The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on June 16, 2020, in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, 590 U.S. — , 2020 WL 3146686, 2020 U.S. LEXIS 3252, that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act bans employment discrimination against people because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, was the fifth landmark in a chain of important LGBT rights victories dating from 1996, continuing the Court’s crucial role in expanding the rights of LGBT people. The ruling culminated seventy years of struggle and activism seeking statutory protection for sexual minorities against employment discrimination, dating from the 1950s, when early LGBT rights organizations always listed such protection as one of their goals, even before the federal government began to address the issue of employment discrimination statutorily in 1964.
Trump-appointee Neil Gorsuch wrote the Court’s opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts (a George Bush appointee), and the four Justices appointed by Democratic presidents: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer (Bill Clinton) and Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan (Barack Obama).
Samuel Alito, appointed to the Court by George Bush, wrote an outraged dissenting opinion, joined by Clarence Thomas, who was appointed by George H.W. Bush. Trump-appointee Brett Kavanaugh penned a more temperate dissent, concluding with a surprising salute to the movement’s achievement of this milestone.
Justice Gorsuch’s emergence as the writer of this opinion caught many by surprise, since he is an acolyte of Justice Antonin Scalia, whom he replaced on the Court. Despite Scalia’s avowed commitment to many of the interpretive principles that Gorsuch also embraces, one could not imagine Scalia writing such an opinion, especially in light of the vitriolic dissenting opinions that he wrote to all four prior landmark opinions.
Because Chief Justice Roberts voted with the majority of the Court, he was in the position to assign the majority opinion to Gorsuch. Had this been a 5-4 ruling without Roberts, Justice Ginsburg, the senior justice in the majority, would have decided which justice would write for the Court. In the two marriage equality rulings, Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose approach to gay issues had been established in earlier cases, assigned the opinions to himself as senior justice in the majority. Ginsburg might well have assigned the opinion to Gorsuch in any event, to help secure his vote, especially as it was possible that if Ginsburg or one of the other Democratic appointees wrote an opinion embracing arguments Gorsuch could not accept, he might either drift away or write a concurrence in the judgment, resulting in a plurality opinion. It is even possible that Roberts’ vote came from his institutional concern that such a significant ruling have the weight of a 6-3 vote. Since there were already five votes in favor of the employee parties, his vote would not affect the outcome, but would give him some control over the opinion through his assignment to Gorsuch.
The 1996 landmark gay rights ruling was Romer v. Evans, a decision that established for the first time that a state’s discrimination against “homosexuals” violated the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, striking down a homophobic amendment that Colorado voters had added to their state constitution, forbidding the state from providing anti-discrimination protection to gay people. Justice Kennedy’s opinion for a 6-3 Court found that the only explanation for the Colorado amendment’s adoption was animus against lesbians and gay men, never a constitutionally valid reason, so the Court did not expressly consider whether heightened scrutiny would apply to a sexual orientation discrimination claim.
The second landmark decision was Lawrence v. Texas (2003), declaring that a state law making gay sex a crime violated the guarantee of liberty in the 14th Amendment’s Due Process clause, and overruling a 1986 decision, Bowers v. Hardwick, which had rejected such a challenge to Georgia’s penal law.
The third landmark, United States v. Windsor, held in 2013 that the federal government must recognize same-sex marriages that states had authorized, striking down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, which had put into the United States Code a definition of marriage limited to different-sex couples. The Court held that this violated the Due Process and Equal Protection rights of same-sex couples under the 5th Amendment, again without explicitly engaging in discussion of whether a law discriminating based on sexual orientation is subject to heightened scrutiny.
The fourth landmark, Obergefell v. Hodges, held in 2015 that gay people enjoyed the same fundamental right to marry that had previously been guaranteed to straight people under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the 14th Amendment. Since the Court dealt with this as a fundamental rights case, both from the perspectives of due process and equal protection, it again avoided discussing whether the discriminatory aspect of the case implicated a suspect or quasi-suspect classification of sexual orientation.
In each of these cases, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Jr., wrote for the Court. The decisions were noteworthy as being the product of an otherwise conservative Court whose Republican appointees outnumbered the Democratic appointees. In Windsor and Obergefell, Kennedy was the only Republican appointee to side with the Democratic appointees to make up the 5-4 majority of the Court. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan, cast a sixth vote for the prevailing parties in Romer and Lawrence. Her replacement, Justice Alito, dissented in Windsor and Obergefell, as well as Bostock.
The Bostock decision, incorporating two other cases, Altitude Express v. Zarda and R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, was the first major LGBT rights decision by the Court since Kennedy retired and Trump made his second appointment to the Court, seemingly locking in a solid conservative majority that was expected not to be so receptive to LGBT rights claims. With the retirement of Kennedy, it was widely believed that it would be unlikely for a gay rights claim to carry a majority of the Court.
Consequently, when the Court announced more than a year ago that it would review these three cases, tremors ran through the LGBT rights legal community. Although progress had been made in persuading the Obama Administration – including the EEOC – and the lower federal courts that Title VII’s ban on “discrimination because of an individual’s sex” could be interpreted to forbid discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity, it was difficult for people to count a fifth vote to add to the presumed votes of the Democratic appointees on the Court. Chief Justice Roberts had emphatically dissented from the Windsor and Obergefell rulings, and LGBT rights groups had strongly opposed the nominations of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, based on their extremely conservative records as court of appeals judges, which was seemingly borne out in Gorsuch’s case by his dissent in Pavan v. Smith (2017), taking the transparently incorrect position that the Court had not clearly held in Obergefell that same-sex marriages must be treated the same as different-sex marriages for all legal purposes, including birth certificates, something specifically mentioned in Kennedy’s Obergefell opinion. Nobody really thought it possible that Alito or Thomas would ever cast a vote in favor of an LGBT employee’s claim, but Kavanaugh and Gorsuch were a question marks, as was the unpredictable chief justice, despite his anti-LGBT voting record up to that time.
The only facts about these cases that were relevant to the Supreme Court’s decision were that the three employees whose discrimination claims ended up before the Court claimed that they were fired because of their sexual orientation (Gerald Bostock and Donald Zarda) or their gender identity (Aimee Stephens) in violation of Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination. The merits of the Title VII claims had not been decided in Bostock or Zarda, because the district courts in both cases found the claims not to be covered under Title VII and dismissed them. Aimee Stephens’ Title VII claim survived a motion to dismiss, however; the district court found that although Title VII, standing alone, was violated in her case (but solely using a gender stereotype theory rather than holding the gender identity claims are necessarily covered by Title VII), but that the employer, a deeply religious funeral home owner, had a valid defense under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), and so granted judgement to the employer. The 11th Circuit affirmed the dismissal in Bostock, as did a three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit in Zarda, but the 2nd Circuit ultimately reversed the dismissal en banc. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which had sued on Stephens’ behalf, appealed to the 6th Circuit, which reversed the district court, finding the RFRA defense invalid, and ruling that Stephens’ gender identity discrimination claim had been proven. The 6th Circuit also rejected the district court’s conclusion that the EEOC, representing Stephens, was limited to a gender stereotyping claim, expanding on its prior precedents to hold that gender identity claims are necessarily covered by Title VII as a form of sex discrimination. Thus, the only final merits ruling in the cases before the Court was the EEOC’s (and Stephens’) victory in the 6th Circuit. Stephens had intervened at the 6th Circuit, represented by the ACLU, making her a respondent alongside the EEOC in the Supreme Court.
After the Trump Administration took office, the Solicitor General took over the case from the EEOC and, consistent with the Administration’s view that Title VII did not forbid gender identity discrimination, effectively “changed sides,” arguing that the employer should have prevailed. But, surprisingly inasmuch as the employer was being represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative religious freedom litigation group, the employer had not sought review of the 6th Circuit’s rejection of its RFRA defense, so the only question before the Court was the Title VII interpretation issue. Stephens was left to defend the 6th Circuit’s ruling, with the EEOC, represented by the Solicitor General, on the other side. The Solicitor General also participated as an amicus on behalf of the government in the Bostock and Zarda cases.
There was a big difference between the earlier landmark cases and this case. The four landmarks all involved interpretations of Constitutional Due Process and Equal Protection, and were decided, in sometimes quite emotional opinions by Justice Kennedy, based on concepts of human dignity and equality. The Bostock case, by contrast, was a matter solely of statutory interpretation, and solely of Title VII (despite Justice Alito’s decision to dwell on the RFRA question in his dissent). Perhaps surprisingly, two of the most ardent “textualists” on the Court, Trump’s appointees, parted company about how to apply that approach in determining the meaning of a 55-year-old statute.
Textualists contend that statutory interpretation is a matter of figuring out what the meaning of statutory language was at the time it was adopted. Extraneous information, such as congressional committee reports, hearing transcripts, speeches on the floor of Congress or statements inserted into the Congressional Record, are generally rejected by textualists, who argue, as Scalia memorably wrote in a 1998 opinion also involving Title VII and sex discrimination, that “it is ultimately the provisions of our laws rather than the principal concerns of our legislators by which we are governed.”
Gorsuch and Kavanaugh (as well as Alito) swear allegiance to this principle, but it took them in different directions in this case. Gorsuch, who had signaled this result as a possibility during the oral argument on October 8 last year, inclined towards a literalistic approach to the words of Title VII. While claiming that he was trying to determine “the ordinary public meaning” of the words at the time they were enacted, he rejected the argument that this meant that sexual orientation and gender identity could not possibly be covered, because he was persuaded by various arguments and examples that the statute as properly understood has always prohibited discrimination against people because of their “homosexuality” or “transgender status.” He wrote, “an employer who intentionally treats a person worse because of sex – such as firing the person for actions or attributes it would tolerate in an individual of another sex – discriminates against that person in violation of Title VII.”
Having accepted that point, he found persuasive several examples offered by counsel for Bostock and Zarda. Most prominent was the example of two employees, a man and a woman, with equally good qualifications, work records, and so forth, both of whom are attracted to men. The employer will hire the woman but reject the man. Because the employer will tolerate attraction to men by women but not by men, the employer’s refusal to hire the man is discrimination because of the man’s sex.
Stating his holding more generally, he wrote: “An employer violates Title VII when it intentionally fires an individual employee based in part on sex. It doesn’t matter if other facts besides the plaintiff’s sex contributed to the decision. And it doesn’t matter if the employer treated women as a group the same when compared to men as a group.” The idea is that sex is supposed to be irrelevant to a personnel decision unless, as the statute provides, the employer can prove that sex is a bona fide occupational qualification for the job in question, an affirmative defense provision that Gorsuch neglects to mention. But Gorsuch agreed that making a personnel decision because the person is gay or transgender makes sex relevant to the decision, and thus is generally prohibited by Title VII. Or, as he put it quite strongly, “Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.”
The issue, wrote Gorsuch, is whether the plaintiff’s sex is a “but-for” cause of the challenged personnel action, but it doesn’t have to be the sole cause, because the statute does not expressly require that. “When an employer fires an employee because she is homosexual or transgender,” he explained, “two causal factors may be in play, both the individual’s sex and something else (the sex to which the individual is attracted or with which the individual identifies). But Title VII doesn’t care. If an employer would not have discharged an employee but for that individual’s sex, the statute’s causation standard is met, and liability may attach.” Because all three cases being argued involved discharges, it is not surprising that Gorsuch mentions only discharges, but the clear important of the decision is that all the personnel actions coming within the scope of Title VII come within this ruling.
Responding to the argument that this could not possibly be the meaning of a statute passed in 1964, Gorsuch insisted that it has always been the meaning, it just was not recognized as such by the courts until more recently. He characterized this as the “elephant in the room” that everybody pretended was not really there. It was now time to recognize the presence of the elephant.
Aside from some passing references, Gorsuch’s interpretive discussion, and the examples he presented, focused mainly on the sexual orientation issue, but he was careful to mention gender identity or transgender status as well as sexual orientation whenever he stated his conclusions.
Alito unkindly stated in his dissent that Gorsuch’s conclusion that sexual orientation and gender identity are covered by Title VII is “preposterous.” Alito’s focus on the “original meaning” of statutory language, which he documents at length, shows as a matter of the historical record that in 1964 gay people were widely reviled as sick criminals, so it is impossible in his view to read the statutory language of 1964 as forbidding discrimination on this ground. Furthermore, he pointed out, as of 1964 the public’s awareness of transgender individuals was slight at best. Indeed, the very terms “transgender” and “gender identity” were not even used until much later. That a statute enacted in 1964 could be interpreted as prohibiting discrimination on this ground could not possibly accord with its “ordinary public meaning” at that time, he argued. But Gorsuch countered that Alito was talking about legislative intent, not contemporary meaning of the statutory language. As Scalia wrote so often in cases where he rejected evidence of legislative history, when the law is reduced to a written text, it is the text that is the law. Gorsuch even cited a few sources to suggest that some people at or near the time of enactment actually believed that gay or transgender people might have discrimination claims under Title VII.
“Ours is a society of written laws,” Gorsuch wrote. “Judges are not free to overlook plain statutory commands on the strength of nothing more than suppositions about intentions or guesswork about expectations. 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. We do not hesitate to recognize today a necessary consequence of that legislative choice: An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law.”
