work full-time as a woman" after she returned from an upcoming vacation. The funeral home fired her before she left, telling her "this is not going to work out."

While these cases began the same way, they ended differently. Each employee brought suit under Title VII alleging unlawful discrimination on the basis of sex. 78 Stat. 255, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e–2(a)(1). In Mr. Bostock's case, the Eleventh Circuit held that the law does not prohibit employers from firing employees for being gay and so his suit could be dismissed as a matter of law. 723 Fed.Appx. 964 (2018). Meanwhile, in Mr. Zarda's case, the Second Circuit concluded that sexual orientation discrimination does violate Title VII and allowed his case to proceed. 883 F.3d 100 (2018). Ms. Stephens's case has a more complex procedural history, but in the end the Sixth Circuit reached a decision along the same lines as the Second Circuit's, holding that Title VII bars employers from firing employees because of their transgender status. 884 F.3d 560 (2018). During the course of the proceedings in these long-running disputes, both Mr. Zarda and Ms. Stephens have passed away. But their estates continue to press their causes for the benefit of their heirs. And we granted certiorari in these matters to resolve at last the disagreement among the courts of appeals over the scope of Title VII's protections for homosexual and transgender persons. 587 U.S. ––––, 139 S.Ct. 1599, 203 L.Ed.2d 754 (2019).

II

This Court normally interprets a statute in accord with the ordinary public meaning of its terms at the time of its enactment. After all, only the words on the page constitute the law adopted by Congress and approved by the President. If judges could add to, remodel, update, or detract from old statutory terms inspired only by extratextual sources and our own imaginations, we would risk amending statutes outside the legislative process reserved for the people's representatives. And we would deny the people the right to continue relying on the original meaning of the law they have counted on to settle their rights and obligations. See New Prime Inc. v. Oliveira , 586 U.S. ––––, –––– – ––––, 139 S.Ct. 532, 538–539, 202 L.Ed.2d 536 (2019).

With this in mind, our task is clear. We must determine the ordinary public meaning of Title VII's command that it is "unlawful ... for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin." § 2000e–2(a)(1). To do so, we orient ourselves to the time of the statute's adoption, here 1964, and begin by examining the key statutory terms in turn before assessing their impact on the cases at hand and then confirming our work against this Court's precedents.

A

The only statutorily protected characteristic at issue in today's cases is "sex"—and that is also the primary term in Title VII whose meaning the parties dispute. Appealing to roughly contemporaneous dictionaries, the employers say that, as used here, the term "sex" in 1964 referred to "status as either male or female [as] determined by reproductive biology." The employees counter by submitting that, even in 1964, the term bore a broader scope, capturing more than anatomy and reaching at least some norms concerning gender identity and sexual orientation. But because nothing in our approach to these cases turns on the outcome of the parties' debate, and because the employees concede the point for argument's sake, we proceed on the assumption that "sex" signified what the employers suggest, referring only to biological distinctions between male and female.

Still, that's just a starting point. The question isn't just what "sex" meant, but what Title VII says about it. Most notably, the statute prohibits employers from taking certain actions "because of " sex. And, as this Court has previously explained, "the ordinary meaning of ‘because of’ is ‘by reason of’ or ‘on account of.’ " University of Tex. Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar , 570 U.S. 338, 350, 133 S.Ct. 2517, 186 L.Ed.2d 503 (2013) (citing Gross v. FBL Financial Services, Inc. , 557 U.S. 167, 176, 129 S.Ct. 2343, 174 L.Ed.2d 119 (2009) ; quotation altered). In the language of law, this means that Title VII's "because of " test incorporates the " ‘simple’ " and "traditional" standard of but-for causation. Nassar , 570 U.S. at 346, 360, 133 S.Ct. 2517. That form of causation is established whenever a particular outcome would not have happened "but for" the purported cause. See Gross , 557 U.S. at 176, 129 S.Ct. 2343. In other words, a but-for test directs us to change one thing at a time and see if the outcome changes. If it does, we have found a but-for cause.

This can be a sweeping standard. Often, events have multiple but-for causes. So, for example, if a car accident occurred both because the defendant ran a red light and because the plaintiff failed to signal his turn at the intersection, we might call each a but-for cause of the collision. Cf. Burrage v. United States , 571 U.S. 204, 211–212, 134 S.Ct. 881, 187 L.Ed.2d 715 (2014). When it comes to Title VII, the adoption of the traditional but-for causation standard means a defendant cannot avoid liability just by citing some other factor that contributed to its challenged employment decision. So long as the plaintiff 's sex was one but-for cause of that decision, that is enough to trigger the law. See ibid . ; Nassar , 570 U.S. at 350, 133 S.Ct. 2517.

No doubt, Congress could have taken a more parsimonious approach. As it has in other statutes, it could have added "solely" to indicate that actions taken "because of " the confluence of multiple factors do not violate the law. Cf. 11 U.S.C. § 525 ; 16 U.S.C. § 511. Or it could have written "primarily because of " to indicate that the prohibited factor had to be the main cause of the defendant's challenged employment decision. Cf. 22 U.S.C. § 2688. But none of this is the law we have. If anything, Congress has moved in the...