These benefits wouldn’t just extend to women, either. The fact is, the language of the amendment — it says “on account of sex”— is vague. Without a doubt, women stand to gain the most from making sexual discrimination truly illegal simply because of the facts of our society, but sexual discrimination against men (like outdated alimony laws and policies that hurt fathers) would also be harder to justify. Likewise, there’s a chance that the LGBTQ+ community would benefit from the vague wording as well. “For years, LGBTQ people have tried to use the courts to establish their own rights. But time and again, the courts have interpreted their cases in terms of sex, so with an ERA all of our rights should level up,” Murphy says. Also: “There is a line of case law around sex discrimination based on this understanding of sex discrimination as a product of stereotypes; a woman not acting or presenting how we feel a woman should act or present,” Fredrickson adds. In that way, the ERA represents an opportunity to argue that this same logic should apply to, say, someone who was assigned a gender at birth and found themselves unable to conform to that, or someone who doesn’t identify with the traditional view of romantic relationships.