Reading Alito’s dissenting opinion may induce nausea in the reader, so graphic is his recounting of the horrendously homophobic views of the government and the public towards LGBT people in 1964, but he recites them to make his point that prohibition of discrimination on these grounds could not possibly be a correct textualist interpretation of this language from his perspective. He started his dissent pointedly by saying that the Court was engaged in “legislation,” not interpretation. And he concentrated on shooting holes in Gorsuch’s examples of the situations that led Gorsuch to conclude that discrimination because of homosexuality or transgender identity is, at least in part, sex discrimination.
Alito also wandered far from the central question in the cases, interjecting discussion of various issues likely to arise as a result of the decision, such as hardship for employers with religious objections to homosexuality or transgender identity (such as the employer in the Harris Funeral Homes case), and objections by co-workers to transgender employees using bathrooms and locker rooms. Gorsuch rejoined that these were questions for another day, not presently relevant to decide the appeals before the Court, noting particularly that Harris Funeral Homes had not asked the Court to review the 6th Circuit’s decision rejecting its RFRA defense. Alito was definitely putting down markers for the future cases that the Court may confront.
Kavanaugh makes some of the same points as Alito in his dissenting opinion, but it is notable that he did not join Alito’s dissent. This may be at least in part a generational thing. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are considerably younger than Alito. By the time they were in college and law school, there were out gay people around and, on a personal level, they undoubtedly both agreed that as a matter of politics it would be appropriate for Congress to ban such discrimination. They just differed on whether the Court could reach the same result through interpretation of the 55-year old law. Kavanaugh noted that three-judge panels of ten circuit courts of appeals had rejected this interpretation. 30 judges out of 30, he wrote, more than once in his opinion, as if the unanimity of an incorrect interpretation somehow turned it into a correct interpretation. Obviously, these judges did not recognize the “elephant in the room”!
For Kavanaugh, this was really a “separation of powers” issue. The question for the Court, he wrote, was “Who decides?” The legislature has the power to make law, while the courts are limited to interpreting the statutes passed by the legislature. Here, agreeing with Alito, he asserted that the Court’s decision was violating the separation of powers. And he disagreed with Gorsuch’s approach to textualism in this case, find it too narrowly focused on individual works, thus losing the context necessary in his view to determine the contemporary “public meaning” of the overall provision in 1964.
However, Kavanaugh concluded his dissent revealing his political, as opposed to interpretive, preferences. “Notwithstanding my concern about the Court’s transgression of the Constitution’s separation of powers, it is appropriate to acknowledge the important victory achieved today by gay and lesbian Americans,” he wrote. “Millions of gay and lesbian Americans have worked hard for many decades to achieve equal treatment in fact and in law. They have exhibited extraordinary vision, tenacity, and grit – battling often steep odds in the legislative and judicial arenas, not to mention in their daily lives. They have advanced powerful policy arguments and can take pride in today’s results. Under the Constitution’s separation of powers, however, I believe that it was Congress’s role, not this Court’s, to amend Title VII.” Kavanaugh’s dissent largely ignored transgender people. His omission of them from this paragraph is inexplicable in light of the scope of the Court’s opinion and their activist role over the past several decades in seeking protection against discrimination.
Interestingly, Gorsuch premised the case entirely on a strict textualist reading of the statute, avoiding reliance on the alternative theories that the EEOC and some lower courts embraced. One such theory was gender stereotyping, grounded in the Court’s 1989 decision in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, in which the Court held that an employer who takes an adverse action because an employee fails to comport with stereotypes about women or men has exhibited an impermissible motivation for its actions under Title VII. Another theory, first developed in race discrimination cases, was that discharging a worker because he or she was engaged in an interracial relationship was a form of discrimination because of race. Neither this “associational theory” nor the sex stereotyping theory entered into Gorsuch’s rationale for binding Title VII applicable in Bostock.
The Court’s opinion has the immediate effect of extending protection to LGBT workers in the majority of states that do not ban sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination in their state civil rights laws, but there remain significant gaps in protection. Title VII applies to employers with at least 15 employees, state and local government employees, and federal employees. It does not apply to the uniformed military (so this decision does not directly affect Trump’s transgender service ban), or to religious organizations in their policies on “ministerial employees.” Thus, a substantial portion of the nation’s workforce does not gain any protection from discrimination by this interpretation of Title VII, because a substantial portion of the workforce is employed by smaller businesses or is classified as non-employee contractors. Furthermore, as Gorsuch noted briefly but Alito expounded at length, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) might be interpreted to “supplant” the Title VII protections in particular cases.
The potential application of RFRA is worth noting. Reading Gorsuch’s opinion, one might immediately identify this as a potential “poison pill.” A few years ago, in its Hobby Lobby decision, the Supreme Court suddenly discovered that business corporations could argue that a particular policy mandated by another federal law unduly burdened the employer’s free exercise of religion, and they might thereby escape compliance with the law if the government fell short in showing that its policy was the least restrictive alternative to achieve a compelling government interest. (In Harris Funeral Homes, the 6th Circuit interpreted RFRA in this context and found that the government’s compelling interest in preventing sex discrimination could be achieved only by an outright prohibition, without an exception for business owners who had religious objections.) Although Justice Alito’s opinion for the Court in Hobby Lobby rejected the idea that an employer could make such an argument in defense of a race discrimination claim, Justice Ginsburg pointed out in dissent that Alito’s opinion failed to address the issue of sexual orientation, pointing to cases where businesses claimed a religiously-based right to discriminate against gay people. This is an issue that is hardly settled, and Gorsuch’s reference to the possibility of RFRA as a “super statute” to “supplant” Title VII protections in “appropriate cases” is ominous. Where a case does not involve “ministerial employees,” the full weight of Title VII normally applies to the issue of employment discrimination by religious institutions whether because of race or color, sex or national origin. Shortly, the Court will be ruling on some new cases about the scope of this “ministerial” exception, and may issue a decision that bears on cases in which, for example, gay employees of Catholic educational institutions have been terminated for entering same-sex marriages.
In addition, of course, Title VII only applies to employment decisions. It doesn’t affect decisions by companies about hiring people as non-employee independent contractors, and it doesn’t apply to the myriad other ways that LGBT people encounter discrimination through denial of services, housing, and other privileges of living in our society. This decision does not eliminate the need for enactment of the Equality Act, a bill that would amend numerous provisions of federal law to extend anti-discrimination protection to LGBT people, while amending Title VII to make explicit the coverage of sexual orientation and gender identity. Perhaps most importantly in terms of gap-filling, the Equality Act would add “sex” to the prohibited grounds of discrimination in federal public accommodations law while at the same time expanding the concept of a public accommodation, and would also require federal contractors and funding recipients not to discriminate on these grounds.
Alito’s dissent suggested that the reasoning of the Court’s opinion could protect LGBT people from discrimination under all those other federal statutes that address discrimination because of sex. That would fill a significant part of the gap left by this decision, but not all of it, because, as explained in the previous paragraph, the Civil Rights Act provisions on public accommodations do not forbid sex discrimination and small employers are not covered. Alito appended to his dissent a list of more than 100 federal statutory provisions that he claimed would be affected by this decision, among them Title IX of the Education Amendments Act, under which courts have addressed disputes involving transgender students. This provides a useful “to do” list for the LGBT rights litigation groups, finding cases to firmly establish that the Court’s conclusion in Bostock applies to all those other protections. Closing the gaps through passage of the Equality Act and through passage of state and local laws to cover employers not subject to Title VII must be an ongoing project. There also may be an opening to persuade state courts that they should adopt similar interpretations of the prohibition of sex discrimination under their state laws.
An early test may come as courts confront challenges to a new regulation announced by the Department of Health and Human Services, just days before this decision was announced, reversing an Obama Administration rule under the Affordable Care Act’s antidiscrimination provision and “withdrawing” protection against discrimination under that Act for transgender people. Lawsuits were quickly threatened challenging this regulation. The ACA incorporates by reference the sex discrimination ban in Title IX, so federal courts should read this consistentlyly with Bostock and hold that the regulatory action violates the statute.
Another important point to bear in mind is that coverage of a form of discrimination by the statute does not inevitably lead to a ruling on the merits for the employee. Title VII litigation can be very difficult, and many employees lose their cases early in the process due to procedural roadblocks or, in the case of sex discrimination claims, to the courts’ view that sex may be a “bona fide occupational qualification” in a particular case. When plaintiffs attempt to represent themselves, they may be felled by statutes of limitations, shortcomings in their factual pleadings, or limited resources to investigate the facts and articulate a convincing claim as required by federal civil pleading standards. Furthermore, many employers require employees to execute arbitration agreements when they are hired, so plaintiffs seeking to get their proverbial “day in court” may be disappointed to discover that they are relegated to arguing in private before an arbitrator, in many cases carefully selected by the employer based on his or her “track record” in ruling on employee claims. The road to vindication is not always a smooth one.
The Court’s decision was immediately controversial with certain conservative and religious groups, some of which quickly made spurious claims about how this ruling could interfere with their free exercise and free speech rights, but public opinion polls have consistently shown overwhelming support for outlawing employment discrimination against LGBT people for many years now, so there was no startled outcry by the public at large in the days following the ruling. Those who are cynical about the idea of judging by “neutral principals of law” have often exclaimed that the Supreme Court follows the election returns, so they may characterize this opinion as more political than legal, but the “bipartisan” nature of the line-up of justices would rebut that contention. And, notably, many of the court of appeals decisions that have ruled this way in recent years have also been bipartisan. The opinion, in the matter of fact way that Gorsuch writes about “homosexual” and “transgender” people in the opinion, comes across as impassive by comparison to the florid prose of Kennedy, but it gets the job done.
Kavanaugh’s closing paragraph says that “gays and lesbians” should take pride in this victory, which was hard-earned through decades of political, legal and personal struggle. A brief pause to take pride in this ruling is appropriate, but pushing ahead to fill the remaining gaps in full legal equality is essential. A battle has been won, but not yet the war.
Unfortunately, neither Donald Zarda nor Aimee Stephens lived to learn of their victories. Zarda, who had been fired from a job as a sky-diving instructor, died in a sky-diving accident while his case was pending. Stephens was gravely ill by the time of the oral argument (which she attended, although wheelchair bound), and passed away just weeks before the Court’s decision. Gerald Bostock, however, gave delighted interviews to the press, and was looking forward to the remand back to the district court so that he would get his opportunity to prove that he was the victim of unlawful discrimination.
The Court was flooded with amicus briefs in these cases, too numerous to mention individually here. On October 8, 2019, the Court first heard arguments on the sexual orientation issue, with Pamela S. Karlen representing Bostock and the Estate of Zarda, Jeffrey M. Harris representing the Clayton County and Altitude Express, and Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco presenting the Trump Administration’s position in support of the employers. Next the Court heard arguments on the gender identity issue, with David Cole representing Stephens, John J. Bursch representing Harris Funeral Homes, and again Solicitor General Francisco representing the Trump Administration’s position that gender identity discrimination is not covered by Title VII. The EEOC, the respondent in the case, was not separately represented and did not support the government’s position, evidenced by the government’s briefs, which unusually did not list attorneys from the agency.
Posts Tagged ‘EEOC’
Supreme Court Holds that Federal Law Bans Anti-LGBT Employment Discrimination in Historic 6-3 Ruling
Justice Department Tells 2nd Circuit That Gays Are Not Protected from Discrimination Under Federal Civil Rights Law
The U.S. Department of Justice filed a brief on July 26 with the New York-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, weighing in on the question whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bans discrimination because of sexual orientation. Not surprisingly, the Trump Administration’s answer is “No.”
Title VII lists forbidden grounds for employment discrimination: race or color, religion, sex and national origin. After it went into effect in July 1965, both the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency charged with enforcement of the statute, and the federal courts quickly took the position that people who encountered discrimination because they were gay or transgender could not pursue a claim under this law. Both the administrative agency and the federal courts held fast to that position until relatively recently.
That consensus began to break down early in this century, first in response to discrimination claims by transgender people, as courts and then the EEOC (in 2012) accepted the argument that discriminating against somebody because they were transitioning or had transitioned was actually discrimination because of sex. The rationale they adopted derived from a 1989 decision by the Supreme Court, which recognized that discrimination against people for failing to comply with the employer’s stereotyped view about how people of a particular sex should behave, dress, or otherwise act, was actually discrimination because of their sex. The 1989 case involved a woman who was denied a partnership in an accounting firm because some of the partners thought she was not sufficiently feminine to meet their image of a “lady partner,” and her immediate boss told her she should get her hair styled and start wearing makeup and jewelry if she wanted to be a partner.
By 2015, the EEOC had taken the analysis one step further to cover sexual orientation claims. It recognized that having a same-sex attraction violates gender stereotypes, similarly to the transgender cases, but also drew analogies to cases where courts found that discriminating against an employee for being in an interracial relationship was a form of race discrimination, called associational discrimination. Further, the EEOC decided that it was really not plausible to distinguish between sexual orientation discrimination and sex discrimination, since both were concerned with treating people differently because of their sex.
