Transgender Workers Gain New Protection in U.S. Court Ruling

WASHINGTON — Employers are moving to adopt or strengthen policies to prevent bias against transgender people after the latest in a series of court rulings that have extended protections for an increasingly diverse workforce.

A federal appeals court, rejecting the position of the Trump administration, ruled this month that transgender people are protected by a civil rights law that bans workplace discrimination based on sex.

Lawyers who specialize in employment cases said the decision, by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, was highly significant. The court held that job discrimination on the basis of transgender status was inherently sex discrimination and that the employer in this case could not claim an exemption from the law because of his religious beliefs.

The case was brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an independent federal agency, on behalf of a funeral director who had been fired by a Michigan funeral home after informing the owner that she intended to transition from male to female and would dress as a woman while at work.

Job discrimination based on a person’s transgender status violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the court ruled. Under the law, it said, “gender must be irrelevant to employment decisions.”

The court’s conclusion is at odds with a position taken by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in October. In a memorandum to Justice Department lawyers, he said “Title VII’s prohibition on sex discrimination encompasses discrimination between men and women but does not encompass discrimination based on gender identity per se, including transgender status.”

The funeral home maintained that it did not violate federal law by requiring the employee to comply with a sex-specific dress code. Moreover, the owner of the home, Thomas Rost, who has been a Christian for more than 65 years, said forcing him to employ the transgender worker would impose a substantial burden on his sincerely held religious beliefs and would therefore violate another law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993.

The court disagreed, saying that employees may not be discriminated against because they fail to conform to “stereotypical gender norms” — in this case, an employer’s notion of “how biologically male persons should dress, appear, behave and identify.”

Discrimination based on transgender status is a form of sex discrimination, said the decision, written by Judge Karen Nelson Moore for a unanimous three-judge panel, because “an employer cannot discriminate against an employee for being transgender without considering that employee’s biological sex.” Scott Rabe, an expert on employment law at the firm Seyfarth Shaw, said the ruling was important because “it addresses two hot-button topics in employment law: the scope of the definition of ‘sex discrimination’ under Title VII and the impact of laws protecting the free exercise of religion in the workplace.”

“The ruling is a big win for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and for transgender people,” Rabe said. “The court sent a strong message that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act has minimal impact on the EEOC’s authority to enforce the anti-discrimination laws under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.”

In an interview, the employee at the center of the case, Aimee Stephens, 57, said she had been shocked by her dismissal.

“I had a hard time believing that a company or a person could get away with firing me because I was transgender,” Stephens said. “It didn’t seem right.” But, she said, she has since learned that “it’s a pretty common occurrence for transgender people to be fired because they are transgender or don’t meet the expectations of what another individual thinks they should be.'’

In court papers, Rost said he wanted to run his business in keeping with his religious belief that “a person’s sex (whether male or female) is an immutable God-given gift and that people should not deny or attempt to change their sex.”

The court decision is binding in states covered by the 6th Circuit: Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee. But its reasoning could have influence elsewhere.

As it embraced a broad view of protections under Title VII, the court also rejected an expansive interpretation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

That law figured prominently in dozens of court cases in which employers challenged an Obama-era rule that required them to provide insurance coverage for contraception under the Affordable Care Act. The Trump administration has proposed to roll back that requirement by offering an exemption to any employer that objects to covering birth control on the basis of religious beliefs.

Doron M. Kalir, a law professor at Cleveland State University in Ohio, said the court ruling showed how judges were “extending the protection of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to a more diverse workforce of gays, lesbians and transgender people.”

The funeral home has not said whether it will appeal the ruling. Kalir said that at least several Supreme Court justices, if presented with the issue, would probably vote to overturn the ruling on the ground that Congress was not thinking about transgender people when it passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (Kalir wrote a friend-of-the-court brief for a civil rights group, Equality Ohio, that was quoted by the appeals court.) In a separate case last year, Judge Richard A. Posner, of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, said the meaning of the civil rights law and the word “sex” had changed over the years.

“It is well-nigh certain that homosexuality, male or female, did not figure in the minds of the legislators who enacted Title VII,” wrote Posner, who retired from the federal bench in September. But, he said, the law “invites an interpretation that will update it to the present,” and the word “sex” in Title VII can now, after more than a half-century, be “understood to include homosexuality.”