The Supreme Court of the United States of America has on Monday 15th June 2020, ruled that the Federal civil rights law protects gay, lesbian and transgender, that is, LGBTQ workers.
According to the report obtained from CNN, the landmark ruling will extend protections to millions of LGBTQ workers nationwide and is a defeat for the Trump administration, which argued that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act that bars discrimination based on sex did not extend to claims of gender identity and sexual orientation.
The CNN report added that the 6-3 opinion was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s four liberal justices.
“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 different sex.
Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids,” Gorsuch wrote.
The LGBTQ community is made of up of approximately 1 million workers who identify as transgender and 7.1 million lesbian, gay and bisexual workers, according to UCLA’s Williams Institute.
Twenty-two states, plus the District of Columbia have statutes protecting LGBTQ workers based on sexual orientation, according to the Williams Institute. Twenty-one states plus DC have statutes protecting workers from discrimination based on gender identity.
…more to come…