[...] adding the category of gender harassment doesn’t cure the problem of under-inclusiveness—if anything, it underscores the basic difficulty. All workers—men, women, trans, cis, gay, straight, and bi—suffer harassment on the job constantly by virtue of their status as workers, and have absolutely no “civil right” under the law to be free of it, unless by chance it can be regarded as racially or sexually charged.

The bullying, the belittlement, the undermining, and the generally shitty, uncivil, and sometimes sadistic treatment of workers that is a part of so many workplaces goes at best unchallenged under the prevailing legal definition of harassment as discrimination. At worst, this consensus actively shores up this destructive status quo, by homing in on a civil right to be free of only some of the more egregious forms of gender harassment—and only then if it can be characterized as sexual and aimed at a victim because of sex. That some harassment at work is a civil rights violation, in other words, helps legitimate the considerable harassment that cannot be so characterized.

This is a regrettable implication of the structure of virtually all of our civil rights laws, including our law of sexual harassment. All workers should enjoy a civil right to a harassment-free workplace. All workers should enjoy a right to be treated with dignity and respect in their place of employment. Work matters, hugely, to virtually everyone; it is often our central place of civil identity. Civil rights should not only address discrimination, regardless of how we interpret sexual harassment as an elementary mode of discrimination. Civil rights and civil equality should fundamentally sustain our rights to inclusion as equals in public spaces, which most profoundly include our work spaces. We all should have a right to civil treatment: in fact, that should be our absolutely non-negotiable core civil right.