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12 

BOSTOCK v. CLAYTON COUNTY 

Opinion of the Court 

not limited to employers who, through the sum of all of their 
employment actions, treat the class of men differently than 
the class of women.  Instead, the law makes each instance 
of  discriminating  against  an  individual  employee  because 
of  that  individual’s  sex  an  independent  violation  of  Title
VII.  So just as an employer who fires both Hannah and Bob 
for failing to fulfill traditional sex stereotypes doubles ra-
ther  than  eliminates  Title  VII  liability,  an  employer  who
fires  both  Hannah  and  Bob  for  being  gay  or  transgender 
does the same. 

At bottom, these cases involve no more than the straight-
forward  application  of  legal  terms  with  plain  and  settled
meanings.  For  an  employer  to  discriminate  against  em-
ployees for being homosexual or transgender, the employer 
must  intentionally  discriminate  against  individual  men
and women in part because of sex.  That has always been
prohibited by Title VII’s plain terms—and that “should be 
the  end  of  the  analysis.”    883  F. 3d,  at  135  (Cabranes,  J., 
concurring in judgment). 

C 
If more support for our conclusion were required, there’s
no need to look far.  All that the statute’s plain terms sug-
gest, this Court’s cases have already confirmed.  Consider 
three of our leading precedents.

In Phillips v. Martin Marietta Corp., 400 U. S. 542 (1971) 
(per curiam),  a  company  allegedly  refused  to  hire  women
with  young  children,  but  did  hire  men  with  children  the 
same age.  Because its discrimination depended not only on
the employee’s sex as a female but also on the presence of
another  criterion—namely,  being  a  parent  of  young  chil-
dren—the company contended it hadn’t engaged in discrim-
ination  “because  of ”  sex.    The  company  maintained,  too, 
that it hadn’t violated the law because, as a whole, it tended 
to favor hiring women over men.  Unsurprisingly by now,