The Supreme Court ruled Monday that gay and transgender workers are protected from workplace discrimination under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The 6 to 3 vote by the court handed the LGBTQ community a surprising win. 

Justice Neil Gorsuch, appointed by President Trump, delivered the majority opinion. He was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the liberal wing of the court: Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

The primary focus of the court case surrounded Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination based on sex, among other reasons.

“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 wrote in the majority opinion. “Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.”

In the dissent, Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Clarence Thomas, said that Title VII covered sex, but not sexual orientation or gender identity.

“There is only one word for what the Court has done today: legislation,” Alito wrote.

In his own dissenting opinion, Justice Kavanaugh wrote that the court was rewriting the 1964 law to include sexual orientation and gender identity, a job to be left to Congress.

Cases involved included two gay male plaintiffs and one transgender woman who sued after losing their respective jobs. 

The cases concerning gay rights are Bostock v. Clayton County, Ga. and Altitude Express Inc. v. Zarda. 

The first was filed by Gerald Bostock, a gay man who worked for a government program helping neglected and abused children just south of Atlanta. He was fired after joining a gay softball league.

The latter, was filed by a skydiving instructor, Donald Zarda. After receiving a complaint from a woman who was concerned about being strapped tightly to him so they could jump together, he tried to reassure her by saying he was “100 percent gay”. He was dismissed after the incident.

Mr. Zarda died in 2014 in a skydiving accident.

Aimee Stephens was fired from her job as a funeral director after revealing to her boss that she had been struggling with gender her whole life and that she finally “decided to become the person that my mind already is.”

Ms. Stephens died in May this year.

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