It seems Nike’s ultra-woke, leftist antics haven’t been quite enough to drive the company to peak inclusivity.
The ubiquitous sports apparel company is being sued for $1.1 million in damages by Jazz Lyles, a former engineering contractor who alleges that she suffered significant harm from repeated misgendering at the hands of coworkers who refused to refer to her with the plural, gender-neutral pronouns “they, them, and their.”
“The lawsuit, filed this week in Multnomah County Circuit Court, alleges Nike … exposed Lyles to gender identity-based discrimination and harassment and retaliation,” Willamette Week reported last Tuesday. “Lyles identifies as transmasculine/nonbinary. That means Lyles was assigned the female gender at birth but identifies with masculinity and is a nonbinary person.”
Pardon me, but why is this even a thing?? Plenty of good and honest tomboys have come and gone on this green Earth without having to compel the world around them to meet such insane demands.
The world might be an awful lot better off if people like Lyles would just realize that a lack of femininity, according to our culture’s standards anyway, does not make you less of a woman! But, I digress.
“Gender identity is the personal sense of one’s own gender,” Lyles’ lawsuit reads. “One’s gender identity can be the same or different from their sex assigned at birth. An individual’s gender identity is at the core of an individual’s self-concept.”
What in the world is a “self-concept”?! Do we all have one? If so, why aren’t the rest of us monumentally absorbed by it to the point of punishing those around us with million-dollar litigation?
Read the full lawsuit below:
Jazz Lyles v. Nike Inc. and… by Matthew Kish on Scribd
“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,” the suit adds, playing the obligatory social justice “real harm” card.
“But from the beginning, Nike employees allegedly disregarded Lyles’ requests. … People on the technical teams on which Lyles worked — which included Nike employees and independent contractors but which reported to Nike managers — allegedly repeatedly used the wrong pronouns, which is known as ‘misgendering,’” the Willamette Week said of Lyles’ case. One of these colleagues, the Week adds, reportedly told Lyles that they could not use her fictitious pronouns because of sincere religious objections.
The suit proceeds to claim that Nike and Mainz Brady, the employment agency that placed Lyles with Nike, “failed to have any policies or procedures in place that required employees at Nike to acknowledge and refer to other employers[sic] by the gender in which an employee identifies” and “altogether failed to remedy the harassment that [Lyles] experienced from their coworkers.”
Lyles eventually “took medical leave and worked primarily from home” out of frustration over her coworkers’ failure to go along with her “gender identity”. Her contract reportedly ended sometime in the fall of 2018.
Lyles also alleges that Nike refused to convert her to a permanent employee despite “positive, successful, and proven performance” and the fact that there was an open position for which she was qualified.
“Nike had a pattern and practice of turning a blind eye to reported and known harassment, instead blaming the harassed, treating them as the problem and as troublemakers, all the while failing to ever investigate or take corrective action to remedy the harassment,” the suit declares.
“In efforts to maintain a positive brand image and reputation, Nike has stressed inclusivity with its ‘Be True’ campaign, emphasizing equality and diversity to the public, and utilizing transgender athletes as part of that campaign,” the lawsuit continues. “However, behind closed doors, Nike’s culture is one of inequality and pervasive harassment for those who do not fit the gender stereotypes and mold of the dominant cisgender white male culture.”
I honestly don’t know who is more ridiculous here: the hyper-leftist, anti-American sports company getting a taste of their own woke medicine, or the “transmasculine” megalomaniac trying to force speech and ideology on others. Maybe both?
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