Physician's assistant fired for objecting to sex-change surgeries can continue legal battle: court

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.

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