No. In 2026, a California Court of Appeal ruled that harassment based on your sexual orientation is a form of sexual harassment, and a federal law keeps sexual harassment claims out of forced arbitration. That means if you were harassed at work because of your sexual orientation, your employer usually cannot push your case into private arbitration, even if you signed an arbitration agreement when you were hired. You can take the claim to court and have the full protection of the justice system.
Many California workers sign an arbitration agreement on their first day of work. Those agreements can send future disputes to a private arbitrator instead of a judge and jury. For sexual harassment claims, that has changed. At Yoosefian Law Firm, P.C., we help California workers figure out their rights when they have been harassed at work.
The Decloedt Ruling: Harassment Because You Are Gay Is Sexual Harassment
In the recent case of Decloedt v. RadNet Management, Inc. (2026), California’s Second District Court of Appeal determined that harassment based on sexual orientation is sexual harassment. In that case, Trevor Decloedt, a patient service representative, said a coworker harassed him because he is gay, telling him things like “you shouldn’t be gay” and that it was “sinning.” He also threatened him and grabbed his hair.
The employee reported the conduct to his supervisor and to human resources, and he said nothing was done to stop it. When he sued, RadNet asked the court to send the case to arbitration under the agreement the employee had signed at hire. The trial court refused, and on July 7, 2026, the Court of Appeal agreed: harassment based on sexual orientation counts as sexual harassment. Since federal law does not allow arbitration agreements to apply to claims of sexual harassment, the case could go to court and not be forced into arbitration.
Why Your Employer Cannot Force These Claims Into Arbitration
The federal law behind the ruling is the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act (often shortened to the EFAA), which took effect in 2022. It says an arbitration agreement you signed before a dispute arose cannot be enforced against you when you bring a sexual harassment claim. The choice belongs to the worker. You can still agree to arbitration after a dispute comes up if that is what you want, but your employer cannot hold you to an arbitration clause you signed years earlier.
The question in Decloedt was whether sexual orientation harassment counts as “sexual harassment” for this law. RadNet argued that it did not. The court disagreed. Because Decloedt had pleaded a sexual harassment claim, the EFAA applied, and the arbitration agreement could not be enforced against any of his claims. The whole case stayed in court, not just the harassment count.
What Counts as Sexual Orientation Harassment Under California Law
California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA), Government Code § 12940, makes it illegal to harass a worker because of sex, and it protects sexual orientation as well. The court read these protections together. Its reasoning follows the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), which held that you cannot treat someone worse for being gay or transgender without also treating them worse because of sex. Harassment aimed at a worker’s sexual orientation is, at bottom, harassment because of sex.
The conduct does not have to be sexual in nature to count. Slurs about a worker’s orientation, threats, and unwanted physical contact can all support a claim when the behavior is severe or happens often enough to change the conditions of the job. A California sexual harassment lawyer can look at what was said and done and tell you whether it crosses that line.
Why Getting Your Case in Front of a Judge and Jury Matters
Arbitration and a courtroom are very different things. Arbitration is a private system. A single arbitrator, not a jury of your peers, hears the case and decides it. That arbitrator is often selected from a pool through a process the employer had a hand in setting up, and the same employers appear before the same arbitration providers again and again while most workers go through it once in their lives. None of that means an arbitrator is dishonest. It does mean the setting is built and paid for in a way that looks very different from a public court.
Arbitration has limits on your ability to gather evidence, too. In court, both sides have broad rights to gather information before trial. You can require the company to hand over emails, personnel files, text messages, prior complaints against the same harasser, and internal investigation notes. You can take sworn depositions of the people involved. In an arbitration, the amount of information you can demand is limited, and an arbitrator can cut it back further. This can make it more difficult for you to prove your case.
Arbitrations are also more private than cases that go through the court system. Arbitration proceedings and their results are typically confidential. That means a company can face the same complaint from worker after worker without any of it becoming public, and without other employees ever learning there was a problem. A public court case creates a record. It lets the public, other workers, and future juries see what an employer did. For many survivors, being able to tell what happened in the open, rather than behind a confidentiality wall, has value.
The right to appeal is another big difference. If a judge or jury gets the law wrong, you generally have a path to appeal and ask a higher court to correct it. Arbitration awards are extremely hard to overturn. Even a clear legal mistake by an arbitrator might not be enough to undo the result. You often get one decision, from one person, with almost no way to challenge it.
All of this is why the EFAA and rulings like Decloedt matter so much in practice. Keeping a sexual harassment claim in court is not a formality. It preserves the jury, the fuller fact-gathering, the public record, and the review process that make the legal protections meaningful in the first place. If you bring a sexual orientation discrimination claim alongside a harassment claim, the harassment claim can keep the entire case out of arbitration, because the law does not split the case apart.
Free Consultation with a California Sexual Harassment Attorney
If you were harassed at work because of your sexual orientation, you may have a sexual harassment claim under California law, and an arbitration agreement you signed when you were hired may not stand in your way. Yoosefian Law Firm, P.C., represents workers across California in sexual harassment and discrimination cases, and we have taken on employers of every size.
Call us at (818) 275-1529 or complete our online contact form. Consultations are free and confidential, and we will review your situation and explain your legal options.