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The Supreme Court will begin hearings Tuesday on whether or not a person can be fired for being gay or trans.
The debates are based on three LGBT rights cases where individuals say they were discriminated at their jobs because of their sexual orientation.
Currently, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bans employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, or sex, but it does not specifically mention sexual orientation or gender identity.
Those three cases could potentially change the interpretation of the law when it comes to the word "sex."
“It's kind of a scary time, because there's a court that's going to say I can be hired or fired,” said Lou Weaver.
For more than a decade, being a trans man has been a core part of Lou Weaver's identity.
“If I don’t grow up with the experiences I had if I didn’t come out as a lesbian when I was the age of 19 in 1989, if I didn’t come out as a trans man 12 years ago, I wouldn't be who I am today and I’m very proud of being who I am,” Weaver said.
Weaver's been a proud advocate for the LGBTQ community for years.
But ahead of Tuesday's Supreme Court hearings for three cases where people claimed they were fired for being gay or trans, Weaver said his fight for equality is far from over.
“The reality of it is people are deciding whether or not I’m worthy of the same respect that my peers are, that my neighbors are. It's really disheartening that people out there still want to say that I am less than, that I am not, that it's ok to not give me a job simply because of who I am,” Weaver said.
The big question is whether the Supreme Court with a conservative majority, will ultimately decide if federal laws that ban employment discrimination will apply to gay and transgender people.
“They're ruling on whether sexual orientation or gender identity are considered sex under the law. So it's not actually changing the law, it's changing how it's interpreted,” said Eden King, an associate professor of industrial and organization psychology at Rice University.
According to recent study by King, who specializes in the study of discrimination in the workplace, organizations who support accepting environments are more likely to retain their employees and keep them happy.
“We found that people who were revealing their identity, who talked about who they were at work felt better at the end of the day and the next day. And the people who were concealing who they were, who were hiding whether or not they were gay, felt worse that day and the next,” said King.
A decision on the cases likely won't be made until June of 2020, which will fall right in the middle of the presidential campaign.