Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf
Page Number: 25.0

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

21 

Opinion of the Court 

Bostock—asking whether Mr. Bostock, a man attracted to
other men, would have been fired had he been a woman— 
we don’t just change his sex.  Along the way, we change his
sexual  orientation  too  (from  homosexual  to  heterosexual).
If the aim is to isolate whether a plaintiff ’s sex caused the
dismissal, the employers stress, we must hold sexual orien-
tation constant—meaning we need to change both his sex 
and the sex to which he is attracted.  So for Mr. Bostock, 
the question should be whether he would’ve been fired if he
were a woman attracted to  women.  And because his em-
ployer would have been as quick to fire a lesbian as it was 
a gay man, the employers conclude, no Title VII violation 
has occurred.   

While the explanation is new, the mistakes are the same. 
The employers might be onto something if Title VII only en-
sured equal treatment between groups of men and women 
or if the statute applied only when sex is the sole or primary 
reason  for  an  employer’s  challenged  adverse  employment
action.  But both of these premises are mistaken.  Title VII’s 
plain  terms  and  our  precedents  don’t  care  if  an  employer
treats men and women comparably as groups; an employer 
who fires both lesbians and gay men equally doesn’t dimin-
ish but doubles its liability.  Just cast a glance back to Man-
hart, where it was no defense that the employer sought to 
equalize  pension  contributions  based  on  life  expectancy.
Nor does the statute care if other factors besides sex con-
tribute to an employer’s discharge decision.  Mr. Bostock’s 
employer might have decided to fire him only because of the 
confluence of two factors, his sex and the sex to which he is 
attracted.    But  exactly  the  same  might  have  been  said  in 
Phillips, where motherhood was the added variable. 

Still,  the  employers  insist,  something  seems  different
here.  Unlike certain other employment policies this Court 
has  addressed  that  harmed  only  women  or  only  men,  the 
employers’ policies in the cases before us have the same ad-
verse consequences for men and women.  How could sex be