# Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) Decided **June 15, 2020**, 6–3. Justice [[Neil Gorsuch]] — joined by [[Chief Justice Roberts]] and the four liberal justices — held that **Title VII of the [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]]**'s prohibition on employment discrimination "because of sex" includes discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. ## The Holding The opinion's reasoning is textualist on its face: > An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids. Gorsuch (a Trump 1.0 appointee and the author of the textualist *Heller* tradition) used the same originalist reading methods conservatives had developed over four decades — and arrived at a result the right-wing legal movement vehemently opposed. The decision is the case study in **textualism eating its own**: the methodology, applied honestly, produces conclusions about contemporary cases that the conservative legal movement does not want. ## The Three Consolidated Cases - **Gerald Bostock** — Clayton County, GA child-welfare worker fired after joining a gay softball league - **Donald Zarda** — skydiving instructor fired after revealing he was gay (Zarda died before the decision) - **[[Aimee Stephens]]** — funeral director fired after announcing her gender transition (Stephens also died before the decision) The fact that two of three plaintiffs died before vindication illustrates the time scale of strategic litigation as a resistance technique. ## What It Did and Didn't Do **Did:** - Extended Title VII employment protection to LGBTQ workers nationwide - Made firing employees for being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender illegal under federal law - Provided doctrinal foundation for extending similar reasoning to other sex-discrimination statutes (Title IX, [[Fair Housing Act]], ACA's Section 1557) **Didn't:** - Address religious-exemption questions (the *Roman Catholic Diocese* / [[Section 702]] issues) - Address bathroom, locker room, or pronoun questions in employment contexts - Reach the public-accommodations (Title II) or housing (Title VIII) questions ## How It's Being Eroded The [[Trump 2.0]] administration has moved on multiple fronts: - **Title IX rollback** — reversed the Biden-era rule extending Bostock's reasoning to Title IX (education); the [[Department of Education]] now interprets Title IX's "sex" prohibition narrowly - **Section 1557 (ACA)** — same-pattern reversal in healthcare nondiscrimination - **Fair Housing** — moved to narrow Bostock's reasoning in housing discrimination contexts - **Federal employment** — executive orders narrowing federal-employee protections for transgender workers The Bostock holding itself stands as Title VII precedent and would require either a Supreme Court reversal or new statutory language to formally undo. But the agency-level interpretive rollbacks effectively limit Bostock to the employment context — repeating the [[Voting Rights Act of 1965]] / *Shelby County* enforcement-collapse pattern. ## The Through-Line Bostock illustrates two patterns relevant to the broader resistance frame: 1. **Textualism is a method, not a politics.** When the right-wing legal movement's preferred interpretive method produces unwelcome results, the movement turns on the method ([[Justice Alito]]'s dissent essentially argues against textualism as applied here). 2. **Civil rights statutes are sometimes more durable than civil rights doctrine.** The Roberts Court has been more willing to limit substantive due process precedents (Dobbs) than to limit textually grounded statutory rights. This shapes the strategic calculation about whether to ground new rights claims in statutory or constitutional arguments. ## See Also - [[Resistance Hub]] - [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]] — the underlying statute - [[Obergefell v. Hodges]] — companion LGBTQ rights expansion - [[Reconstruction Amendments]] — the broader [[Fourteenth Amendment]] context