Page:Bostock v. Clayton County (2020).pdf/71

34 merely feeble would be generous.

While Americans in 1964 would have been shocked to learn that Congress had enacted a law prohibiting sexual orientation discrimination, they would have been bewildered to hear that this law also forbids discrimination on the basis of “transgender status” or “gender identity,” terms that would have left people at the time scratching their heads. The term “transgender” is said to have been coined in the early 1970s, and the term “gender identity,” now understood to mean “[a]n internal sense of being male, female or something else,” apparently first appeared in an academic article in 1964. Certainly, neither term was in common parlance; indeed, dictionaries of the time still primarily defined the word “gender” by reference to grammatical classifications. See, e.g., American Heritage Dictionary, at 548 (def. 1(a)) (“Any set of two or more categories, such as masculine, feminine, and neuter, into which words are divided ... and that determine agreement with or the