On Feb. 28, 53 major US companies signed a “friend of the court” brief supporting Gavin Grimm, a transgender high school student from Virginia who sued the board of his school after his district denied him access to the restroom corresponding to his chosen gender. Grimm has argued the policy violates Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the case on March 28.
On Feb. 22, US president Donald Trump rescinded the federal protections which forced public schools to let transgender students use the bathroom of their choice. White House spokesman Sean Spicer said the administration was being pressured to act ahead of Grimm’s case coming before the Supreme Court.
The 53 companies that signed the brief include some of the largest tech companies in the US, such as Apple, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon, and represent over 1.3 million employees and $613 billion in revenue.
The amicus brief notes that the companies who have signed on to the brief all have nondiscrimination policies and allow transgender individuals to use company facilities consistent with their chosen gender identity. The brief says the organizations have adopted these policies not only because of their “respect for the dignity, autonomy, and privacy of their transgender employees and/or customers” but also because they “know that diversity and inclusion are good for business.” Discriminating against and harming their transgender employees, customers, and families would threaten their “diverse and inclusive workplaces and their bottom lines.”
It’s not the first time time American corporations have stood up for the rights of the LGBTQ community when those rights were on the verge of being adjudicated in the Supreme Court. Ahead of the landmark 2015 case that made same-sex marriage legal nationally, 379 US companies signed a brief in support of the policy.
Here’s the complete list of companies have signed on as amici curiae, or a friend-of-the-court, for the Grimm case:
- Affirm, Inc.
- Airbnb, Inc.
- Amazon.com, Inc.
- Apple
- Asana, Inc.
- Box, Inc.
- Codecademy
- Credo Mobile, Inc.
- Dropbox, Inc.
- eBay Inc.
- Etsy
- Fastly, Inc.
- Flipboard, Inc.
- Gap Inc.
- General Assembly Space, Inc.
- GitHub, Inc.
- IBM Corporation
- Intel Corporation
- Kickstarter, PBC
- Knotel, Inc.
- LinkedIn Corporation, a subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation
- Lyft
- M Booth
- MAC Cosmetics Inc.
- Mapbox, Inc.
- Marin Software Incorporated
- Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
- Microsoft
- Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams
- MongoDB Inc.
- NetApp, Inc.
- Next Fifteen Communications Corporation
- Nextdoor
- Pandora Media, Inc.
- PayPal Holdings, Inc.
- Postmates Inc.
- Replacements, Ltd.
- RetailMeNot, Inc.
- Salesforce
- Shutterstock, Inc.
- Slack Technologies, Inc.
- Spotify
- The OutCast Agency
- The WhiteWave Foods Company
- Tumblr, Inc.
- Twilio Inc.
- Twitter Inc.
- Udacity, Inc.
- Warby Parker
- Williams-Sonoma, Inc.
- Yahoo! Inc.
- Yelp Inc.
- Zendesk, Inc.