Until this year, no federal appellate court had accepted these theories, but on April 4, the full bench of the Chicago-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit became the first federal appeals court to rule that Title VII bans sexual orientation discrimination. Reversing its prior precedents, the court accepted the EEOC’s analysis in a lawsuit by Kimberly Hively, a lesbian who had been denied a tenure-track position by an Indiana community college. The college decided not to appeal, taking the position that it had not discriminated at all, so the case was sent back for trial to the district court.
Meanwhile, however, the same issue was being litigated in other parts of the country. In the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit, a sexual orientation discrimination claim by Jameka Evans against a Georgia hospital that had been dismissed by the district court was revived by the court of appeals, but on a narrower theory. In common with several other circuits, the 11th Circuit will accept Title VII claims from gay plaintiffs who allege that they suffered discrimination because of their failure to conform to gender stereotypes. In this case, while a three-judge panel ruled 2-1 to affirm the trial court’s rejection of the plaintiff’s sexual orientation discrimination claim, the panel sent the case back to the trial court to allow the plaintiff to pursue a sex stereotyping claim. One member partially dissented, Judge William Pryor (who had been on Trump’s potential Supreme Court list), finding no basis for any Title VII claim by the plaintiff. Another member of the court agreed to send the case back, but argued that Title VII should be interpreted to cover sexual orientation claims. A third member found that the panel was bound by circuit precedent to reject the sexual orientation claim, but agreed that the plaintiff should have a chance to pursue a sex stereotype claim. The 11th Circuit denied a petition to reconsider the Evans case “en banc” (by the full bench) a few weeks ago, and Lambda Legal announced that it will petition the Supreme Court to review the panel decision. Lambda has until the first week of October to file its petition.
Meanwhile, however, within the 2nd Circuit, at least two federal district court judges have recently refused to dismiss sexual orientation claims under Title VII, finding that the circuit’s acceptance of the “associational theory” in a race discrimination case means that the court should accept sexual orientation discrimination claims. Several other district judges have dismissed such claims, concluding that until the court of appeals explicitly overrules its earlier precedents, the trial judges are bound to follow them. A few months ago, confronted by petitions for en banc review in three different cases, the Circuit announced that it would reconsider the panel decision in Estate of Donald Zarda v. Altitude Express.
In Zarda, the district court had dismissed a Title VII claim but allowed the case to go to trial under New York State’s Human Rights Law, which expressly outlaws sexual orientation discrimination. The jury ruled in favor of the employer, although it is questionable whether the jury was properly instructed about how to weigh the evidence. The plaintiffs appealed the dismissal of the Title VII claim. A three-judge panel affirmed the district court’s dismissal, while noting that recent developments in the law could justify reconsideration by the full 2nd Circuit bench. In a case decided by a different three-judge panel at around the same time, Christiansen v. Omnicom, the panel also upheld dismissal of a sexual orientation claim, but sent the case back to the district court for reconsideration as a sex stereotyping claim, and two of the judges joined a concurring opinion suggesting that it was time for the 2nd Circuit to reconsider the sexual orientation issue en banc in an “appropriate case.” However, after granting en banc review in Zarda, the circuit court denied a petition for en banc review in Christiansen!
Briefs were due from the plaintiff’s side in the Zarda appeal during the last week in June. The EEOC, consistent with its interpretation of the statute, filed an amicus (friend of the court) brief in support of the Zarda. (Zarda, a sky-diving instructor, died in a diving accident after starting his discrimination case, so the lawsuit is now being pursued by his executors, seeking money damages for the estate.) Briefs were due by July 26 from the employer and any amicus parties supporting its position. After some suspense about what the Trump Administration might do, the Justice Department filed its brief right at the deadline.
It is somewhat unusual for the government to file an amicus brief in opposition to a position taken by a federal agency, and it is also unusual for the government to file a brief in a case between private parties – a former employee versus a business – but the federal government has a significant interest in this case, and the politics of EEOC v. DOJ are unusual because of the timing. Until this month, the majority of the EEOC Commissioners have been appointees of President Obama. They decided the key sexual orientation case two years ago by a vote of 3-2, with the Republican commissioners dissenting. Upon confirmation of Trump’s appointees to fill some vacancies, control of the EEOC will switch over to Republican hands. But for now, the EEOC continues to pursue sexual orientation discrimination cases under Title VII, and has even filed some new lawsuits this year despite the change of administrations in January. On the other hand, the Justice Department reflects the views of the new administration, which are consistent with those expressed by 7th Circuit Judge Diane Sykes (also on Trump’s potential Supreme Court list), who wrote a dissenting opinion in the Hively case.
Why does the Trump Administration have a strong interest in a case between private parties? Because Title VII has provisions banning sex discrimination in the federal workforce, and because the president’s political base and the Republicans in Congress stand in opposition to outlawing sexual orientation discrimination. This is clear from the failure of Republican legislators to co-sponsor the Equality Act, a bill that would amend Title VII to add sexual orientation and gender identity or expression to the statutory list of forbidden grounds of employment discrimination. A few Republicans were co-sponsors of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a narrower bill that was pending in Congress from the mid-1990s through Obama’s first term until it was supplanted by the Equality Act, but not enough to call that bipartisan legislation. The Employment Non-Discrimination Act came up for floor votes once in each house of Congress but in different sessions of Congress. On both of those occasions it received few votes from Republican legislators, and their party’s platform never endorsed it.
The Justice Department’s brief, noting the EEOC’s position in the case, states that “the EEOC is not speaking for the United States and its position about the scope of Title VII is entitled to no deference beyond its power to persuade.” And, almost needless to say, the Justice Department under the outspokenly anti-gay Jeff Sessions is not persuaded by any of the EEOC’s arguments. The brief argues that Congress did not intend to ban sexual orientation discrimination in 1964 when it enacted Title VII and that should be the end of the matter. The failure of Congress to approve any amendment to add sexual orientation to the law is cited as evidence of continuing legislative intent, and the brief argues that only Congress can change the law. It argues at length that the theories embraced by the EEOC and the 7th Circuit are mistaken interpretations of the Supreme Court’s rulings on sex stereotyping and associational discrimination, and that there is a distinct difference between sex discrimination and sexual orientation discrimination, despite statements by many federal judges that they have difficulty drawing the line between the two.
The 2nd Circuit will not be oblivious to the political nature of the government’s opposition. The concurring opinion in the Christiansen case, written by 2nd Circuit Chief Judge Robert Katzmann, virtually endorsed the EEOC’s interpretation of the statute while calling for the circuit to reconsider its earlier precedents. And a majority of the judges who will sit on the en banc panel were appointed by Bill Clinton or Barack Obama and have generally taken a more liberal approach to interpreting Title VII. The circuit’s earlier precedents that are being reconsidered were issued by three-judge panels at a time when the arguments for allowing sexual orientation discrimination claims were not nearly as well developed as they have been in recent years, and the circuit has accepted the associational discrimination theory in a race discrimination case after those earlier cases were decided. It is likely to see that theory’s applicability here, as the district judges have commented. However, if the Supreme Court decides to grant Lambda Legal’s petition to review the 11th Circuit case, it is possible that the 2nd Circuit will hold up on deciding the Zarda appeal until the Supreme Court has spoken. Interesting timing issues will arise this fall. The 2nd Circuit argument is scheduled for late in September, before the Supreme Court will begin its fall term and start announcing whether it will grant petitions for review filed over the summer.
The brief filed by Altitude Express in opposition to the appeal has raised significant jurisdictional arguments that would give the 2nd Circuit a way out of deciding this appeal on the merits, if the judges are so inclined. That brief argues that when he filed his initial discrimination charge with the EEOC, Donald Zarda expressly disclaimed making a sexual orientation discrimination claim under Title VII, relying instead on the allegation that he suffered discrimination for failing to comply with sex stereotypes. That was the theory he initially presented in his federal court complaint under Title VII as well, and it was dismissed by the trial judge, who opined that Zarda’s factual allegations were not sufficient for a sex stereotyping claim. Zarda only pressed a sexual orientation claim under the New York State Human Rights Law. Thus, Altitude Express argues, he cannot now argue for a sexual orientation discrimination claim under Title VII, because the statute requires that any claim first be presented to the administrative agency, and further that any ruling by the court of appeals on that question would be, in effect, an advisory opinion, as the jury has already ruled against his sexual orientation discrimination claim. There’s no telling how the 2nd Circuit will respond to these arguments, but one suspects that if they had serious doubts about jurisdiction, they would not have granted the en banc petition.
In the meantime, however, it is clear that if the Supreme Court grants review in the 11th Circuit Evans case, the federal government, represented by the Solicitor General, will come into the case against the plaintiff, and by then the EEOC will be in Republican control and will probably not be filing a separate brief. Once again, the Trump Administration is actively disavowing the LGBT-supportive stance that the candidate claimed during the election last year. The brief was filed just as Trump was tweeting his decision to bar transgender people from military service, which seemed no coincidence.
11th Circuit Panel Splinters Over Lesbian’s Appeal of Title VII Dismissal
A three-judge panel of the Atlanta-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit issued a divided ruling on March 10 holding that a lesbian plaintiff suing for discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 could file an amended complaint alleging that she suffered discrimination because of sex stereotyping, but upholding the district court’s dismissal of her claim that sexual orientation discrimination violates the statute. A dissenting judge, agreeing with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which submitted an amicus brief in the case, and Lambda Legal, which was appointed to represent the plaintiff on appeal, argued that the plaintiff should be allowed to pursue her sexual orientation discrimination claim as well. Lambda Legal, representing the appellant, immediately announced that it would petition for rehearing “en banc” before the entire 11th Circuit bench.
Unsurprisingly, the judges rejecting the sexual orientation claim, Circuit Judge William Pryor and Florida District Judge Jose Martinez, were appointed by President George W. Bush. The dissenter, Circuit Judge Robin Rosenbaum, was appointed by President Barack Obama.
This case is one of appeals recently argued in three different federal circuits presenting the question whether sexual orientation discrimination claims are covered as “discrimination because of sex” under Title VII. The Chicago-based 7th Circuit heard argument “en banc” on November 30, and the New York-based 2nd Circuit heard three-judge panel argument in two different appeals in January. So far, no federal circuit court has ruled favorably on such a claim, although many have ruled that gay plaintiffs can sue under Title VII on gender-based sex stereotyping claims, depending on their factual allegations. There are older court of appeals precedents in most circuits rejecting sexual orientation discrimination claims, as such, under Title VII. The Supreme Court has never directly ruled on the question.
In this case, Evans v. Georgia Regional Hospital, plaintiff Jameka Evans claimed that she was discriminated against in her position as a security officer at the hospital because of both gender non-conformity and sexual orientation. Evans is a “butch” lesbian who claims she was discriminated against because she failed to carry herself in a “traditional womanly manner” and that “it was ‘evident’ that she identified with the male gender, because of how she presented herself – ‘(male uniform, low male haircut, shoes, etc.’),” wrote Judge Martinez.
She filed her case in federal district court in Savanah, Georgia, without a lawyer (“pro se”). The district judge, J. Randal Hall, referred her case to a magistrate judge to rule on procedural issues and “screen” the claim, as is usually done with “pro se” cases. Magistrate Judge George R. Smith found procedural problems and, applying old circuit precedent, held that the claim of sexual orientation discrimination could not be brought under Title VII. Smith recommended dismissal of the case. Lambda Legal submitted an amicus brief, urging Judge Hall to reject the Magistrate’s recommendation, but Hall dismissed without reference to Lambda’s arguments. However, Hall then appointed Lambda to represent Evans on appeal to the 11th Circuit, and Gregory Nevins from Lambda’s Atlanta office argued the appeal. The hospital never responded to the complaint and was not represented at the one-sided argument before the court of appeals.
At the heart of this appeal and of the other pending cases on the same question is the effect of two Supreme Court rulings, Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins and Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services. In the first of these, the Court ruled that an employer’s denial of a partnership to a woman because of her failure to conform to the employer’s stereotyped view of how women should behave and present themselves was evidence of discrimination “because of sex” in violation of Title VII. In the second, the Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s dismissal of a same-sex harassment case in a unanimous opinion authored by Justice Antonin Scalia holding that the interpretation of discrimination “because of sex” was not limited based on the intentions of Congress when it enacted the statute in 1964. Scalia commented that “comparable evils” to those that Congress sought to address might be covered by the statute, and that we are governed by the language of our statutes as adopted by Congress, not by the presumed intentions expressed by individual legislators or committees as reflected in the legislative history. Thus, a claim by a man that he was subjected to sexual harassment by male co-workers could be dealt with under Title VII, even if members of Congress did not anticipate or intend that such cases could be brought under Title VII.
LGBT rights advocates have used these two Supreme Court cases to argue that gay and transgender plaintiffs who suffer discrimination because of their sexual orientation or gender identity should be able to bring sex discrimination claims under Title VII. Sex stereotyping is arguably present to some extent in all such cases and, at a more fundamental level, anti-gay and anti-trans discrimination is “necessarily” because of sex. These arguments persuaded the EEOC during the Obama Administration, resulting in administrative rulings in cases raised by LGBT federal employees, and have also persuaded some federal district judges. Several federal courts of appeals have accepted the sex stereotyping argument, but only to a limited extent, according to the extensive concurring opinion in Evans’s case by Judge Pryor. So far, no federal circuit court has accepted the argument that an otherwise gender-conforming gay person can bring a sex discrimination claim under Title VII.
