A Houston-area woman says she was fired from her teaching job for refusing to address a six-year-old transgender child born a female with his preferred male name.
An attorney for Madeline Kirksey, who filed a discrimination suit against her former employer at the Children’s Lighthouse Learning Center in Katy, Texas, said the child care facility had violated his client’s religious rights, according to a report in the Houston Chronicle.
The suit was filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “At her age she was indecisive, some days she wanted to be a girl, some days she wanted to be a boy, it was according to what situation she got in that day,” said Kirksey, according to local television outlet ABC 13.
A Children’s Lighthouse Learning Center representative told the Houston Chronicle that Kirksey’s dismissal was not related to the transgender child but declined to comment further on a personnel issue.
The lawsuit comes the week after Houston resident voted to strike down an anti-discrimination ordinance that protected transgender people among other protected classes.
- How to Help Victims of the Texas School Shooting
- TIME's 100 Most Influential People of 2022
- What the Buffalo Tragedy Has to Do With the Effort to Overturn Roe
- Column: The U.S. Failed Miserably on COVID-19. Canada Shows It Didn't Have to Be That Way
- N.Y. Will Soon Require Businesses to Post Salaries in Job Listings. Here's What Happened When Colorado Did It
- The 46 Most Anticipated Movies of Summer 2022
- ‘We Are in a Moment of Reckoning.’ Amanda Nguyen on Taking the Fight for Sexual Violence Survivors to the U.N.