The U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last month that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits an employer from discriminating against a transgender woman “on the basis of sex” and also ruled that the supervisor’s belief that gender transition “violates God’s commands” is not a defense to employment discrimination.

The Sixth Circuit, which decides federal cases brought in Kentucky, Tennessee, Michigan and Ohio, reviewed the firing of Aimee Stephens from her job at a funeral home in which she had originally worked as a male in the case of EEOC v. R.G & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes (U.S. 2018)

After she was diagnosed with gender identity disorder, Stephens told her boss, Thomas Rost, that she was planning to transition to female. Her boss fired her. Rost stated during the lawsuit that he terminated Stephens’s employment because “he was no longer going to represent himself as a man” and that a person’s sex is “an immutable God-given fit”.

The Sixth Circuit decided, like the Second and Seventh Circuits (covering New York, Vermont, Connecticut and Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, respectively) before it, that a company violates an employee’s civil rights if the employer fires that worker on the basis of sex, including sexual orientation and gender identity.

The funeral home where Stephens worked hoped that its termination of her would be protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the U.S. Supreme Court’s case of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (U.S. 2014).

However, almost three decades ago. the U.S. Supreme Court had already rejected the argument that a supervisor’s religious squeamishness was sufficient to overcome the civil rights laws. The United States Supreme Court ruled in Employment Division v. Smith (U.S. 1990) that a person may not defy neutral laws of general applicability even as an expression of religious belief. “To permit this,” wrote conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, “would make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”

Despite this long-standing Supreme Court precedent, the funeral home argued that the presence of a transgender employee would require Rost to leave his job, because forcing him to work with a transgender person was an infringement of his religious rights and also would “often create distractions for the deceased’s loved ones”. Continue reading Transgender Woman Protected From Sex Discrimination, Court Decides →