Judge Martinez premised his vote to reject the sexual orientation discrimination claim on a 1979 decision by the 5th Circuit, Blum v. Gulf Oil Corporation, 597 F.2d 936, in which that court said that “discharge for homosexuality is not prohibited by Title VII” as an alternative basis for its ruling. Effective on September 30, 1981, a statute divided the old 5th Circuit in half, assigning Georgia to the newly-created 11th Circuit. At that time, the 11th Circuit ruled that former 5th Circuit cases would be treated as precedent in the new 11th Circuit, so this case counts as a binding circuit precedent. Lambda argued that the 1979 ruling is no longer valid in light of the 1989 Price Waterhouse decision and the 1999 Oncale decision. Martinez and Pryor both rejected that argument, but dissenting Judge Rosenbaum embraced it. At the oral argument, Judge Pryor had observed that in light of the Blum precedent, the three judge panel most likely could not rule in favor of Evans on this point, as only an en banc panel could reverse circuit precedents.
As to the sex stereotyping claim, Martinez asserted that Evans’ pro se complaint “failed to plead facts sufficient to create a plausible inference that she suffered discrimination. In other words, Evans did not provide enough factual matter to plausibly suggest that her decision to present herself in a masculine manner led to the alleged adverse employment actions.” However, he wrote, it was inappropriate for the district judge to dismiss her case outright rather than allowing her to file an amended complaint, since her theory of sex stereotyping discrimination was a theory accepted in the 11th Circuit and it was possible that, in light of the court’s discussion of her claim, she might be able to meet these pleading deficiencies in an amended complaint. It is customary in pro se cases to allow the plaintiff to file an amended complaint if she is asserting a claim under a valid legal theory and there is a possibility that a better framed complaint could survive screening.
Pryor’s concurring opinion agreed that the magistrate erred in asserting that a sex stereotyping argument by a lesbian plaintiff was just “another way to claim discrimination based on sexual orientation,” and thus Evans should get a second chance to frame a complaint that might survive review. However, he argued at length to refute the arguments by the EEOC and Judge Rosenbaum that sexual orientation discrimination claims were “necessarily” sex discrimination claims. Pryor insisted on a strict distinction between “status” and “conduct,” arguing that sex stereotyping claims were tied to the plaintiff’s conduct in failing to conform to gender stereotypes. Thus, a claim of sexual orientation discrimination not accompanied by factual allegations about the plaintiff’s gender non-conformity fell short, in his view, of coming within the compass of discrimination “because of sex.” He was not willing to accept the argument that being sexually attracted to members of the same-sex would suffice to constitute non-conformity with sexual stereotypes.
Judge Rosenbaum took a diametrically opposite approach, embracing a theoretical description of how Price Waterhouse had changed Title VII law by extending prior sex stereotyping cases to adopt a “prescriptive stereotyping” model. In prior cases, the Supreme Court had condemned “ascriptive stereotyping,” situations where an employer discriminated against a class of employees because of a stereotype about the class. For example, an employer required women to contribute more to its pension plan than men in order to get the same monthly benefits upon retirement, based on the stereotype that women live longer than men so it would all “even out” in the end. The Supreme Court condemned this practice as sex discrimination, finding that the statute protects individuals from being treated based on class-based stereotypes. In Price Waterhouse, the Court for the first time condemned “prescriptive stereotyping,” where an employer discriminated against an employee because she failed to conform to a sexual stereotype, presenting a demeanor which was not traditionally feminine.
Applying this to the sexual orientation case, Rosenbaum accepted the argument that in such cases the employer was discriminating because the employee violated the stereotypical view that men are supposed to be attracted to women, not to men, and vice versa. Furthermore, she found that it was clearly sex discrimination to treat a woman differently based on whether she was attracted to men or women.
Judge Rosenbaum argued that Pryor’s opinion was “at war” with his vote a decade ago that allowed a sex discrimination claim under the Equal Protection Clause by a transgender employee of the Georgia legislature. Indeed, Pryor’s vote in the former case, Glenn v. Brumby, had given the plaintiff hope in this case that the panel might rule in her favor. Pryor devoted considerable effort in his concurring opinion to explaining why he found this case to be different, once again relying on the “status” and “conduct” distinction. Cross-dressing and announcing plans to transition were “conduct,” in his view, while having a sexual orientation was “status.” He argued that sex stereotyping theory was concerned with conduct, not status, in its focus on gender non-conformity.
The sharp division among the judges may lead the 11th Circuit to agree to hear the case en banc, especially noting that one member of the panel was a district judge. The federal judiciary is so short-handed as a result of the Republican-controlled Senate’s stonewalling of President Obama’s court of appeals nominees during his second term that it has become increasingly common for some particularly short-staffed circuits to fill-out three-judge panels by “designating” district court judges to provide the third member to make up a panel. These district judges do not participate if the case is reargued en banc. Furthermore, with the 7th Circuit having held en banc argument on this question recently, it seems clear that many federal judges believe it is time to reconsider the issue. Meanwhile, decisions from the 7th and 2nd Circuits are eagerly awaited, especially if they create a “circuit split” that would entice the Supreme Court to agree to take up the issue.
7th Circuit Panel Rejects Lesbian Professor’s Title VII Claim
A three-judge panel of the Chicago-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit ruled on July 28 that a lesbian professor could not sue the local community college in South Bend, Indiana, for sexual orientation discrimination under Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, rejecting her argument that anti-gay discrimination is a form of sex discrimination in violation of that law. Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College, 2016 U.S. App. LEXIS 13746, 2016 Westlaw 4039703.
Weighing in on a question that has taken on renewed vitality since last July, when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a federal agency that enforces Title VII, ruled that David Baldwin, a gay air traffic controller, could bring an employment discrimination claim against the U.S. Transportation Department, the court, while describing the existing precedents in the 7th Circuit as “illogical,” nonetheless concluded that it was bound by those precedents.
Kimberly Hively began teaching part-time at Ivy Tech Community College in 2000. She applied six times for full-time positions for which she claimed to be qualified, but she was always turned down and her part-time contract was not renewed in July 2014. By then, she had already filed a complaint with the EEOC on December 13, 2013, representing herself. This was about 18 months before that agency changed its long-standing position and began to approve gay Title VII claims in the air traffic controller case. The EEOC’s position, however, is not binding on federal courts.
Hively did not file a complaint with the South Bend human rights agency. Although that city’s anti-discrimination law was amended in 2012 to include sexual orientation, the city does not have jurisdiction to legislate about personnel practices at state-operated educational institutions, and they are explicitly exempted from coverage by the local law. There is no Indiana state law forbidding sexual orientation discrimination.
After the EEOC concluded that it did not have jurisdiction, it sent Hively a “right to sue” letter. She filed her claim in federal court on August 15, 2014. The college filed a motion to dismiss, arguing that sexual orientation discrimination claims are not covered under Title VII. Hively, citing the advances of gay rights in the courts, urged that the college should not be allowed to discriminate based on sexual orientation. On March 3, 2015, U.S. District Judge Rudy Lozano granted the college’s motion. Citing a 7th Circuit decision from 2000 and a 2010 decision by the federal district court in Indiana, Judge Lozano wrote, “While this Court is sympathetic to the arguments made by Hively in her response brief, this Court is bound by Seventh Circuit precedent. Because sexual orientation is not recognized as a protected class [sic] under Title VII, that claim must be dismissed.”
Hively also alleged a violation of 42 U.S.C. Section 1981, which Judge Lozano had to dismiss as well, because the Supreme Court interprets that 19th-century statute to apply only to race discrimination claims. HiverlyivelyHi also asked to amend her complaint to push a claim for breach of contract, seeking enforcement of the college’s published non-discrimination policy, but that claim would arise under Indiana state contract law, and federal courts usually refuse to address state law claims when they have determined that the plaintiff has no federal law claim.
The fate Hively suffered in the district court shows the perils of individuals trying to navigate the complexities of federal employment law without legal representation. A well-versed lawyer might have found a way to construct a 14th Amendment Equal Protection claim on her behalf, which could be directed against individual school officials if she could allege sufficient facts to suggest that they refused to consider her applications because she is a lesbian, although there would be no guarantee of success because the Supreme Court has yet to rule on whether sexual orientation discrimination claims against public officials are entitled to heightened or strict scrutiny.
Attorney Gregory Nevins from Lambda Legal’s Atlanta office represented her on appeal to the 7th Circuit, where oral argument took place on September 30 and a long wait began for the court’s opinion. The wait seemed surprising, because the three-judge panel would most likely easily conclude, as had Judge Lozano, that circuit precedent would dictate affirmance. But the court took nine months to release its decision. (By contrast, the 7th Circuit issued its marriage equality decision in 2014 less than two weeks after oral argument.)
Judge Ilana Rovner’s opinion obviously took so long because the majority of the panel was not content just to issue a pro forma dismissal in reliance on circuit precedent. The first, shorter, part of Rovner’s opinion, performing that function, was joined by Senior Judges William Bauer and Kenneth Ripple. But the second, much longer, part, joined by Judge Ripple, provides a lengthy and detailed discussion of how the EEOC’s Baldwin decision has led to an intense debate in the district courts around the country about how those old precedents are clearly out-of-step with where the country has moved on LGBT rights.
Judge Rovner (or, more likely, Lambda Legal in its appellate brief) collected district court decisions from all over the country – particularly from circuits where there were no adverse appeals court rulings – in which judges have decided to follow the EEOC’s reasoning and find that discrimination because of sexual orientation is “necessarily” sex discrimination.
The logical pathway to that conclusion runs through the Supreme Court’s 1989 ruling, Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, which accepted the argument that discrimination against an employee because that employee fails to meet their employer’s sex-stereotypical views about how employees present themselves, is evidence of sex discrimination. That case involved a woman who was denied a partnership because she was perceived as inadequately feminine in her dress and conduct by partners who voted on the partnership decision.
Since 1989 some district courts have extended protection under Title VII to LGBT plaintiffs who could plausibly allege that they encountered discrimination because of sex stereotypes, but other courts have refused to take such cases, criticizing them as attempting to “bootstrap” coverage for sexual orientation into Title VII against the intent of Congress. What has emerged is a hodgepodge of decisions, resulting in the odd situation that, at least in some circuits, a gay plaintiff who is also obviously gender-nonconforming in terms of dress and speech may be protected under Title VII using the stereotyping theory, but a “straight-acting” gay plaintiff would have no protection. Judge Rovner pointed out the irrationality of this, but, unfortunately, the 7th Circuit precedents seemed inescapable to this panel.
After discussing how various courts have pointed out the difficulties of distinguishing between a sex-stereotyping case and a sexual orientation case, she observed that the difficult is not necessarily impossible. “There may indeed be some aspects of a worker’s sexual orientation that create a target for discrimination apart from any issues related to gender,” she wrote. “Harassment may be based on prejudicial or stereotypical ideas about particular aspects of the gay and lesbian ‘lifestyle,’ including ideas about promiscuity, religious beliefs, spending habits, child-rearing, sexual practices, or politics. Although it seems likely that most of the causes of discrimination based on sexual orientation ultimately stem from employers’ and co-workers’ discomfort with a lesbian woman’s or a gay man’s failure to abide by gender norms, we cannot say that it must be so in all cases. Therefore we cannot conclude that the two must necessarily be coextensive unless or until either the legislature or the Supreme Court says it is so.”
In this case, she pointed out, Kimberly Hively had not made any specific allegations of gender non-conformity, other than the implicit contention that being a lesbian, as such, was gender non-conforming in that she was attracted to women rather than men. Although a few district courts, especially after the Baldwin ruling, have found that to be enough to squeeze into coverage under the sex stereotype theory, the 7th Circuit hasn’t gotten there yet, and this panel did not feel empowered to extend circuit precedent to accept that argument.
While noting the significant advances in LGBT rights at the Supreme Court from Romer v. Evans (1996) through Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), Judge Rovner pointed out that in none of those cases has the Supreme Court said anything that would deal directly with the question whether anti-gay discrimination must be treated as a form of sex discrimination under Title VII. But she did observe the stark legal anomaly created by last year’s marriage equality decision.
“The cases as they do stand, however, create a paradoxical legal landscape in which a person can be married on Saturday and then fired on Monday for just that act,” she wrote. “For although federal law now guarantees anyone the right to marry another person of the same gender, Title VII, to the extent it does not reach sexual orientation discrimination, also allows employers to fire that employee for doing so. From an employee’s perspective, that right to marriage might not feel like a real right if she can be fired for exercising it. Many citizens would be surprised to learn that under federal law any private employer can summon an employee into his office and state, ‘You are a hard-working employee and have added much value to my company, but I am firing you because you are gay.’ And the employee would have no recourse whatsoever – unless she happens to live in a state or locality with an anti-discrimination statute that includes sexual orientation. More than half of the United States, however, do not have such protections.”
She pointed out the additional oddity that even a “straight” employee who was discharged because her employer mistakenly thought she was a lesbian would have no protection, unless she could show her overt violation of gender stereotypes aws the reason for the discrimination. Straight people are not protected from “mistaken” sexual orientation discrimination!
