In what may prove to be the greatest judicial victory for gay and transgender people since the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage with the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling in 2015, the court decided that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act does indeed protect gay and transgender workers from being fired on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity. The case was crucially decided by two Republican appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch, who joined the liberal wing of the bench, with President Trump’s first appointee writing the opinion.
True to his originalism, Gorsuch doesn’t try and extrapolate some unwritten meaning that can be bent to apply to contemporary social justice convention. Instead, it’s precisely because of how sex is explicated as a protected class that the court came to its conclusion.
