ARTICLE Reconsidering the Gender-Equality Perspective for Understanding LGBT Rights Sandi Farrell* I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................. 606 II. THE GENDER-EQUALITY CONCEPT.................................................. 611 A. “Sexual Orientation” Is a Gender-Based Model of Sexuality .................................................................................. 612 1. Historical Development of “Sexual Orientation” ......... 615 2. The Conflation of Gender and Sexual Orientation....... 618 3. Political and Social Institutions...................................... 621 a. “Traditional” Marriage and the Patriarchal Family....................................................................622 b. (Hetero)Sexual Intercourse...................................624 4. Gender and Sexuality Redux ......................................... 626 B. Deconstructing the Gendered Basis of Sexuality-Based Theories of “Sexual Orientation” ........................................... 628 1. Conservative Arguments................................................ 628 2. Liberal Arguments.......................................................... 633 III. GENDER EQUALITY ARGUMENTS IN EMPLOYMENT DISCRIMINATION LAW ...................................................................... 642 A. Sex and Gender in the Courts................................................. 644 B. Title VII Gender Nonconformists: The Early Years.............. 647 C. Price Waterhouse’s Impact on the Gender-Equality Perspective............................................................................... 655 IV. GENDER-EQUALITY ARGUMENTS IN FAMILY LAW .......................... 661 A. Marriage .................................................................................. 664 1. Baehr v. Lewin and the Miscegenation Analogy .......... 665 * Madison Fellow, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, 2003-05. J.D. 2001, Yale Law School. B.A. 1998, Louisiana State University. The author wishes to thank Professor Katharine K. Baker for her support and invaluable suggestions and questions about this Article; Professor William N. Eskridge, Jr. for encouraging reflection on the ideas herein in his Spring 2000 Sexuality, Gender and the Law course; and Professor Catharine MacKinnon for so generously sharing a draft of a book chapter with a group of Yale Journal of Law & Feminism editors and thereby inspiring this article. The author would also like to thank her fellow students in Professor Baker’s Fall 2000 Feminism and the Family seminar for their thoughtful questions and criticisms of the ideas in this Article. 605 606 LAW & SEXUALITY [Vol. 13 2. A Civil Union: The “Definition of Marriage” and Baker v. State .................................................................. 667 3. Same Song, Second Verse?: Goodridge v. Department of Health..................................................... 669 4. A Gender-Equality Perspective on Same-Sex Marriage.......................................................................... 672 B. Children ................................................................................... 675 1. The Learned-Behavior Theory ...................................... 678 2. The Gender-Identity Formation Theory........................ 680 3. Protecting the Unconventional Family .......................... 683 V. WHY THE LAW MUST RECOGNIZE THE GENDER-EQUALITY PARADIGM......................................................................................... 687 A. Reason and Empathy: Romer’s Rational Basis Test and Normalizing Narratives........................................................... 688 B. Neutrality: The Problem with Libertarian Arguments.......... 691 C. Equality: Gender’s Answer to the Failure of Neutrality and Suspect Class.................................................................... 695 D. Truth and Consequences: Challenging the Sex-Gender System ..................................................................................... 700 VI. CONCLUSION .................................................................................... 703 “The world is flat. The sun revolves around the earth. Human beings are either heterosexual or homosexual.”1 “There’s nothing in me that is not in everybody else, and nothing in everybody else which is not in me.” —James Baldwin2 I. INTRODUCTION If the project of anti-discrimination law is to minimize or eliminate status hierarchies,3 then what is the status hierarchy that lesbian and gay rights advocates seek to dismantle? It has most often been conceptualized as a “sexual orientation” hierarchy in which the 1. MARJORIE GARBER, BISEXUALITY AND THE EROTICISM OF EVERYDAY LIFE 14 (1995). 2. Richard Goldstein, “Go the Way Your Blood Beats”: An Interview . ., VILL. VOICE, June 26, 1984, at 14. 