A Christian physician’s assistant is suing a Michigan hospital for allegedly firing her for refusing to use transgender pronouns or refer patients for “gender reassignment” procedures.
Valerie Kloosterman insists that during her 17 years at Metropolitan Hospital, she had never “used pronouns contrary to a patient’s wishes” or needed to refer anyone for “gender transition” drugs or surgery.
However, she was ordered to do both as part of mandatory diversity training after a takeover in 2021, according to a lawsuit filed on her behalf by the religious rights law group First Liberty.
She requested an opt-out because of her religious beliefs, while offering a “work-around” by using names instead of pronouns where necessary, the lawsuit said.
Instead, she was called “evil” and a “liar” — and a diversity manager “blamed her for gender dysphoria-related suicides,” according to the lawsuit.
She was fired weeks later in August last year over the “dispute about hypotheticals” that had never come up in her work outside of the training module, the lawsuit said.
“The letter explaining her termination listed three reasons for firing Ms. Kloosterman, all of which directly related to her sincerely held religious beliefs about gender identity and to her conscientious objection to assisting in the provision of certain ‘gender reassignment’ drugs and procedures,” the lawsuit claimed.
Valerie Kloosterman is suing the Michigan hospital where she worked for 17 years for firing her because she refused to use transgender pronouns and refer patients for “gender reassignment” procedures. First Liberty Institute
Valerie Kloosterman said she was “heartbroken” to be fired from UMH-West, where she had worked for 17 years. First Liberty Institute“If not for Ms. Kloosterman’s religious beliefs about gender and sexuality, she would not have been fired,” it insisted.
Kloosterman told Fox News Digital that she was “heartbroken.”
“I had 17 years that I spent with patients and families, co-workers who sometimes I spent more time with than I did with my own family. And they took that away. They took away the relationships that I had built up, and the people who trusted me for their care,” she said.
“It was over something that could have easily been accommodated based on the University of Michigan’s focus on being inclusive.”
She said the mandatory training included two questions that “were very specific in confirming that gender was fluid, and I had to select the box.
“It was not an option for me to state my concerns, and I could not complete this mandatory test without answering that question the way they wanted me to based on the university’s belief, and so I raised my concerns,” she continued.
She called for a meeting with bosses to explain that as a Christian, she could not “answer these questions in good conscience to God.”
“The meeting became hostile,” Kloosterman told the outlet.
“I was called evil. I was called a liar. And I very compassionately gave my point of what my concern was from a medical standpoint from my medical judgment, as well as in good conscience to God, and I should never have been asked to compromise my faith to be able to do my job,” she said.
“I heard nothing after that other than at my termination meeting.”
A spokesperson for the hospital, now called University of Michigan Health-West, said: “We are confident Ms. Kloosterman’s claims, like those she filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, are without merit.”
The health care group “is committed to providing appropriate medical treatment to all patients and respects the religious beliefs of its employees,” the rep told Fox News Digital.
