Court Opinion

ID: 9496152
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:19:00.647651+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:57:23.537792
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
Judge Williams’s opinion is consistent with the cases and the facts, and it reaches a result (denial of liability) that I agree with. I cannot fairly quarrel with the methodological conservatism of her approach. But I think it worth recording my conviction that the case law has gone off the tracks in the matter of “sex stereotyping” and that if it got back on, this case could be decided on a simpler and more intuitive ground and one that would reduce future litigation.
The ease law as it has evolved holds, as Judge Williams explains, that although Title VII does not protect homosexuals from discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation, it protects heterosexuals who are victims of “sex stereotyping” or “gender stereotyping.” Spearman v. Ford Motor Co., 231 F.3d 1080, 1085 (7th Cir.2000) (“the record ... shows that Spear-man’s co-workers maligned him because of his apparent homosexuality, and not because of his sex” (so no liability)); Bibby v. Philadelphia Coca Cola Bottling Co., 260 F.3d 257, 264 (3d Cir.2001) (if “the harasser was acting to punish the victim’s noncompliance with gender stereotypes,” then liability); Nichols v. Azteca Restaurant Enterprises, Inc., 256 F.3d 864, 874-75 (9th Cir.2001) (same); Schmedding v. Tnemec Co., 187 F.3d 862, 865 (8th Cir.1999) (same) (“although Schmedding concedes that the use [in his complaint] of the phrase ‘perceived sexual preference’ may have been confusing, he asserts that the phrase indicates or shows that the harassment included rumors that falsely labeled him as homosexual in an effort to debase his masculinity, not that he was harassed because he is homosexual or perceived as being a homosexual”).
The origin of this curious distinction, which would be very difficult to explain to a lay person (an indication, often and I think here, that the law is indeed awry), is the Supreme Court’s decision in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, 490 U.S. 228, 109 S.Ct. 1775, 104 L.Ed.2d 268 (1989). Part of the evidence that the plaintiff in that case had been denied promotion because she was a woman was that her male superiors hadn’t liked her failure to conform to their expectations regarding feminine dress and deportment. Id. at 235-36, 109 S.Ct. 1775. That was indeed a reason to *1067suspect that the firm discriminated against women. But there is a difference that subsequent cases have ignored between, on the one hand, using evidence of the plaintiffs failure to wear nail polish (or, if the plaintiff is a man, his using nail polish) to show that her sex played a role in the adverse employment action of which she complains, and, on the other hand, creating a subtype of sexual discrimination called “sex stereotyping,” as if there were a federally protected right for male workers to wear nail polish and dresses and speak in falsetto and mince about in high heels, or for female ditchdiggers to strip to the waist in hot weather. If a court of appeals requires lawyers presenting oral argument to wear conservative business dress, should a male lawyer have a legal right to argue in drag provided that the court does not believe that he is a homosexual, against whom it is free to discriminate? That seems to me a very strange extension of the Hopkins case.
The “logic” of the extension is that if an employer disapproves of conduct by a man that it would not disapprove of in a woman, or conduct by a woman that it would not disapprove of in a man, the disapproval is “because of’ sex. What is true, as I have said, is that this asymmetry of response may be evidence of sex discrimination; but to equate it to sex discrimination is a mistake. If an employer refuses to hire unfeminine women, its refusal bears more heavily on women than men, and is therefore discriminatory. That was the Hopkins case. But if, as in this case, an employer whom no woman wants to work for (at least in the plaintiffs job classification) discriminates against effeminate men, there is no discrimination against men, just against a subclass of men. They are discriminated against not because they are men, but because they are effeminate.
If this analysis is rejected, the absurd conclusion follows that the law protects effeminate men from employment discrimination, but only if they are (or are believed to be) heterosexuals. To impute such a distinction to the authors of Title VII is to indulge in a most extravagant legal fiction. It is also to saddle the courts with the making of distinctions that are beyond the practical capacity of the litigation process. Hostility to effeminate men and to homosexual men, or to masculine women and to lesbians, will often be indistinguishable as a practical matter, especially the former. Effeminate men often are disliked by other men because they are suspected of being homosexual (though the opposite is also true — effeminate homosexual men may be disliked by heterosexual men because they are effeminate rather than because they are homosexual), while mannish women are disliked by some men because they are suspected of being lesbians and by other men merely because they are not attractive to those men; a further complication is that men are more hostile to male homosexuality than they are to lesbianism. To suppose courts capable of disentangling the motives for disliking the nonstereotypical man or woman is a fantasy.
Inevitably a case such as this impels the employer to try to prove that the plaintiff is a homosexual (the employer’s lawyer actually said at the argument that a plaintiffs homosexuality would be a complete defense to a suit of this kind) and the plaintiff to prove that he is a heterosexual, thus turning a Title VII case into an inquiry into individuals’ sexual preferences — to what end connected with the policy of the statute I cannot begin to fathom. An unattractive byproduct of the inquiry is a gratuitous disparagement of homosexuals — as when Hamm in his brief, remarking on how “his harassers tormented him with the ultimate attack on his masculinity, namely, barraging him with every vulgar, slang phase for a homosexual,” concludes: “For a heterosexual male, such slurs are tantamount to verbal castration” (emphasis *1068mine) — as if they were unwounding when directed at a homosexual male.
“Sex stereotyping” should not be regarded as a form of sex discrimination, though it will sometimes, as in the Hopkins case, be evidence of sex discrimination. In most cases — emphatically so in a case such as this in which, so far as appears, there are no employees of the other sex in the relevant job classification — the “discrimination” that results from such stereotyping is discrimination among members of the same sex. The distinction can be illustrated by a pair of examples. If the producer of Antony and Cleopatra refuses to cast an effeminate man as Antony or a mannish woman as Cleopatra, he is not discriminating against men in the first case and women in the second, although he is catering to the audience’s sex stereotypes. But if a fire department refused to hire mannish women to be firefighters, this would be evidence that it was discriminating against women, because mannish women are more likely than stereotypically feminine women to meet the demanding physical criteria for a firefighter.