Washington State turns up on almost every list of places that protect fat people from discrimination. It usually sits in the same column as Michigan, sometimes with a footnote, often without one.
There is no such law. The Washington Law Against Discrimination does not list weight, height or body size among its protected grounds, and no legislature has added them. What Washington has is a court decision from 2019, and the decision does something quite different from what a statute would do.
The difference matters, and not as a technicality. It decides what you have to say about your own body before the law will look at your case.
The certified question
The case is Taylor v. Burlington Northern Railroad Holdings, Inc., No. 96335-5, decided by the Washington Supreme Court on 11 July 2019, written by Chief Justice Fairhurst.
It did not arrive there the ordinary way. Casey Taylor had sued in state court in 2010, the case was moved to federal court, and by 2018 it had reached the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. That court found the state-law question unresolved and handed it back, which is what a certified question is. The Ninth Circuit asked exactly this:
Under what circumstances, if any, does obesity qualify as an “impairment” under the [WLAD, RCW] 49.60.040?
Note what is not being asked. Nobody asked whether Washington should ban weight discrimination. The question is narrow: does this condition fit inside a definition the legislature wrote for something else.
What happened to Casey Taylor
In 2007 Taylor received a conditional offer to work as an electronic technician for BNSF Railway. The offer depended on a physical exam and a medical history questionnaire.
The physical exam found that he “[m]eets minimum physical demands of the essential functions of Electronic Technician.” He could do the job. The court’s opinion records that finding in the same paragraph as what followed.
The exam also recorded his height as 5 feet 6 inches and his weight as 256 pounds, a BMI of 41.3. BNSF treated a BMI over 40 as a trigger for further screening. Taylor’s file went to the company’s chief medical officer, and BNSF then told him it could not determine whether he was medically qualified, citing “significant health and safety risks associated with extreme obesity (Body Mass Index near or above 40) and uncertain status of knees and back.”
BNSF offered to reconsider if Taylor paid for a sleep study, blood work and an exercise tolerance test himself. He was unemployed at the time, without medical insurance and without veterans’ benefits, and could not afford them. According to the opinion, BNSF told him that company policy was not to hire anyone with a BMI over 35, and that if he could not pay for the testing, his only remaining option was to lose ten percent of his weight and keep it off for six months.
That is the shape of the thing. A man who passed the physical was told the job was available at the price of a medical bill he could not pay or a body he did not have.
What the court actually held
The Washington Supreme Court answered the certified question broadly:
obesity always qualifies as an impairment under the plain language of RCW 49.60.040(7)(c)(i) because it is a “physiological disorder, or condition” that affects many of the listed body systems.
That statutory subsection is a list of body systems: neurological, musculoskeletal, special sense organs, respiratory including speech organs, cardiovascular, reproductive, digestive, genitourinary, hemic and lymphatic, skin, and endocrine. An impairment under the WLAD is a disorder or condition affecting one or more of them.
BNSF had argued for the narrower federal reading: obesity counts only if some separate underlying physiological disorder caused it. The court refused, on the ground that Washington’s statute is deliberately broader than the federal Americans with Disabilities Act and that the legislature had said so.
Two consequences follow, and both are in the opinion. For a disparate treatment claim, the person does not have to show they actually have the condition, only that the employer perceived it. For a reasonable accommodation claim, they do have to have it in fact, plus meet the further requirements of RCW 49.60.040(7)(d).
There is also a boundary the court drew in a footnote, and it is the sentence that most summaries drop: “Merely being overweight is not an impairment under the WLAD, but obesity is.”
The mechanism, spelled out
This is the part that gets lost when Washington is listed next to Michigan.
Michigan’s Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act names weight as a protected characteristic. A person in Michigan who is refused a job because of their size points at the ground itself. Nothing further is required of them.
Washington has no such ground. The route runs entirely through the disability definition in RCW 49.60.040(7). To be protected, a person’s body has to be classified as an impairment, which under this ruling means classified as a physiological disorder or condition. The court was explicit about the classification it was making. Answering BNSF’s argument that weight is just a physical trait, it wrote: “Obesity is not a physical trait. It is a disease.”
So the protection is real and it is conditional. It exists because a court placed fat bodies inside a medical category. It is disability law doing the work of body-size law.
Readers of this magazine will recognise the shape from somewhere much closer to home. Germany’s General Equal Treatment Act lists six grounds and body size is not among them, so claims there are routed through disability as well. We have written about what that detour does to the numbers: a ground nobody records produces no cases, and no cases gets read as no problem. Washington took the same detour and arrived somewhere better, which tells you the detour can work. It does not tell you the detour is free.
The dissent saw the seam
Justice Yu dissented, and her disagreement is narrower and sharper than a headline would suggest.
She agreed that obesity need not be caused by some separate disorder to count. She agreed that obesity is distinct from weight, which is a physical trait. She agreed there is a growing consensus in medicine treating obesity as a disease in itself.
What she rejected was the word always. Her objection is that the line between the categories is drawn by a formula: weight in relation to height. She noted that BMI does not distinguish weight carried as muscle from weight carried as fat. She would have required an individualised inquiry in each case rather than a categorical rule.
Read from outside the courtroom, the majority and the dissent are arguing about which unsatisfying option to take. One puts every fat body in a disease category automatically. The other makes each person prove their body qualifies. Neither judge had the option a legislature has, which is to protect people from being treated badly because of their size, and to leave their diagnosis out of it.
Has anything changed since 2019?
We checked, because a seven-year-old ruling is only good law if nothing overtook it.
RCW 49.60.040 has been amended twice since the decision. In 2020, House Bill 2602, Washington’s version of the CROWN Act, defined race as inclusive of traits historically associated or perceived to be associated with race, including hair texture and protective hairstyles. In 2024, Engrossed Substitute Senate Bill 5788 added definitions for service animal trainees and service animal trainers.
Neither touched subsection (7). The impairment definition reads today word for word as the court quoted it in 2019. And neither added weight, height or body size to the grounds the statute protects.
So the position is unchanged, and so is the gap. Washington protects fat people through a disability classification decided by a court, not through a characteristic named by a legislature. On our tracker of weight discrimination law it now has its own row, and that row says court decision, not statute.
Checked 27 August 2026.
Sources
- Washington Supreme Court, Taylor v. Burlington Northern Railroad Holdings, Inc., No. 96335-5, filed 11 July 2019 (slip opinion, majority by Fairhurst C.J., dissent by Yu J.): https://www.courts.wa.gov/opinions/pdf/963355.pdf
- Ninth Circuit certification order quoted therein: Taylor v. Burlington N. R.R. Holdings, Inc., No. 16-35205 (9th Cir. 17 September 2018)
- Washington State Legislature, RCW 49.60.040, current text and amendment history: https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=49.60.040
- Washington State Legislature, RCW 49.60.030, protected grounds: https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=49.60.030