Judge Rovner observed that this state of the law “leads to unsatisfying results.” It also is inconsistent with Title VII race discrimination cases that impose liability when an employer fires a white employee because he or she is dating or marrying a person of a different race. It is now well-established that it is race discrimination to single out somebody because of their interracial social life. Why not, as a logical matter, prohibit discriminating against somebody because of their same-sex social life? The logic seems irrefutable. “It is true that Hively has not made the express claim that she was discriminated against based on her relationship with a woman,” wrote Judge Rovner, “but that is, after all, the very essence of sexual orientation discrimination. It is discrimination based on the nature of an associational relationship – in this case, one based on gender.”
Rover found it “curious” that “the Supreme Court has opted not to weigh in on the question of whether Title VII’s prohibition on sex-based discrimination would extend to protect against sexual orientation discrimination” and that even in “the watershed case of Obergefell” the court “made no mention of the stigma and injury that comes from excluding lesbian, gay, and bisexual persons from the workforce or subjecting them to un-remediable harassment and discrimination.” But, frustratingly, the Supreme Court has yet to tackle head-on the direct issue of anti-gay discrimination in a way that would provide guidance to lower federal courts and state courts, and has so far consistently denied review in cases presenting this question. “In addition to the Supreme Court’s silence,” she observed, “Congress has time and time against said ‘no’ to every attempt to add sexual orientation to the list of categories protected from discrimination by Title VII.”
Ultimately the judge was very critical of the 7th Circuit’s precedent. “It may be that the rationale appellate courts, including this one, have used to distinguish between gender non-conformity discrimination claims and sexual orientation discrimination claims will not hold up under future rigorous analysis,” she wrote. “It seems illogical to entertain gender non-conformity claims under Title VII where the non-conformity involves style of dress or manner of speaking, but not when the gender non-conformity involves the sine qua non of gender stereotypes – with whom a person engages in sexual relationships. And we can see no rational reason to entertain sex discrimination claims for those who defy gender norms by looking or acting stereotypically gay or lesbian (even if they are not), but not for those who are openly gay but otherwise comply with gender norms. We allow two women or two men to marry, but allow employers to terminate them for doing so. Perchance, in time, these inconsistencies will come to be seen as denying practical workability and will lead us to reconsider our precedent.” She then quoted Justice Kennedy’s Obergefell decision, pointing out how “new insights and societal understandings” could lead to changes in the law.
Rovner concluded that it was “unlikely” that society would tolerate this anomalous situation for long. “Perhaps the writing is on the wall,” she wrote. “But writing on the wall is not enough. Until the writing comes in the form of a Supreme Court opinion or new legislation, we must adhere to the writing of our prior precedent, and therefore, the decision of the district court is affirmed.”
This conclusion is not totally accurate. The full 7th Circuit, considering this issue en banc, could decide to overrule the prior precedent within the circuit without waiting for passage of the Equality Act (which would amend Title VII to add sexual orientation and gender identity) or for a Supreme Court ruling. Judge Rovner’s extended critique implies receptivity to rethinking the precedent, so perhaps a motion for rehearing en banc could find favor with a majority of the judges of the circuit.
A little “circuit math” suggests the possibility: There are nine active judges on the 7th Circuit, with two vacancies for which President Obama has made nominations that are stalled in the Senate. Only one of the active judges was appointed by President Obama, David Hamilton, and two were appointed by President Clinton, Chief Judge Diane Wood and Ann Williams. All the other judges are appointees of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. (There is no appointee of George W. Bush sitting on the 7th Circuit.)
The three-judge panel in this case consisted entirely of Republican appointees: Judge Rovner by the first President Bush, Senior Judges Bauer and Ripple by Presidents Ford and Reagan. Interestingly, Ripple and Rovner, both Republican appointees with long service on the court, agree that the precedent is “illogical” and not “rational.” Unfortunately, Judge Ripple, as a Senior Judge, would not participate in an en banc rehearing. But perhaps despite the strong 6-3 overall Republican tilt of this circuit, a full nine-member bench might find a majority for granting en banc rehearing and changing the circuit precedent. That would require at least one more Republican appointee to join Rovner and the three Democratic appointees to make a 5-4 majority.
One of the other Republican appointees, Richard Posner, could be the prime candidate for that. He wrote the 7th Circuit’s magnificent marriage equality decision, which reflected his strong receptivity to reconsidering his views on LGBT issues, a point he has subsequently reiterated in a law review article musing about his changing understanding of LGBT issues since he was appointed to the court by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
On the other hand, it is possible that this opinion took so long to get out because some attempt was made within the judges’ chambers to provoke a spontaneous en banc reconsideration , but it was unsuccessful. Who knows? Mysterious are the inner workings of our courts.
Federal Trial Courts Divided Over Title VII Sexual Orientation Discrimination Claims
Last July the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), reversing its position dating back fifty years, issued a ruling that a gay man could charge a federal agency employer with sex discrimination in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for denying a promotion because of his sexual orientation. The Baldwin v. Foxx decision is an administrative ruling, not binding on federal courts, and federal trial judges are sharply divided on the issue.
During May and June, federal district judges in Virginia, New York, Illinois, Mississippi and Florida issued rulings in response to employers’ motions to dismiss Title VII claims of sexual orientation discrimination. In each case, the employer argued that the plaintiff’s Title VII claim had to be dismissed as a matter of law because the federal employment discrimination statute does not forbid sexual orientation discrimination.
Title VII was enacted as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although the House committee considering the bill took evidence about sex discrimination, it decided to send the bill to the House floor without including “sex” as a prohibited basis for discrimination, because this was deemed too controversial and might sink the bill. During the floor debate, however, a southern representative, Howard Smith of Virginia, a conservative Democrat who was opposed to the proposed ban on race discrimination, proposed an amendment to add “sex” to the list of prohibited grounds. Most historical accounts suggest that Smith’s strategy was to make the bill more controversial, thus ensuring its defeat. More recent accounts have suggested that Smith, although a racist, was actually a supporter of equal rights for women and genuinely believed that sex discrimination in the workplace should be banned. (His amendment did not add “sex” to the other titles of the bill addressing other kinds of discrimination.) The amendment passed, and ultimately the bill was enacted, going into effect in July 1965.
Because “sex” was added through a House floor amendment, the Committee Report on the bill says nothing about it, and the subsequent debate in the Senate (where the bill went directly to the floor, bypassing committee consideration) devoted little attention to it, apart from an amendment providing that pay practices “authorized” by the Equal Pay Act of 1963 would not be outlawed by Title VII. As a result, the “legislative history” of Title VII provides no explanation about what Congress intended by including “sex” as a prohibited ground of discrimination.
During the first quarter century of Title VII, the EEOC and the federal courts consistently rejected claims that the law outlawed sexual orientation discrimination. In the absence of explanatory legislative history, they ruled that Congress must have intended simply to prohibit discrimination against women because they are women or against men because they are men, and nothing more complicated or nuanced than that. This interpretation was challenged in 1989, when the Supreme Court ruled in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins that a woman who failed to conform to her employer’s sex stereotypes could bring a sex discrimination case under Title VII, adopting a broader and more sophisticated view of sex discrimination.
Since 1989, some lower federal courts have used the Price Waterhouse ruling to allow gay or transgender plaintiffs to assert sex discrimination claims in reliance on the sex stereotype theory, while others have rejected attempt to “bootstrap” sexual orientation or gender identity into Title VII in this way. More recently, several federal appeals courts have endorsed the idea that gender identity discrimination claims are really sex discrimination claims, and a consensus to that effect has begun to emerge, but progress has been slower on the sexual orientation front.
Last summer the EEOC’s decision in Baldwin v. Foxx presented a startling turnabout of the agency’s view. The EEOC does not adjudicate discrimination claims against non-governmental and state employers, but it is assigned an appellate role concerning discrimination claims by federal employees. In Baldwin v. Foxx, the EEOC reversed a ruling by the Transportation Department that a gay air traffic controller could not bring a sexual orientation discrimination claim under Title VII. Looking at the developing federal case law since Price Waterhouse and seizing upon a handful of federal district court decisions that had allowed gay plaintiffs to bring sex discrimination claims under a sex stereotype theory, the agency concluded that a sexual orientation discrimination claim is “necessarily” a sex discrimination claim and should be allowed under Title VII.
Since that July 15 ruling, many federal district judges have had to rule on motions by employers to dismiss Title VII sexual orientation discrimination claims. The precedential hierarchy of the federal court system has required some of them to dismiss those claims because the circuit court of appeals to which their rulings could be appealed had previously ruled adversely on the issue. In other circuits, however, the question is open and some judges have taken the EEOC’s lead.
On May 5, U.S. District Judge Robert E. Payne in Virginia found that he was bound by 4th Circuit precedent to reject a sexual orientation discrimination claim under Title VII, even though the plaintiff, an openly-gay administrative assistant at Virginia Union University, had alleged clear evidence of anti-gay discrimination by the university president. Judge Payne found that a 1996 decision by the 4th Circuit, Wrightson v. Pizza Hut of America, was still binding. Payne noted that other federal trial courts were divided about whether to defer to the EEOC’s Baldwin ruling, but in any event he felt bound by circuit precedent to dismiss the claim.
A district judge on Long Island, Sandra J. Feuerstein, reached a similar result in Magnusson v. County of Suffolk on May 17, dismissing a Title VII claim by an openly-lesbian custodial worker at the Suffolk County Department of Public Works, who alleged that her failure to comply with her supervisors’ stereotypes of how women should dress had led to discrimination against her. Relying on prior decisions by the New York City-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Feuerstein refrained from discussing more recent developments and dismissed the claim, asserting that the plaintiff’s “claims regarding incidents of harassment based on her sexual orientation do not give rise to Title VII liability.”
However, on May 31, a senior district judge in Illinois decided that prudence in light of the developing situation counseled against dismissing a pending “perceived sexual orientation” claim in the case of Matavka v. Board of Education. Judge Milton I. Shadur confronted the school district’s motion to dismiss a discrimination claim by an employee at J. Sterling Morton High School, who alleged that “he experienced severe harassment from his coworkers and supervisors, including taunts that he was ‘gay’ and should ‘suck it,’ frequent jokes about his perceived homosexuality, and hacking of his Facebook account to identify him publicly as ‘interested in boys and men’, and an email stating ‘U. . . are homosexual.’” Judge Shadur observed that the Chicago-based 7th Circuit Court of Appeals had in the past rejected sexual orientation discrimination claims under Title VII, which “would appear to bury” Matavka’s Title VII claim. But, he noted, Baldwin v. Foxx, while not binding on the court, may prompt a rethinking of this issue, and that the 7th Circuit heard oral argument on September 30 of a plaintiff’s appeal from a different federal trial judge’s dismissal of a sexual orientation discrimination claim in the case of Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College. “Should Hively follow recent district court decisions in finding Baldwin persuasive,” he wrote, “that finding plainly would affect the disposition of Morton High’s motion. That being so, the prudent course at present is to stay this matter pending the issuance of a decision in Hively.”
The 7th Circuit has not issued a decision in Hively as of this writing. Judge Shadur stayed a ruling on the motion until July 29, and said that if the 7th Circuit had not issued a ruling by then, he might stay it further.
The federal appeals courts are not bound by any rules about how soon after oral argument they must issue opinions. Sometimes the 7th Circuit moves quickly. During 2014 it took just a week after the August 26 oral argument to rule affirmatively on a marriage equality case on September 4, giving the states of Wisconsin and Indiana time to petition the Supreme Court for review before the start of the Court’s October term. The panel that heard the Hively argument has not ruled in more than eight months, suggesting that an extended internal discussion may be happening among the nine active judges of the 7th Circuit, to whom the panel’s proposed opinion would be circulated before it is released. Panels may not depart from circuit precedent, but a majority of the active judges on the circuit can overrule their past decisions. A 7th Circuit ruling reversing the district court’s dismissal of the Hively complaint would be a major breakthrough for Title VII coverage of sexual orientation claims.
Meanwhile, two decisions issued in June have taken opposite views on the question. In Brown v. Subway Sandwich Shop of Laurel, U.S. District Judge Keith Starrett of the Southern District of Mississippi bowed to prior 5th Circuit rulings rejecting sexual orientation claims under Title VII, and he even claimed, somewhat disingenuously, that the EEOC’s Baldwin decision did not support the plaintiff’s claim, stating that Baldwin “takes no position on the merits of the claim and resolves only timeliness and jurisdictional issues.” While this may appear to be technically true, since the EEOC was ruling on an appeal from the Transportation Department’s dismissal of the claim and not ultimately on the merits, on the other hand the EEOC definitely did take a “position” on the question whether sexual orientation discrimination claims are covered by Title VII; it had to address this question in order to determine that it had jurisdiction over the claim. The EEOC clearly stated in Baldwin that sexual orientation discrimination claims are “necessarily” sex discrimination claims.
