USCA11 Case: 18-13592 Document: 304-1 Date Filed: 12/30/2022 Page: 13 of 150
Thurgood Marshall’s statement—“[a] sign that says ‘men only’ looks very different on a bathroom door than a courthouse door”—so pithy. City of Cleburne, 473 U.S. at 468–69 (Marshall, J., concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part). Of course, not all sex-based classifications, no matter how longstanding, satisfy the mandate of the Equal Protection Clause. And it is well settled that when it comes to sex-based classifications, a policy will pass constitutional muster only if it satisfies intermediate scrutiny. See United States v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515, 533 (1996). To satisfy intermediate scrutiny, the government must show “that the classification serves ‘important governmental objectives and that the discriminatory means employed’ are ‘substantially related to the achievement of those objectives.’” Miss. Univ. for Women v. Hogan, 458 U.S. 718, 724 (1982) (quoting Wengler v. Druggists Mut. Ins. Co., 446 U.S. 142, 150 (1980)).
For a governmental objective to be important, it cannot “rely on overbroad generalizations about the different talents, capacities, or preferences of males and females.” Virginia, 518 U.S. at 533. For a policy to be substantially related to an important governmental objective, there must be “enough of a fit between the … [policy] and its asserted justification.” Danskine v. Mia. Dade Fire Dep’t, 253 F.3d 1288, 1299 (11th Cir. 2001). But the Equal Protection Clause does not demand a perfect fit between means and ends when it comes to sex. See Nguyen v. INS, 533 U.S. 53, 70 (2001) (“None of our gender-based classification equal protection cases have required that the [policy] under consideration
