Supreme Court rules that the federal law that bars sex discrimination in employment also applies to LGBTQ individuals

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• The Supreme Court decided in a landmark ruling on Monday that existing anti-discrimination employment protections apply to individuals who are gay, lesbian, and transgender.
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• In a 6-3 decision, conservative Justices John Roberts and Neil Gorsuch sided with the court's four liberal voices.
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• The decision is a blow to the Trump administration, which argued that existing protections did not apply to individuals based on their identification in the LGBTQ community.
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The Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision on Monday that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act applies to LGBTQ individuals, delivering a striking blow to the Trump administration, which argued it did not encompass such protections.

Title VII protects employees from facing discrimination from their employer on the basis of their race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.

In writing the majority opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, the Trump-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the decision to protect employees LGBTQ employees stems from Title VII's existing protections on sex.

"The answer is clear," he wrote in the majority opinion.

He continued: "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. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids"

Chief Justice John Roberts - a Bush-appointed conservative - also joined with the majority decision, along with the court's four liberals: Justices Elena Kagan, Sonya Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer.

Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and the Trump-appointed Brett Kavanaugh wrote dissenting opinions against the Monday ruling.

The Supreme Court webpage to the ruling went down immediately after the it was published, rendering many people unable to access it.

The Monday decision serves as a blow to the Trump administration, which has argued since 2017 that the existing statute did not protect individuals from employment discrimination based on their identifying as homosexual or transgender.

The landmark decision also marks the biggest win for the LGBT community since the court ruled in 2015 in a 5-4 decision that the Fourteenth Amendment required all states to grant and recognize same-sex marriages.