By contrast, U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker of the Northern District of Florida, finding that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has not issued a precedential ruling on the question, refused to dismiss a “perceived sexual orientation” discrimination claim in Winstead v. Lafayette County Board of County Commissioners on June 20. Pointing out that the 11th Circuit had ruled in 2011 in Glenn v. Brumby that a gender identity discrimination claim could be considered a sex discrimination claim under the Equal Protection Clause using a sex stereotyping theory, Judge Walker found that the Baldwin ruling, which also discussed sex stereotyping as a basis for a sexual orientation claim, was persuasive and should be followed.
Judge Walker rejected the argument made by some courts that using the stereotyping theory for this purpose was inappropriately “bootstrapping” claims of sexual orientation discrimination under Title VII. “These arguments seem to this Court to misapprehend the nature of animus towards people based on their sexual orientation, actual or perceived,” he wrote. “Such animus, whatever its origin, is at its core based on disapproval of certain behaviors (real or assumed) and tendencies towards behaviors, and those behaviors are disapproved of precisely because they are deemed to be ‘inappropriate’ for members of a certain sex or gender.”
He concluded: “This view – that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is necessarily discrimination based on gender or sex stereotypes, and is therefore sex discrimination – is persuasive to this Court, as it has been to numerous other courts and the EEOC.” He also contended that it “follows naturally from (though it is not compelled by) Brumby, which is binding Eleventh Circuit precedent. Simply put, to treat someone differently based on her attraction to women is necessary to treat that person differently because of her failure to conform to gender or sex stereotypes, which is, in turn, necessarily discrimination on the basis of sex.”
Ironically, Judge Walker turned to an opinion written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, an outspoken opponent of LGBT rights, to seal the deal. He quoted from Scalia’s opinion for the Supreme Court in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, a 1998 decision that same-sex harassment cases could be brought under Title VII. “No one doubts,” wrote Judge Walker, “that discrimination against people based on their sexual orientation was not ‘the principal evil Congress was concerned with when it enacted Title VII,’” quoting Scalia, and continuing the quote, “’But statutory prohibitions often go beyond the principal evil to cover reasonably comparable evils, and it is ultimately the provisions of our laws rather than the principal concerns of our legislators by which we are governed.’” Scalia was opposed to relying on “legislative history” to determine the meaning of statutes, instead insisting on focusing on the statutory language and giving words their “usual” meanings.
Judge Walker concluded that his decision not to dismiss the Title VII claim “does not require judicial activism or tortured statutory construction. It requires close attention to the text of Title VII, common sense, and an understanding that ‘in forbidding employers to discrimination against individuals because of their sex, Congress intended to strike at the entire spectrum of disparate treatment of men and women resulting from sex stereotypes,’” a quote from a 1971 court of appeals ruling that had been cited by the Supreme Court.
Judge Walker’s decision provides the most extended district court discussion of the merits of allowing sexual orientation discrimination claims under Title VII, but it will not be the last word, as the EEOC pushes forward with its affirmative agenda to litigate this issue in as many federal courts around the country as possible, building to a potential Supreme Court ruling. So far, the Supreme Court has refused to get involved with the ongoing debate about whether sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination claims are covered under Title VII. It refused to review the 11th Circuit’s decision in Glenn v. Brumby. But it can’t put things off much longer. An affirmative 7th Circuit ruling in Hively would create the kind of “circuit split” that usually prompts the Supreme Court to agree to review a case. That may not be long in coming.
The current status of transgender legal rights in the U.S.
I was invited by Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum to give a talk at Friday night services at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah on June 3 about the current status of transgender rights in the U.S. CBST observes Gay Pride Month with a series of guest speakers on Friday nights, and the first Friday of the month was designated as “Trans Pride Shabbat” this year. Below is a revised version of the text I prepared for that talk, although on Friday night I left this text in my folder and spoke extemporaneously.
This month we mark the anniversary of a major victory for transgender rights in the U.S. which has generally been overlooked. There was much celebration last June 26 when the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex couples were entitled to marry and to have our marriages recognized by state and local governments under the 14th Amendment . What few mentioned in those celebrations was that this decision implicitly overruled some terrible state court rulings from around the country holding that marriages involving transgender people were invalid under the state bans on same-sex marriage. By removing any gender requirements for marriage, the Supreme Court was not only opening up marriage nationwide for same-sex couples, it was also making it possible for transgender people to marry the partners they love regardless of their sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity. This would also cancel out any argument that a married person who was transitioning was no longer validly married or should be required to divorce their spouse. However, since every state now has no-fault divorce, of course if such a transition takes place and the couple decides to end their marriage, there would be no impediment under state law to their doing so.
Let’s consider the current legislative status of transgender rights protections in the U.S. As of today, 17 states expressly prohibit discrimination based on gender identity in employment, housing and public accommodations (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico). Massachusetts prohibits gender identity discrimination in employment and housing, and the legislature is working on adding public accommodations, with the likely approval of the governor. Most of these laws have specific exemptions for religious institutions, and some of the states also have Religious Freedom statutes that might be interpreted to provide exemptions for businesses whose owners have religious objections, but the question of such exemptions for businesses is not really settled and heavily argued.
Three states prohibit sexual orientation discrimination by statute but not yet gender identity discrimination: New Hampshire, New York and Wisconsin. In New York, however, the State Division of Human Rights earlier this year published a regulation stating that it interprets the New York Human Rights Law ban on sex discrimination to include discrimination because of gender identity, and the ban on disability discrimination to cover gender dysphoria, thus providing protecting to individuals who have not yet finished transitioning to the gender with which they identify. That interpretation has not yet been tested in the courts, but it is consistent with some unfolding federal law developments and also some older decisions by New York trial courts.
In addition, many states have now included specific protection on the basis of gender identity under their Hate Crimes statutes, which authorize enhanced penalties against people who perpetrate violent crimes against people because of their transgender identity. Also, many cities, towns, villages and counties around the country have passed local laws banning gender identity discrimination. In states that lack such laws, many of the large cities have passed them, although there is a disturbing new trend in some of those states for the state legislatures to pass laws prohibiting localities from going beyond the provisions of the state civil rights laws. Lawsuits are challenging these limitations.
At the federal level, two statutes, the Matthew Shepard – James Byrd Jr. Hate Crime Prevention Act and the Violence against Women Act, provide for enhanced penalties for those who commit crimes of physical violence against people because of their gender identity, but only when there is some connection to interstate activity. The interstate activity requirement relates to Congress’s limited power to pass criminal statutes because Article I of the Constitution does not list criminal laws, so federal criminal statues are normally based on Congress’s power to regulate commerce between the states or to enforce other provisions of the Constitution. In states that do not provide gender identity protection under their hate crimes laws, state prosecutors can refer cases to the US Justice Department, which may prosecute after determining that the crime implicates interstate commerce. For example, if the weapon used to commit the crime had moved across state lines, or if the crime (such as kidnaping) involved transportation on an interstate highway, the federal Hate Crimes law could come into play.
Congress has not yet approved the Equality Act, which was introduced last year to amend all federal civil rights statutes to list gender identity and sexual orientation as prohibited grounds of discrimination. This would provide protection in the areas of employment, housing, public accommodations, credit, educational institutions, and all programs that receive federal financial assistance or are operated by federal contractors, and would also cover state government employment and federal employment. The bill enjoys wide co-sponsorship among Democratic members of both houses, but has only a handful of Republican co-sponsors, and the Republican leadership in both houses has denied committee hearings or votes on the bill, so it cannot be passed unless there is a significant change in the political balance of Congress or in the views of the Republican Party.
The Obama Administration adopted executive orders last year that prohibit federal executive branch agencies and federal contractors from discriminating in employment or provision of services because of gender identity or sexual orientation. These orders are enforced administratively within the executive agencies, not in federal courts. However, there has been recent activity in Congress placing the federal contractor protections into question. An impasse between Republicans and Democrats has led to a stalemate over adoption of important pending spending bills and has generated substantial debate on the floor of the House of Representatives, because there are enough Republicans who will vote in favor of this protection (which essentially incorporates the terms of the President’s executive order into legislation) to add it to the pending bills as amendments, but then not enough votes from the Republican majority in the House to pass the resulting amended bills, which are generally opposed by the Democrats because they provide insufficient funding for federal agencies or place objectionable restrictions on the agencies’ actions. This curious situation has brought the legislative authorization process to a temporary halt, and looms as a potential crisis as we move through this hotly contested congressional election cycle.
There are areas where there is much contention now in legislatures and the courts over transgender discrimination claims asserted under existing sex discrimination laws. Is it possible that gender identity discrimination is already illegal, even when it is not mentioned as a prohibited ground of discrimination? This is the hot issue of the day that may reach the Supreme Court next term.
In 1964, Congress considered a Civil Rights Act that was mainly intended to ban race and religious discrimination in employment and public services. However, the employment provision, Title VII, was amended in the House of Representatives to add “sex” as a prohibited ground of employment discrimination. The term “sex” was not defined in the statute, and historical accounts show that the amendment was introduced by a Conservative Virginia representative, possibly as part of a strategy to keep the bill from being passed. When Title VII went into effect in July 1965, some attempts were made to bring discrimination claims on behalf of gay and transgender people, but they were rejected by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency in charge of enforcement of Title VII, and in early decisions by the federal courts.
In 1972, Congress enacted Title IX of the Education Amendments Act, which forbids sex discrimination by educational institutions that receive federal funding. The U.S. Department of Education and courts interpreting Title IX have generally followed the interpretation of “sex” under Title VII. In early cases they refused to use this statute to protect gay and transgender people from discrimination. Other federal statutes addressing sex discrimination, including the Fair Housing Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, also received narrow interpretations of their sex discrimination provisions.
In 1990, Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act. Some opponents of that bill complained that it might be hijacked by sexual minorities claiming that homosexuality or transsexuality could be deemed disabilities. Republican Senator Jesse Helms from North Carolina obtained an amendment specifically stating that homosexuality and “transsexualism” would not be considered disabilities for purposes of protection under this statute.
Interpretation of federal sex discrimination laws began to change after 1989, when the Supreme Court decided an important Title VII case, Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins. Ann Hopkins was denied a partnership at a national accounting firm because some of the partners thought she was not adequately feminine in her appearance and conduct. One said she needed “a course in charm school,” and the head of her office told her she should wear make-up and jewelry and walk, talk and dress more femininely if she wanted to be a partner. The Supreme Court said that this kind of sexual stereotype was evidence of a discriminatory motive under Title VII, and stated that Congress intended to knock down all such barriers to advancement of women in the workplace, signaling a broad interpretation of sex discrimination.
Over the following two decades, lower federal courts have used the Price Waterhouse decision to adopt a broader interpretation of “sex” under Title VII and other federal sex discrimination provisions. By early in this century federal appeals courts started to extend protection to transgender plaintiffs on the theory that they were suffering discrimination because they failed to conform to sex stereotypes. Federal circuit and district courts in many different parts of the country have now found gender identity protection in cases under the Violence against Women Act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. In an important breakthrough, the Atlanta-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled that discrimination against a transgender state employee violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, finding that the same standard used for sex discrimination claims should be applied to gender identity claims.
One of the key factors advancing this broad interpretation of sex discrimination was President Obama’s appointment of Chai Feldblum, then a law professor at Georgetown University, to be a commissioner at the EEOC during his first term. (She is now serving a second term at the EEOC.) Commissioner Feldblum, the first openly lesbian or gay EEOC commissioner, argued effectively that the agency should adopt a broad interpretation of “sex” and apply it to discrimination claims by federal employees. In three important rulings over the last few years, the EEOC held first that gender identity discrimination claims may be brought under Title VII, then that sexual orientation discrimination claims could also be brought under Title VII, and late last year that Title VII requirs federal agencies to allow transgender employees to use workplace restrooms consistent with their gender identity. Building on these rulings as well as the growing body of federal court rulings, the Justice Department, the Department of Education, and other federal agencies with civil rights enforcement responsibility, have also begun to interpret their statutory sex discrimination laws more broadly.
The EEOC was ruling on internal discrimination claims within the federal government, but the agency has also undertaken an affirmative litigation strategy, filing briefs in cases pending in federal court brought by private litigants against non-governmental employers. In addition, the EEOC has filed its own gender identity and sexual orientation discrimination lawsuits in federal courts on behalf of individuals who filed charges against employers with that agency.
The Department of Education and the Justice Department have become involved in several cases brought by transgender high school students under Title IX, seeking access to restrooms consistent with their gender identity.
In a case that drew national attention last year, the Education and Justice Departments represented a transgender high school student in Illinois who was denied appropriate bathroom access and negotiated a settlement with the school district affirming the student’s rights. That attracted a federal court lawsuit against the government by Alliance Defending Freedom, a right-wing litigation group representing some objecting parents and students. The lawsuit claims that Title IX does not apply to this situation and that their children’s “fundamental right of bodily privacy” was violated by the terms of the settlement. It also claims that the Education and Justice Departments did not have authority to adopt this new interpretation of the law without proposing a formal regulation under the procedures established by the Administrative Procedure Act, which include a right of any interested member of the public to challenge a new regulation directly in the federal appeals courts.
