On July 31, 2013, she wrote to her employer, the Harris Funeral Homes group, so that they could be prepared for her decision to undergo gender reassignment surgery, telling them that after a vacation, she planned to return dressed in female attire that otherwise followed the employee handbook.

The Court ruled in a 6–3 decision under Bostock but covering all three cases on June 15, 2020, that Title VII protection extends to gay and transgender people.

[2] In the United States, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a landmark piece of legislation to prevent discrimination across race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

[3][4] Stephens considered herself a transgender woman for most of her adult life but presented herself as a male, which reportedly caused her constant emotional stress.

[5] In 2013, she decided to come out to family and friends, and arranged to undergo reassignment surgery within the next year, expressing herself as a woman prior to transition as part of real-life experience.

There in 2016, the district court found for the funeral home on two bases: first, that in Title VII neither transgender persons nor gender identity were protected classes, and second, that because Rost was a devout Christian who does not accept that one can change one's gender, and ran the homes under his religion, that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act gave him the ability to fire Stephens if she would not conform.

[8] The court also considered that the funeral home had failed to show how the Civil Rights Act burdened Rost from expressing his religious freedom.

[9] Part of the Sixth's decision rested on the 1989 case Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins which states that employers cannot discriminate against employees for failure to conform to the stereotypical behavior of a man or woman.

The case revolves around protections relating to public and private employees from being discriminated upon because of sex and whether this applies to gender identity for transgender persons.

[13] The funeral home was represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, an American conservative Christian legal advocacy group involved in multiple transgender rights cases.

[14] The U.S. Department of Justice filed a brief with the Supreme Court in October 2018 arguing that the Sixth Circuit had decided wrongly and that Harris Funeral Homes had a right to fire an employee for being transgender.

[15] The Court granted the cert petition (agreeing to hear the appeal) for Harris Funeral Homes in April 2019, alongside a pair of cases consolidated under Bostock which raised the same question related to Title VII discrimination against sexual orientation.

"[20] Gorsuch's decision also alluded to concerns that the judgment may set a sweeping precedent that would force gender equality on traditional practices.

In his dissent, Alito asserted that at the time of the crafting of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 the concepts of sexual orientation and transgender identity would have been unknown, and thus Congress's language should not be implied to cover these facets.

He concluded by acknowledging that Millions of gay and lesbian Americans have worked hard for many decades to achieve equal treatment in fact and law ...