A former male employee at Liberty University who began identifying as a woman while employed at the school has sued Liberty for sex discrimination.
The lawsuit, which was announced on July 29, claims that the former employee, then known as Jonathan Zinski, a biological male, was fired in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 after he notified the conservative Christian school that he had begun identifying as a woman.
Zinski, 30, started working for Liberty in February 2023 as a full-time information services apprentice at the IT help desk. According to the lawsuit, Zinski sent an email to Liberty’s human resources office on July 5, 2023, notifying the department that he identified as a woman, had been undergoing hormone replacement therapy, and intended to change his name legally from Jonathan to Ellenor.
The suit says that Zinski received a response from the HR department on July 8, 2023, informing him that the department would respond to his email. When he had not heard back from HR in a month, he sent another email, the suit says, and at that point university officials scheduled a meeting with him, during which he was fired.
According to an article in The College Fix, a website run by the Student Free Press, the university claims that Zinski’s action went against the school’s employee doctrinal statement, which lists “denial of birth sex by self-identification with a different gender” as a sin. All employees must sign an affirmation of the doctrinal statement.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits workplace discrimination, doesn’t mention gender identity, but it does mention sex. And in 2020, a Supreme Court handed down a decision that sex includes gender identity. The court ruled 6-3 in Bostock v. Clayton County that an employer who fires a worker for being gay or transgender violates Title VII, which prohibits discrimination “on the basis of sex.”
Brad Jacob, a constitutional law professor at Regent University School of Law, said in a World article Tuesday that he suspects Liberty will claim an exemption, arguing it fired Zinski for religious reasons, citing its doctrinal statement as evidence that he violated the university’s conviction.
Greg Baylor, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, said in the article that the question of how far Title VII exemption protections extend is still being debated in courts across the country. He added that the case against Liberty gives courts another chance to weigh in on the question.
At issue is whether the courts will see Liberty’s actions as gender discrimination or a decision based on religious belief and practice, Jacob told World.
Some legal experts speculate that because Zinski worked for the university’s IT department and had no religious duties, the court could find the school does not have grounds for a legal defense. But courts across the country have ruled differently in similar cases.
Zinski is seeking more than $300,000 in damages from the university and is demanding a trial by jury.
ADF’s Baylor told World, “Religious organizations ought to have the [right] to draw their workforces from among those who share their religious convictions. It’s wrong for the government to force religious employers to retain employees who reject the employer’s religious teachings.”