This issue burst into wider public discussion when the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, passed an ordinance forbidding sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination, and made clear that transgender people in Charlotte would be allowed to use public and workplace restrooms consistent with their gender identity. The ordinance was set to take effect on April 1, 2016. This stirred up a storm in the North Carolina legislature, which held a special session late in March to pass H.B. 2, a measure that preempted local anti-discrimination laws and provided that in government-operated buildings the restrooms would be strictly segregated by biological sex, meaning, for example, that a person can’t use a women’s restroom unless their birth certificate indicates that they are female. This would apply to public colleges, universities and schools at all levels and in all other government buildings.
The main focus of debate was Republican legislators’ argument that allowing transgender women to use women’s restrooms would present a danger to women and children of possible sexual assault by heterosexual men declaring themselves to be transgender in order to gain improper access. The argument is patently ridiculous. Seventeen states prohibit gender identity discrimination in public facilities, as do several hundred local jurisdictions, but there are no reports that these laws have enabled male sexual predators to gain access to women’s restrooms, and existing criminal laws against public lewdness and sexual assault can easily be used to prosecute such individuals. In a alternative argument, the opponents of transgender restroom access are now pushing the theory argued in the new Illinois lawsuit: that allowing transgender people into restrooms consistent with their gender identity threatens the “right of bodily privacy” of other users to avoid exposing themselves to the view of transgender people. Those making this argument reject the proposition that a transgender woman is genuinely a woman and a transgender man is genuinely a man, and argue that there is a tradition of sheltering people in restrooms from the gaze of members of the opposite sex.
A similar rejection of the reality of transgender identity can be found in a law recently passed by the state of Mississippi, which specifically authorizes people whose religious belief rejects transgender identity to refuse to treat transgender people consistent with their gender identity, including in places of business when it comes to things like restroom access. This reverts back to the views that used to be expressed by courts during the 20th century, rejecting the idea of gender transition and insisting that gender must be defined solely by a determination made at someone’s birth and entered on their birth certificate.
North Carolina’s H.B. 2 and the Mississippi law are now both the subject of multiple federal law suits disputing the bodily privacy argument and forcing courts to confront the question whether discrimination against transgender people violates the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, Title IX and Title VII. While this dispute was pending, the Obama Administration threatened North Carolina with enforcement action under Title VII and Title IX, and distributed a letter in May to educational administrators nationwide advising them of the requirement to respect the rights of transgender students and staff under Title IX. The administration’s action attracted new lawsuits, including one filed by the State of Texas on behalf of itself and a dozen other states challenging the administration’s interpretation of Title IX.
Meanwhile, during April the Richmond-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, ruling in a high school restroom case brought by a transgender boy under Title IX, held that the federal district court should defer to the Education Department’s interpretation of that statute, reversed the district court’s dismissal order, and sent the case back to the district court for further proceedings. At the end of May, the full bench of the 4th Circuit rejected the School District’s petition for reconsideration of the case, and on June 7 the school district filed a notice with the 4th Circuit that it plans to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to review the decision. This will probably result in a “stay” of the 4th Circuit’s ruling, which will delay further consideration by the district court of the plaintiff’s request for a preliminary injunction so that he can access the boys’ restroom facilities at his high school when classes resume in the fall.
Although legal commentators have suggested that it is unlikely the Supreme Court will agree to hear this case, it is at least possible. The notice the School Board filed focuses on two arguments: that the district court should not defer to the Education Department’s interpretation of Title IX, and that giving transgender students the restroom access they desire violates the “bodily privacy rights” of other students. The first argument would require the Supreme Court to overrule a precedent that has been strongly criticized by the Court’s most conservative justices. The second would require the Court to broaden the right of privacy under the Due Process Clause to encompass a right not to share restroom facilities with transgender people.
We should begin to see decisions in many of the pending lawsuits in the months ahead. One of the complications facing us now in getting a resolution to this controversy is that the Supreme Court is operating with only 8 members since the death of Justice Scalia in February. Senate Republicans have refused to hold hearings and vote on President Obama’s nominee for the seat, Chief Judge Merrick Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. This vacancy may lead the Supreme Court to avoid taking for review controversial cases as to which it is likely to be sharply divided, such as the case from Virginia involving the transgender student’s discrimination claim under Title IX. The court of appeals decision in that case was 2-1. The dissenting judge urged the school district to seek review from the Supreme Court. Although there might be some delays in getting this issue to the Supreme, it appears likely that the next big LGBT rights case to go to that Court will focus on whether gender identity discrimination is a form of “sex” discrimination that can be challenged under existing sex discrimination statutes and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Federal Court Refuses to Dismiss Sexual Orientation Discrimination Claim Under Title IX
United States District Judge Dean D. Pregerson ruled on December 15 that two students at Pepperdine University could sue the school for sexual orientation discrimination under Title IX, a federal statute that prohibits sex discrimination by educational institutions that receive federal money. Videckis v. Pepperdine University, 2015 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 167672 (C.D. Calif.). The ruling rejecting the school’s motion to dismiss the discrimination claims advanced by Haley Videckis and Layana White is the first under Title IX to acknowledge the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s ruling last summer that sexual orientation discrimination claims should be treated as sex discrimination claims under Title VII, the analogous federal law that bans sex discrimination in the workplace.
Videckis and White are former members of the Pepperdine women’s basketball team. Their lawsuit “arises out of allegedly intrusive and discriminatory actions that Pepperdine and its employees committed against Plaintiffs on account of Plaintiffs’ dating relationship,” wrote Judge Pregerson. They allege that “in the spring of 2014, Coach Ryan [Weisenberg] and others on the staff of the women’s basketball team came to the conclusion that Plaintiffs were lesbians and were in a lesbian relationship. Plaintiffs further allege that Coach Ryan and the coaching staff were concerned about the possibility of the relationship causing turmoil within the team. Plaintiffs allege that, due to their concerns, Coach Ryan and members of the coaching staff harassed and discriminated against Plaintiffs in an effort to force Plaintiffs to quit the team.”
Pepperdine’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit argued that Title IX does not apply to sexual orientation discrimination claims, that the plaintiffs’ allegations would not support a sex discrimination claim based on “gender stereotype discrimination,” and that the Title IX claims “should be dismissed because they are uncertain and not legally cognizable.” The school argued that the plaintiffs’ retaliation claim under Title IX should be rejected as well. The school also appeared to be arguing that since the women had been secretive about their relationship, they could not mount a sexual orientation discrimination or retaliation claim against the school.
Judge Pregerson had previously dismissed in part the plaintiff’s’ first amended complaint, stating then that “the line between discrimination based on gender stereotyping and discrimination based on sexual orientation is blurry, at best.” At this point in the lawsuit, the plaintiffs have amended their complaint to include more factual allegations and legal arguments, so Pepperdine’s motion is actually addressed to their third amended complaint. “After further briefing and argument,” wrote Pregerson, “the Court concludes that the distinction is illusory and artificial, and that sexual orientation discrimination is not a category distinct from sex or gender discrimination. Thus, claims of discrimination based on sexual orientation are covered by Title VII and IX, but not as a category of independent claims separate from sex and gender stereotype. Rather, claims of sexual orientation discrimination are gender stereotype or sex discrimination claims.”
After noting prior decisions by other federal courts pointing out the difficulties of line-drawing in terms of classifying such discrimination claims, Pregerson wrote, “Simply put, the line between sex discrimination and sexual orientation discrimination is ‘difficult to draw’ because that line does not exist, save as a lingering and faulty judicial construct.” He pointed out that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, whose rulings are binding on the federal district courts in California, had ruled in sexual harassment claims that gay men could bring such claims under Title VII, regardless of their sexual orientation, and that “the cases upon which Pepperdine relies, for the most part, dismiss analogous sexual orientation-based claims in a cursory and conclusory fashion. The Court rejects the reasoning of these cases, which do not fully evaluate the nature of claims based on sexual orientation discrimination.”
He continued, “In sexual orientation discrimination cases, focusing on the actions or appearance of the alleged victim of discrimination rather than the bias of the alleged perpetrator asks the wrong question and compounds the harm. A plaintiff’s ‘actual’ sexual orientation is irrelevant to a Title IX or Title VII claim because it is the biased mind of the alleged discriminator that is the focus of the analysis. This is especially true given that sexuality cannot be defined on a homosexual or heterosexual basis; it exists on a continuum. It is not the victim of discrimination who should be forced to put his or her sexual orientation on trial. We do not demand of a victim of alleged religious discrimination, ‘Prove that you are a real Catholic, Mormon, or Jew.’ Just as it would be absurd to demand that a victim of alleged racial discrimination prove that he is black, it is absurd to demand a victim of alleged sex discrimination based on sexual orientation prove she is a lesbian. The contrary view would turn a Title IX trial into a broad inquisition into the personal sexual history of the victim. Such an approach should be precluded as not only highly inflammatory and offensive, but also irrelevant for the purposes of the Title IX discrimination analysis.”
Pregerson concluded on this point that it “is impossible to categorically separate ‘sexual orientation discrimination’ from discrimination on the basis of sex or from gender stereotypes; to do so would result in a false choice.” Thus, a sexual orientation discrimination claim under Title IX is a sex discrimination claim.
In addition to accepting the plaintiffs’ sexual orientation discrimination claim, Pregerson also accepted the alternative argument that they were targeted as a matter of sex stereotyping. “Plaintiffs have state a claim for discrimination,” he wrote, “because they allege that Pepperdine treated them differently due to their perceived lack of conformity with gender stereotypes, and further that Pepperdine discriminated against them based on stereotypes about lesbianism.”
Finally, Pregerson would also treat this as a straightforward sex discrimination claim. “Here,” he wrote, “Plaintiffs allege that they were told that ‘lesbianism’ would not be tolerated on the team. If Plaintiffs had been males dating females, instead of females dating females, they would not have been subjected to the alleged different treatment. Plaintiffs have state a straightforward claim of sex discrimination under Title IX.”
Acknowledging the EEOC’s July 16 decision in Baldwin v. Foxx, 2015 WL 4397641, Judge Pregerson asserted that his conclusion “is in line” with that Title VII ruling. “The EEOC concluded that ‘an employee could show that the sexual orientation discrimination he or she experienced was sex discrimination because it involved treatment that would not have occurred but for the individual’s sex; because it was based on the sex of the person(s) the individual associates with; and/or because it was premised on the fundamental sex stereotype, norm, or expectation that individuals should be attracted only to those of the opposite sex.’ For these reasons, as well as for the reasons stated in this Order, this Court agrees.”
Judge Pregerson also concluded that the plaintiffs had alleged a plausible retaliation claim, including that they were forced off the basketball team when they complained about their treatment by the coaches. “Pepperdine argues that because Plaintiffs tried to hide their relationship status, they therefore never could have made a complaint about discrimination,” wrote Pregerson. “This argument is without merit. Plaintiffs clearly allege that they complained to the coaching staff and school officials about intrusive questioning and harassment to which they were subjected. The fact that Plaintiffs may never have explicitly told school officials that they were dating is irrelevant to whether they complained that they were being harassed. Again, requiring that Plaintiffs disclose their sexual orientation or relationship status improperly focuses the inquiry on the status of the victim rather than the bias of the alleged harasser, and imposes a burden that Title IX does not contemplate.”
The plaintiffs are represented by Jeffrey J. Zuber and Jeremy J. Gray of Zuber Lawler and Del Duca LLP, a Los Angeles law firm.
Federal Judge Agrees With EEOC that Sexual Orientation Discrimination is Actionable under Title VII
At last, a federal district judge has expressly relied on the EEOC’s ruling from July 2015 that sexual orientation discrimination claims can be brought under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
U.S. District Judge Myron H. Thompson of the Middle District of Alabama, rejecting the recommendation of a U.S. Magistrate Judge that a sexual orientation discrimination complaint under Title VII be dismissed on jurisdictional grounds, determined that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was correct when it ruled that sexual orientation discrimination is a form of sex discrimination under Title VII. However, this determination in Isaacs v. Felder, 2015 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 146663 (Oct. 29, 2015), did not do any good for the plaintiff, Roger Isaacs, because the court concluded that his factual allegations included neither direct nor indirect evidence of discriminatory intent in his discharge or treatment by his employer.
Isaacs, a gay man, worked for Felder Services as a dietician for about six months. Felder provides various services to healthcare facilities. Isaacs was assigned to work at Arbor Springs Health and Rehabilitation Center under a contract that Felder had with that organization. He complained that he was subjected to a discriminatory hostile environment at Arbor Springs, and relayed this complaint back to Felder, which asked Arbor to investigate and report.
Meanwhile, Isaacs had also been assigned by Felder to provide dietician services at another facility, in Florala, Alabama, once every three weeks. Isaacs had been injured in a car accident and asked for permission “for a man he identified as his brother but who was actually his husband to drive him to Florala, and for the two to stay overnight there,” wrote Judge Thompson, observing that there was a “dispute” about whether Isaacs was authorized to seek expense reimbursements on behalf of his “brother” for these expeditions. He submitted these expenses, and also brought his mother along on some of these trips and submitted for reimbursement of her expenses as well. An administrative assistant at Felder Services raised questions about these expense reimbursements, leading to an internal investigation at Felder. This investigation led to the conclusion that Isaacs was submitting unauthorized expenses for reimbursement, and then Felder’s human resources director received the result of Arbor’s investigation of Isaacs’ allegations about harassment, which found his charges to be unsubstantiated. The results of the expense reimbursement investigation were brought to Felder’s president by the HR director, and they decided to terminate him “based on the improper reimbursement requests.”
