(LifeSiteNews) – University of Michigan Health-West agreed to pay $410,000 to a Christian physician’s assistant it fired for refusing to facilitate “transgender” procedures on the job.
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, the hospital system fired Valerie Kloosterman in 2021 after she objected to participating in gender “transition” drugs and surgeries and to referring to gender-confused patients by biologically inaccurate pronouns.
The following year, Kloosterman filed a lawsuit, represented by First Liberty Institute, alleging that UMich “attempted to compel Ms. Kloosterman to pledge, against her sincerely held religious convictions and her medical conscience, that she would speak biology-obscuring pronouns and make referrals for ‘gender transition’ drugs and procedures”; and that she was berated by staff for her faith, called “evil” and a “liar,” and even blamed for transgender suicides. The second Trump administration opened an investigation into the hospital’s treatment of Kloosterman last year.
On July 29, First Liberty announced it has reached a settlement with the hospital, which has agreed to pay Kloosterman and her attorneys $410,000 in damages and fees, plus adopted a new policy under which “employees will not be required to perform or assist with gender transition treatments, including procedures, medications, and referrals, if doing so would violate the employee’s sincerely-held religious belief,” nor would they be “required to use pronouns in a way that violates their sincerely-held religious belief or conscience.”
“All I wanted to do was provide the best care possible to my patients without being forced to violate my Christian beliefs,” Kloosterman said. “This new policy ensures that providers of faith and employees at UMHW will receive religious accommodations so that they can provide excellent care consistent with their medical judgment, because all patients are created in the image of God.”
A large body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically-transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
In 2024, National Health Service (NHS) England’s landmark Cass Review found that “gender medicine” is “built on shaky foundations” and that while such interventions require a great deal of caution, “quite the reverse happened in the field of (so-called) gender care for children,” and that “(w)hile a considerable amount of research has been published in this field, systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for children and their families to make informed choices.”
In April, a study of “all under-23-year-old gender-referred individuals between 1996 and 2019” in Finland (2,083 people) found that those who had gone through gender transitions had “markedly higher psychiatric morbidity (other mental health issues) than controls before and after referral, with treatment needs often persisting and even intensifying after medical interventions.”
Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who suffered under transitioning before returning to their true sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion that “transitioning” is the best solution.
“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”