An employee of a health system in Michigan was fired for requesting a religious exemption to demands about transgender language and hormone blockers. Now, she’s fighting back with a lawsuit.
On Tuesday, Valerie Kloosterman, a 17-year physician assistant at the University of Michigan Health-West, says the nonprofit organization violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when it denied her a religious accommodation and fired her. The university nonprofit group recently started requiring all employees to use preferred pronouns for transgender patients and even be willing to prescribe hormone blockers. Even though Kloosterman had never had a patient who wanted hormone blockers or who had asked to be addressed with a different pronoun, and even though she knew of other colleagues who received all kinds of other personal accommodations, Kloosterman alleges she was fired for requesting a religious accommodation.
Constitutional rights are clear. But religious objections aside, employers should refuse to give in to the groupthink that they must force their employees to defy reality with their speech.
GENDER IDEOLOGY HAS BROKEN THE MEDIA AND THEIR SO-CALLED ‘EXPERTS’
Kloosterman alleges that before University of Michigan Health-West officials fired her, they “summoned her to a meeting, during which they denigrated her religious beliefs, called her ‘evil’ and a ‘liar,’ mockingly told her that she could not take the Bible or her religious beliefs to work with her, and blamed her for gender dysphoria-related suicides. They fired her on August 24, 2021, without even allowing her to finish her patients’ charts for that day, to collect her belongings, or to say farewell to beloved colleagues and patients.”
To be clear, religious accommodations should be allowed within reason in workplace settings. Indeed, this is the purpose of nondiscrimination law and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That officials at this health system did not immediately recognize this is a shame, but not unusual. That Kloosterman experienced this anti-religious bigotry, but only on account of the transgender issue, reveals just how important organizations believe this issue to be. They’re willing to risk a lawsuit to hold their ground against the law.
Employees should be kind and polite to everyone in a health system. All patients should receive respect and adequate care. But people should not be mandated to deny biology and use pronouns that deny reality. Nor should they be mandated to prescribe hormone-blocking drugs, especially if individuals could receive a referral elsewhere. There must be room for multiple worldviews in a pluralistic society; firing people suggests there is only room for one.
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Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She is an opinion columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
