Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf
Page Number: 13

Cite as:  590 U. S. ____ (2020) 

9 

Opinion of the Court 

equally.  So an employer who fires a woman, Hannah, be-
cause  she  is  insufficiently  feminine  and  also  fires  a  man, 
Bob, for being insufficiently masculine may treat men and
women as groups more or less equally.  But in both cases 
the employer fires an individual in part because of sex.  In-
stead of avoiding Title VII exposure, this employer doubles 
it. 

B 
From  the  ordinary  public  meaning  of  the  statute’s  lan-
guage at the time of the law’s adoption, a straightforward 
rule emerges:  An employer violates Title VII when it inten-
tionally fires an individual employee based in part on sex. 
It doesn’t matter if other factors besides the plaintiff ’s sex 
contributed to the decision.  And it doesn’t matter if the em-
ployer treated women as a group the same when compared 
to men as a group.  If the employer intentionally relies in
part on an individual employee’s sex when deciding to dis-
charge the employee—put differently, if changing the em-
ployee’s sex would have yielded a different choice by the em-
ployer—a  statutory  violation  has  occurred.  Title  VII’s 
message  is  “simple  but  momentous”:    An  individual  em-
ployee’s sex is “not relevant to the selection, evaluation, or
compensation of employees.”  Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, 
490 U. S. 228, 239 (1989) (plurality opinion).

The statute’s message for our cases is equally simple and 
momentous:  An individual’s homosexuality or transgender
status is not relevant to employment decisions.  That’s be-
cause it is impossible to discriminate against a person for 
being  homosexual  or  transgender  without  discriminating 
against that individual based on sex.  Consider, for exam-
ple, an employer with two employees, both of whom are at-
tracted to men.  The two individuals are, to the employer’s 
mind, materially identical in all respects, except that one is 
a  man  and  the  other  a  woman.  If  the  employer  fires  the