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.