3. For the purposes of this Article, I will take for granted that this is the case—i.e., that the goal of antidiscrimination law is to eliminate the subordination of historically-disadvantaged or stigmatized groups. That this is a controversial proposition I do not deny, but it is far beyond the scope of this Article to consider its merits. Moreover, others have done so much better than I ever could. See, e.g., J.M. Balkin, The Constitution of Status, 106 YALE L.J. 2313 (1997); KENNETH KARST, BELONGING TO AMERICA: EQUAL CITIZENSHIP AND THE CONSTITUTION (1989); ANDREW KOPPELMAN, ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW AND SOCIAL EQUALITY (1996). 2004] UNDERSTANDING LGBT RIGHTS 607 “heterosexual” subordinates the “homosexual”; hence, the “homosexual” as such seeks equality.4 However, this characterization of discrimination against lesbians and gay men asks more questions than it answers. For example: Why is same-sex sexuality stigmatized? What is “bisexuality,” and what is its relationship to “homosexuality”? Where do transsexuals and the transgendered fit into this status hierarchy, or do they? Is it accurate or fair to assign a label to an individual solely on the basis of whether she is sexual with women, men, or both? Is it a complete representation of an individual’s sexuality to do so? One objective of this Article is to refocus attention on these and other questions about the nature of the status we call “sexual orientation.”5 For many years, legal scholars and commentators from other disciplines have written in support of the view that what we call “sexual 6 orientation” is, in fact, inextricably connected to or derivative of gender. 4. See, e.g., Renee Culverhouse & Christine Lewis, Homosexuality as a Suspect Class, 34 S. TEX. L. REV. 205 (1993); Chai R. Feldblum, Sexual Orientation, Morality, and the Law: Devlin Revisited, 57 U. PITT. L. REV. 237 (1996); Kenji Yoshino, Suspect Symbols: The Literary Argument for Heightened Scrutiny for Gays, 96 COLUM. L. REV. 1753 (1996); Harris M. Miller II, Note, An Argument for the Application of Equal Protection Heightened Scrutiny to Classifications Based on Homosexuality, 57 S. CAL. L. REV. 797 (1984); Note, The Constitutional Status of Sexual Orientation: Homosexuality as a Suspect Classification, 98 HARV. L. REV. 1285 (1985); cf. Janet E. Halley, The Politics of the Closet: Towards Equal Protection for Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Identity, 36 UCLA L. REV. 915 (1989). 5. A few notes about terminology: I will use the term “gender” and the somewhat more awkward “sex-gender” more or less interchangeably to underscore my belief that it is impossible for us to know where biology leaves off and culture picks up, and to implicitly suggest throughout the text that sex and gender are so closely related as to be conceptually indistinguishable. I will use the phrase “lesbians and gay men” and the more inclusive acronym “LGBT” to denote all those who name themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgendered, but I will often qualify that by saying “those who identify as” or something similar in order to make it clear that I do not endorse the categories, either theoretically or normatively. At times I will use the phrases “lesbian and gay rights” or the more succinct “gay rights” for the sake of convenience and clarity in referring to that concept as it is popularly understood, though the purpose of this Article is to challenge the concept rather than to discuss it. I try to refrain from using the word “homosexual”; when I find it necessary to do so, I often place the word in quotation marks. I will also not make it a practice to use the word “queer” because it remains unclear whether the usage of the word will be as inclusive as some have hoped. See Michael Warner, Introduction to FEAR OF A QUEER PLANET: QUEER POLITICS AND SOCIAL THEORY vii, xxvi-xxviii (Michael Warner ed., 1993); Lisa Duggan, Making It Perfectly Queer, SOCIALIST REV., Jan.-Mar. 1992, at 11, 20 (arguing in support of a “queer community” that is “unified only by a shared dissent from the dominant organization of sex and gender”). 6. Many of these are legal scholars. See Elvia R. Arriola, Gendered Inequality: Lesbians, Gays, and Feminist Legal Theory, 9 BERKELEY WOMEN’S L.J. 103 (1994); Mary Becker, Women, Morality, and Sexual Orientation, 8 UCLA WOMEN’S L.J. 165 (1998); B.J. Chisholm, The (Back)Door of Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc.: “Outing” Heterosexuality as a Gender-Based Stereotype, 10 TUL. J.L. & SEXUALITY 239 (2001); Mary Coombs, Between Women/Between Men: The Significance for Lesbianism of Historical Understandings of Same-(Male) Sex Sexual Activities, 8 YALE J.L. & HUMAN. 241 (1996); Amelia A. Craig, Musing About Discrimination