Well this is delicious. Nike has pumped up its stock price by pandering to the anti-cop hatred of Colin Kaepernick, but that didn’t shelter them from accusations of transphobia. And the million dollar lawsuit that comes along with them:
A transgender former Nike contractor is seeking $1.1 million in damages from the sporting goods giant for allegedly allowing gender identity-based harassment.
According to a civil lawsuit filed this week, Nike and Mainz Brady Group, a staffing firm that hired workers for Nike, discriminated against computer engineer Jazz Lyles, who identifies as transmasculine and prefers the pronouns they/them/their. The complaint was filed with Multnomah Circuit Court in Oregon.
During Lyles’ tenure at Nike — from May 2017 to September 2018 — the engineer was repeatedly “misgendered” by coworkers, the complaint said. While Lyles notified management about the issue multiple times, the companies allegedly failed to implement any policies, procedures and trainings around the use of gender pronouns in the workplace.
Use the wrong pronouns, you’re gonna have a bad time.
“When someone refuses to acknowledge a person’s gender identity or insists on referring to them by a gender to which they do not identify (called misgendering), this causes real and significant harm,” read the complaint. “This is particularly true when a person is misgendered repeatedly on a daily basis.”
Nike declined to comment on the lawsuit, but said the company “is committed to a culture of diversity, inclusion and respect where everyone can succeed and realize their full potential.”
That is fantastic. I ain’t crying tears over Nike. BUT, this is a warning to other companies. You can bet the next few years will be a flurry of transgender lawsuits trying to cash in on the normalization of mental illness by our society. And they won’t stop at the “woke” companies like Nike either…