The US Supreme Court ruled today that the ban on sex-based discrimination in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects employees from discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Justice Gorsuch, who is a textualist (i.e. believes that laws should only be interpreted according to the written words alone without taking into any consideration the intent of the writers), writes "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." I find this to be an interesting exercise in logic. For example, consider the case of a "man married to a man". According to Gorsuch's logic, this cannot be an excuse to fire someone because if you replace "man" with "woman" in the first instance then you end up with the the phrase "woman married to a man", and since this is not sufficient for firing, the reason is not sex invariant. Dissenting legal scholars disagree. They argue that the correct logic is to replace all instances of "man" with "woman", in which case you would end up with "woman married to a woman" and thus the reason for firing would be sex invariant. I think in this case Gorsuch is correct because in order to have complete sex invariance, the rule must apply for any form of exchange. The law should be applied equally in all the possible ways that one gender is replaced by the other.