Viewpoint that bisexuals experience discrimination because of their conduct, as opposed to their status. Antidiscrimination law is inherently limited. Statutes such as the public accommodations statute in Washington protect people from discrimination based on a limited number of protected characteristics, such as race, sex, religion and, in some states, sexual orientation. Thus, people who experience discrimination can only obtain legal relief if they can demonstrate that their discrimination happened because they possessed a characteristic mentioned in the
acted like a man. In protecting Hopkins, the Supreme Court announced its theory of sex stereotyping, under which sex discrimination would be protected in instances in which a plaintiff’s conduct failed to conform to expectations about the plaintiff’s conduct because of the plaintiff’s status. Like sex, sexual orientation comes with expectations. The expectation to partner with a member of a particular sex is chief among such expectations. An individual’s sexual orientation could productively be understood to comprise two concepts. An individual’s “general orientation” is the
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Discrimination because an individual’s specific orientation fails to conform to his general orientation should qualify as discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation because an individual’s behavior failed to conform to stereotypes about sex.
statute upon which their claim is based. This demonstration becomes more difficult when discrimination occurred because its victim not only was a member of a particular race or sex but acted in a particular way. Antidiscrimination law has been reluctant to protect against discrimination for behaviors that are stereotypically associated with characteristics upon which discrimination is prohibited, exemplified by its failure to protect an African-American woman who experienced discrimination for wearing her hair in cornrows. However, in a notable Supreme Court case, Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, Ann Hopkins won her discrimination lawsuit against her employer, Price Waterhouse, for denying her bid for partnership because she acted too masculine. Though Hopkins brought a claim for sex discrimination, the discrimination she suffered did not occur simply because she was a woman but because she was a woman who had
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sex toward which people in the world perceive an individual to be attracted. An individual’s “specific orientation” is the sex of an individual’s chosen partner or partners. Discrimination because an individual’s specific orientation fails to conform to his general orientation should qualify as discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation because an individual’s behavior failed to conform to stereotypes about sex. The nature of bisexuality resists conformity with such an expectation, leading to the inquisitions in Perry and Apilado. Inquisitions like these could be avoided, as could the law’s reluctance to protect against discrimination on the basis of a bisexual orientation, by revising the law’s understanding of sexual orientation and applying the logic of Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins to sexual orientation discrimination. H
ONLINE CONTENT
Links to the complete versions of two journal articles on which this piece is based, “Sexual Reorientation,” 100 Georgetown Law Journal 997 (2012), and “Optimizing Orientation,” 100 Georgetown Law Journal 1105 (2012), are available at law.hofstra.edu/HLR
Hofstra Law Report • SPRING 2012
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