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16 

BOSTOCK v. CLAYTON COUNTY 

Opinion of the Court 

in enacting Title VII or certain expectations about its oper-
ation.  They warn, too, about consequences that might fol-
low a ruling for the employees.  But none of these conten-
tions about what the employers think the law was meant to 
do, or should do, allow us to ignore the law as it is. 

A 
Maybe  most  intuitively,  the  employers  assert  that  dis-
crimination on the basis of homosexuality and transgender
status aren’t referred to as sex discrimination in ordinary 
conversation.  If asked by a friend (rather than a judge) why 
they were fired, even today’s plaintiffs would likely respond 
that it was because they were gay or transgender, not be-
cause  of  sex.    According  to  the  employers,  that  conversa-
tional answer, not the statute’s strict terms, should guide
our thinking and suffice to defeat any suggestion that the
employees now before us were fired because of sex.  Cf. post,
at 3 (ALITO, J., dissenting); post, at 8–13 (KAVANAUGH, J., 
dissenting).

But this submission rests on a mistaken understanding 
of what kind of cause the law is looking for in a Title VII 
case.  In conversation, a speaker is likely to focus on what
seems most relevant or informative to the listener.  So an 
employee  who  has  just  been  fired  is  likely  to  identify  the 
primary or most direct cause rather than list literally every 
but-for cause.  To do otherwise would be tiring at best.  But 
these conversational conventions do not control Title VII’s 
legal analysis, which asks simply whether sex was a but-for 
cause.  In Phillips, for example, a woman who was not hired 
under the employer’s policy might have told her friends that
her application was rejected because she was a mother, or 
because she had young children.  Given that many women
could be hired under the policy, it’s unlikely she would say 
she was not hired because she was a woman.  But the Court 
did not hesitate to recognize that the employer in Phillips
discriminated against the plaintiff because of her sex.  Sex