Please read the below excerpt from Outsiders and answer the below 2 questions in detail.

1. How do we draw the line between permissible and impermissible stereotypes?

2. Is the law equipped for this? Why or why not?

178 THE FUTURE Accommodating Difference 179 of an employee who, after she reveals she is transgender, falls out of favor with her employer. She doesn't get fired or transferred or anything official like that, but she struggles to connect with her boss from then on. I countered with an even harder ex- ample: Say that the employer objects to her identity on religious grounds. In that case, no amount of conversation may serve to work things out. There is a larger lesson embedded in this criticism. Civil rights law is hamstrung by its own ambitions. Changing hearts and minds is no small task. Institutions take time to reform. Equality is a life's work. No amount of dolphins jumping on a poster can make people get along. There are always going to be people who don't want to engage, people for whom conversation is not an option. The threat of conversation doing damage is real. I am partic- ularly concerned about the risk to outsiders who are reluctant to speak out about who they really are. Coming out is always a leap of faith. Ultimately, I believe it is a leap worth taking when the circumstances are right for the person. Each of us has to de- cide that for ourselves. But my hope is there will be more positive conversations than negative ones, that over time we'll get better at connecting with each other. Difference is the through line; it is the mortar that will hold equality together. Samantha Elauf loved the mall. 32 The shopping, the movies, the sushi-Woodland Hills Mall in Tulsa, Oklahoma was Samantha Elauf's home away from home. 33 It only made sense for the seventeen-year-old to get a job there, so she applied to work at the children's store owned by Abercrombie & Fitch. For her interview with the store's assistant manager, Elauf wore a black headscarf. The assistant manager rated Elauf qualified to work at the store, but questioned whether the headscarf would be permissible under the company's Look Policy, which deems "caps" as too informal for Abercrombie's image. Is a headscarf a cap? Unsure, the assistant manager asked the manager, who like- wise didn't know. The assistant manager then asked the district manager, who decided that the headscarf violated the Look Policy. No headwear is allowed, the district manager concluded, not even religious garb. Elauf didn't get the job. She was seven- teen at the time. Elauf never told them that she was Muslim. She never said the headscarf was religious in nature. Abercrombie assumed it was, and it actually was, but Abercrombie didn't know that for sure. In court, after being sued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Elauf's behalf, Abercrombie argued that it couldn't be liable under the circumstances. If the claimant doesn't ask for an accommodation, how is the company supposed to know to provide one? I have a certain amount of sympathy for the company's ar- gument. It sort of feels like Elauf didn't advocate for herself at the time, that she didn't speak up when it could have made a difference. But the problem is that speaking up wouldn't have made a difference. The assistant manager assumed that Elauf's headscarf was religious, and the district manager said that not even religious headwear was acceptable under the Look Policy. Which means that actual knowledge wouldn't have made a difference. Elauf wasn't getting this job, and it was be- cause of her religion. So concluded the Supreme Court. 34 In 8- 1 decision, the Court said actual knowledge wasn't required. 35 Abercrombie allowed its suspicion about Elauf's religion to af- fect its decision-making, and that is enough to run afoul of the law. 36