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.
“An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex,” Gorsuch writes. “Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.”
To be clear, the court could deliver one of greatest legal protections for gay and transgender workers specifically because it acknowledges a fact deemed heretical by the most vocal woke activists: Namely that biological sex is real.
For years, the wokes have attempted to cancel everyone from right-wing trolls to liberal scientists for pointing out that biological sex is a scientific reality, one that specifically validates gay and transgender folks as a distinct class. And now the court has decided that because of that distinction, they’re a protected class.
Transphobia used to mean refusing to address someone by their preferred pronouns or denying their gender identity. Now, it’s morphed into meaning that you acknowledge that transgender males are “transgender” precisely because they were born biological females. But today’s SCOTUS ruling proves that bifurcating the meaning of biological sex from gender identity is specifically what confers special protections onto gay and transgender workers.
This is a victory for gay and transgender people, and hopefully one that puts to bed this hysterical canard that acknowledging the reality of biological sex is somehow hateful or dangerous toward transgender folks.
