# Aimee Stephens Born December 7, 1960 in Fayetteville, North Carolina; died May 12, 2020 in Redford Township, Michigan. American transgender woman whose 2013 firing by her employer — the R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes in Garden City, Michigan — became one of the three consolidated cases that produced ***[[Bostock v. Clayton County]]*** (2020), the Supreme Court ruling that extended Title VII employment-discrimination protections to LGBTQ workers. ## The Firing Stephens had worked at Harris Funeral Homes for six years as a funeral director and embalmer. In July 2013, she sent her employer a letter explaining that she was transgender and that, after returning from an upcoming vacation, she intended to begin presenting at work in alignment with her gender identity and consistent with the women's-clothing dress code applicable to female funeral directors. Two weeks later, owner Thomas Rost fired her — explicitly citing her gender transition as the reason. Rost's stated grounds were religious: he believed Stephens's continued employment would violate his Christian convictions about sex and gender. Stephens filed a complaint with the EEOC; the EEOC sued Harris Funeral Homes in 2014 alleging Title VII sex-discrimination violations. ## The Litigation The case worked its way up through federal court: - **2016**: U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan ruled for the employer, holding that Title VII did not protect against transgender discrimination as a freestanding category - **2018**: U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed, holding that anti-trans discrimination is necessarily sex discrimination — using essentially the textualist analysis that would later prevail at the Supreme Court - **2019**: Supreme Court granted certiorari and consolidated the case with two other LGBTQ-employment cases (Donald Zarda's gay-employee case from the Second Circuit, and Gerald Bostock's gay-employee case from the Eleventh Circuit) - **June 15, 2020**: Supreme Court ruled 6-3 (Gorsuch) for the LGBTQ plaintiffs — Title VII's prohibition on sex discrimination covers sexual orientation and gender identity Stephens was represented by [[Chase Strangio]] and the [[ACLU]] LGBTQ & HIV Project. She **died of complications from kidney failure on May 12, 2020 — one month before the Supreme Court decision** that vindicated her case. ## Place in the Vault Stephens is one of three named plaintiffs (with Donald Zarda and Gerald Bostock) whose cases produced the single most consequential federal LGBTQ employment-discrimination ruling in U.S. history. The Bostock decision applies particularly to trans Americans through Stephens's case, and her death weeks before the ruling has become one of the most-cited tragic facts in modern American LGBTQ legal history — the named plaintiff who did not live to see her victory. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Bostock v. Clayton County]] - [[Chase Strangio]]