A federal appeals court panel has revived a physician’s assistant’s lawsuit claiming she was fired for refusing on religious grounds to assist in body-mutilating gender surgeries and use preferred pronouns.
A three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a unanimous opinion Wednesday in favor of Valerie Kloosterman in her lawsuit against the University of Michigan Health-West, also known as Metropolitan Hospital.
Circuit Judge Eric Murphy, a Trump appointee, authored the panel opinion, which overturned a lower court ruling that had dismissed the lawsuit and allowed the hospital’s request for arbitration to proceed.
By approving the hospital’s arbitration request, the lower court sought to have Kloosterman’s complaint resolved outside of litigation.
Murphy wrote that the hospital took too long to introduce the proposal to arbitrate the litigation, noting that the defendants “gave up their right to arbitrate by litigating this dispute in court for a year before invoking that right.”
“Courts often recognize the conflict between seeking a court victory and arbitrating the dispute. The Third Circuit, for example, held that a defendant lost the right to arbitrate when it sought to enforce that right only after the judicial decisions on its motions to dismiss made clear ‘that further litigation would be required’ and that it could not win on the pleadings,” wrote Murphy.
“The same reasoning dooms the Hospital’s efforts to arbitrate this dispute. Before the Hospital gave the slightest hint that it might invoke arbitration, it twice sought ‘an immediate and total victory’ by asking the district court — not an arbitrator — to reject Kloosterman’s case on the merits.”
Murphy did, however, state that “Kloosterman has yet to support her factual allegations with evidentiary support,” adding that “she must” do so “at later stages of this case.”
Kloosterman is being represented by the conservative legal group First Liberty Institute and the law firm Clement & Murphy PLLC.
“Today’s decision is a reckoning for institutions that discriminate and punish caring people of faith like Valerie Kloosterman,” First Liberty Counsel Kayla Toney said in a statement Wednesday.
“It was intolerant of University of Michigan Health to fire Valerie because of her religious beliefs, and now the Sixth Circuit has recognized that they cannot avoid accountability by hiding the case in arbitration.”
In August 2021, Kloosterman was fired by Michigan Health when she refused to finish a training program that required her to use the preferred pronouns of patients and participate in cosmetic sex-change surgeries.
Kloosterman sued the hospital in October 2022, arguing that hospital officials had wrongfully refused to grant her a religious exemption and had shown contempt for her religious beliefs during meetings discussing her objections.
U.S. District Judge Jane M. Beckering of the Western District of Michigan, Southern Division, issued an opinion and order in September 2023 largely in favor of Kloosterman.
Beckering, a Biden appointee, wrote that Kloosterman “has sufficiently stated a free exercise of religion claim against Individual Defendants.” Additionally, the judge ruled that Kloosterman had plausible claims that hospital officials violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
However, Beckering rejected Kloosterman’s claim of freedom of speech violation, writing that, as an employee, Kloosterman “was speaking pursuant to her official duties, not as a citizen” and thus she “has not plausibly alleged that she was involved in constitutionally protected activity.”
The district court also rejected Kloosterman’s claims for “nominal damages against Defendants in their official capacities” and “claims for reinstatement and injunctive relief against Defendants in their individual capacities.”
Later, after both parties began their discovery planning, the district court granted the hospital’s request to pursue arbitration in the case instead of litigation.