Felder asserted Title VII claims of discrimination (by firing him) on the basis of his sex, gender non-conformity, and sexual orientation, hostile environment sexual harassment, and retaliation for claiming about the harassment. The company’s motion for summary judgment was referred to a magistrate judge, who recommended granting the motion as to all three claims. Among other things, the magistrate judge asserted that the sexual orientation claim should be rejected as not actionable under Title VII.
Judge Thompson, conducting de novo review of the record before the magistrate judge, granted summary judgment to the company on all claims, but for some different reasons from those stated by the magistrate judge. Most importantly, Thompson rejected the contention that a sexual orientation discrimination claim could not be brought under Title VII.
“The court rejects the magistrate judge’s conclusion that ‘sexual orientation discrimination is neither included in nor contemplated by Title VII,” wrote Thompson. “In the Eleventh Circuit, the question is an open one,” he wrote, citing to a recent ruling from the Southern District of Georgia, Evans v. Georgia Regional Hospital, 2015 WL 5316694 (Sept. 10, 2015) (where the judge noted that the 11th Circuit hadn’t decided this issue yet). “This court agrees instead with the view of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that claims of sexual orientation-based discrimination are cognizable under Title VII,” Thompson wrote, citing the July EEOC decision in Baldwin v. Federal Aviation Administration. In that case, he wrote, “the Commission explains persuasively why ‘an allegation of discrimination based on sexual orientation is necessarily an allegation of sex discrimination under Title VII.’ Particularly compelling is its reliance on Eleventh Circuit precedent,” he continued, noting the EEOC’s invocation of Parr v. Woodmen of the World Life Ins. Co., 791 F.2d 888, 892 (11th Cir. 1986), where the 11th Circuit held that discriminating against an employee based on an interracial marriage or association was a form of race discrimination; Thompson was making an analogy to same-sex marriage or associations as sex discrimination. Judge Thompson also cited a 1994 law review article by Northwestern University Professor Andrew Koppelman titled “Why Discrimination Against Lesbians and Gay Men is Sex Discrimination,” 69 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 197, which made the same argument by analogy to the racial association cases in the wake of the Hawaii Supreme Court’s ruling in Baehr v. Lewin that a ban on same-sex marriage was sex discrimination.
Thompson continued, “To the extent that sexual orientation discrimination occurs not because of the targeted individual’s romantic or sexual attraction to or involvement with people of the same sex, but rather based on her or his perceived deviations from ‘heterosexually defined gender norms,’ this, too, is sex discrimination, of the gender-stereotyping variety,” here again citing Baldwin as well as a concurring opinion in Latta v. Otter, the 9th Circuit’s 2014 marriage equality decision, in which Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon argued that a state ban on same-sex marriage was a form of sex discrimination in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. Judge Thompson quoted a passage from Berzon’s concurring opinion that included a citation to a 1975 law review article by then-professor (now Supreme Court Justice) Ruth Bader Ginsburg titled “Gender and the Constitution” (44 U. Cin. L. Rev. 1), which had helped to provide the theoretical underpinning for the Supreme Court’s subsequent adoption of the view that sex-stereotyping is evidence of sex discrimination.
While determining that the magistrate judge’s recommendation to reject Isaacs’ sex discrimination claim on the basis that Title VII did not apply was incorrect, however, Thompson concluded that Isaacs had failed to allege facts that would give rise to an inference that he was discharged because of his sexual orientation, and he agreed with the magistrate judge that the factual allegations were also insufficient to support Isaacs’ hostile environment and retaliation claims against Felder.
Thompson’s decision is apparently the first by a federal district judge to rely on the EEOC’s Baldwin decision to hold affirmatively that sexual orientation discrimination claims, if supported by sufficient factual allegations, can be brought under Title VII. Since the employer won its motion for summary judgment, there would seem to be no reason for it to seek review of Thompson’s ruling at the 11th Circuit, but the issue might get there if Isaacs were to appeal. He is represented in this lawsuit by Benjamin Howard Cooper of Cooper Law Group LLC, Birmingham, Alabama.
Federal Discrimination Agency Says Gays Are Protected Against Employment Discrimination
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency that enforces Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, issued a decision on July 15 holding for the first time that Title VII’s ban on employment discrimination because of sex includes discrimination against somebody because they are gay, lesbian or bisexual. This marks a complete turnaround by the EEOC from the position taken by the agency throughout all of its 50 year history. The Commission, acting in its appellate capacity, overruled a 2013 agency decision that had rejected a discrimination claim by a man who had been denied a permanent Front Line Manager position by the Federal Aviation Administration. As is customary with such administrative rulings by the EEOC, the decision does not give the name of the man, referring throughout to the “Complainant.” Baldwin v. Foxx (Anthony Foxx, Secretary, Department of Transportation), 2015 WL 4397641 (EEOC, July 15, 2015).
The EEOC went into business in July 1965 when Title VII took effect. That statute was the result of prolonged struggle in Congress, including a lengthy filibuster in the Senate led by southern conservative Democrats opposed to racial integration of the workplace. Almost all of the attention around Title VII focused on the proposal for a federal ban on race discrimination in employment. The bill originally introduced in the House of Representatives was limited to race or color, religion and national origin as prohibited grounds of discrimination. The relevant House committees did study sex discrimination issues, but decided that the Equal Pay Act passed in 1963, which prohibited compensating men and women at different rates for the same work, was sufficient, and proponents of the bill feared that adding a general prohibition on sex discrimination would endanger the bill’s passage. Nonetheless, on the floor of the House, Rep. Howard Smith of Virginia, a long-time proponent of equal legal rights for women, introduced an amendment to add sex, which was passed by an unlikely alliance of pro-feminist liberals and southern conservatives. Some of the southerners probably supported the amendment hoping that this would make the final bill more difficult to pass. Because “sex” was added as a floor amendment, the committee reports on the bill do not discuss it, and Smith’s amendment did not add any definition of sex to the definitional section of the bill, merely adding the word “sex” to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination wherever that list appeared in the bill.
After the bill passed the House, it went to the Senate under a deal worked out by the leadership to by-pass the committee process, in order to prevent it from being bottled up in committee by the conservative southern Democratic chair of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Eastland, who was a sworn opponent of the bill. Instead the measure went directly to the Senate floor under a procedure that allowed little opportunity for amendments. There was some brief discussion about the inclusion of sex but nothing really illuminating, apart from a floor amendment attempting to reconcile the bill with the Equal Pay Act, the meaning of which wasn’t settled until a Supreme Court ruling several years later.
Consequently, the “legislative history” provides no help in figuring out what kind of discrimination Congress intended to ban when it voted to add “sex” to the list of prohibited grounds of employment discrimination. Without such guidance, the EEOC and the courts were left to their own devices in trying to figure out what this meant, and the conclusion they reached early in the history of Title VII was that it was intended to prohibit discrimination against women because they were women or against men because they were men. As such, both the EEOC and many courts ruled beginning shortly after the Act went into effect that it did not apply to discrimination because of a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, both concepts that were largely missing from American jurisprudence during the 1960s. One commonsense reason usually raised by courts in rejecting such discrimination claims was that if Congress had intended to ban these forms of discrimination, there surely would have been some mention during the debates over the bill. They have also pointed to the fact that bills to add sexual orientation and gender identity to Title VII or to enact a free-standing law addressing such discrimination have been frequently introduced in Congress since the early 1970s, but no such measure has ever been enacted. Some courts have construed this history to reflect Congress’s view that Title VII does not already ban such discrimination.
A Supreme Court decision from 1989, Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, initiated a changing landscape for sexuality issues under Title VII. Ann Hopkins, rejected for a partnership at Price Waterhouse, won a ruling from the Supreme Court that sex stereotypes held by some of the partners who voted against her application violated her rights under Title VII. Writing for a plurality of the Court, Justice William J. Brennan said that Title VII applied to discrimination because of gender, not just biological sex. Later courts seized upon this to justify taking a broader view of sex discrimination under Title VII. By early in this century, there was a growing body of federal court rulings suggesting that LGBT people might be protected to some extent under Title VII, depending on the nature of their case. If the discrimination they suffered could be described in terms of sex stereotypes, or if they could show that they had been the victim of sexual harassment that turned in some way on their gender, they might be able to maintain a legal claim of discrimination.
Within the past few years, the EEOC has taken a leading role in making these developments more concrete, first by its treatment of discrimination claims within the internal investigative process, and then through its decision-making on discrimination claims brought against federal agencies, where the Commission plays an important appellate role reviewing rulings by federal agencies on internal employment grievances. In 2012, the EEOC ruled in a case against the Justice Department that a transgender woman who was denied a position because of her gender identity had a valid claim under Title VII. Macy v. Dep’t of Justice, 2012 Westlaw 1435995 (April 20, 2012). This ruling echoed many then-recent federal court decisions, including some by courts of appeals, finding that discrimination because of gender identity almost always involves sex stereotyping by the discriminating employer. Late last year, the agency and then the Justice Department concluded that all gender identity discrimination claims could be investigated and prosecuted under Title VII. Pushing that position forward, the Justice Department has filed suit on behalf of the EEOC or joined ongoing private cases in federal court seeking to move the courts beyond the stereotyping theory to a straightforward acceptance that gender identity discrimination is sex discrimination.
The new July 15 ruling by the EEOC seeks to achieve the same thing for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals confronting employment discrimination. While acknowledging the significance of the Supreme Court’s Price Waterhouse decision and sex stereotyping theory in widening the agency’s appreciation of the scope of sex discrimination, this ruling takes things a step further. “In the case before us,” wrote the Commission, “we conclude that Complainant’s claim of sexual orientation discrimination alleges that the Agency relied on sex-based considerations and took his sex into account in its employment decision regarding the permanent FLM position. The Complainant, therefore, has stated a claim of sex discrimination. Indeed, we conclude that sexual orientation is inherently a ‘sex-based consideration,’ and an allegation of discrimination based on sexual orientation is necessarily an allegation of sex discrimination under Title VII. A complainant alleging that an agency took his or her sexual orientation into account in an employment action necessarily alleges that the agency took his or her sex into account.”
The Commission amplified this conclusion with an extended discussion, grounding its conclusion in rulings by several federal courts and pointing especially to the well-established principle that discriminating against somebody because of the race of their sexual partner has long been deemed by the Commission and the courts to be race discrimination. Logically, then, discriminating against somebody because of the sex of their sexual partners would be sex discrimination. The Commission also referenced the recent marriage equality litigation, noting the Supreme Court’s statement in Obergefell v. Hodges that laws prohibiting same-sex marriage “abridge central precepts of equality.” Of course, the Commission also explained that recent court rulings have made clear that stereotyped thinking about proper gender roles, as well as behavior, underlies much sexual orientation discrimination, thus providing a firm theoretical justification in the Supreme Court’s Price Waterhouse case.
What is the significance of this EEOC ruling? It is likely to result in the agency initiating federal court litigation, enlisting the Justice Department, to push this interpretation of Title VII into the courts. Although federal courts are not bound by an administrative agency’s interpretations of their governing statutes, the Supreme Court has frequently deferred to agency interpretations when they are seen as consistent with the statutory language and overall congressional purpose, and constitute a reasonable interpretation of the statute. Here is where the EEOC’s past rulings may result in less deference than courts otherwise might give. When an agency “changes its mind” about an issue, courts may be skeptical about whether the new ruling is more political than legalistic. So it may be premature to assume that this ruling by the EEOC means that we have no need to enact explicit federal protection through a vehicle such as the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which has been pending in one form or another in Congress since 1993.
Ironically, this EEOC action comes at a time when LGBT political leaders have largely abandoned ENDA, finding it too narrowly focused on employment. Objections have also been raised to the extremely broad religious exemption contained in ENDA. One of the major lobbying victories last summer was persuading the Obama Administration not to include the broad ENDA-style religious exemption in President Obama’s executive order banning sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination by federal contractors. Lobbyists are now working with legislators on a broader, comprehensive LGBT civil rights bill, expected to be introduced this summer, that would go beyond employment to cover other areas traditionally covered by federal law, including housing, public services and public accommodations. In the meantime, however, it will certainly be useful for the federal government’s primary civil rights enforcement agency, the EEOC, to be on record that sexual orientation discrimination is sex discrimination. EEOC’s view may be influential with the agencies that enforce the Fair Housing Act and the other titles of the Civil Rights Act, and its analysis may prove persuasive to the courts, regardless of the level of deference it receives.
The vote on this decision is not indicated in the opinion (which was drafted by the Commission’s staff), but was reported in the press as a party-line vote of 3-2. Under the statute, the five-member Commission may not have more than three commissioners who are members of the same political party. The two Republicans on the Commission voted against this decision, but did not issue a written dissent. A prime mover behind the EEOC’s expanded view of sex discrimination to encompass gender identity and sexual orientation claims has been Commissioner Chai Feldblum, the first openly gay member of the Commission, who was appointed by President Obama and confirmed by the Senate for a second term last year.