employee says his religion prevents him from using the correct pronouns for trans or non-binary coworkers

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager .
A reader writes:
I’ve got an older employee who has been very forthright with me about his opinion of LGTBQAI2+ people based on his conservative religious beliefs. He says he doesn’t have a problem working with them, but problems started when I explained that if we ever hired someone in our department who identified as non-binary and used they/them pronouns (for example) he would be expected to use them. He has told me his religion (and therefore, he himself) believes people are going to hell if they act on homosexual feelings and I believe he also includes transgender individuals under this umbrella of sin.
He said he felt that if he used those pronouns, he would be accepting that “lifestyle” and he didn’t feel comfortable doing so. He would rather just use their name. I told him it’s a matter of respect for our fellow humans to use their pronouns as requested.
My organization is more and more outwardly supportive of DEI initiatives, including public support of Pride, an employee support group, etc. and I do not feel this is in line with our institutional values. He has said he would quit over this if he felt our organization forced him to accept it, and in his mind having to use someone’s correct pronouns would be an example of being forced to accept it (I think?).
However, how do I handle this if he is claiming his feelings on this matter are due to religious beliefs? I am not going to change his mind about this and am curious from an HR perspective about what to do. I want to create a welcoming space for all employees but am at a loss here when his identity is so at odds with others’.
He can privately feel however he wants, but he can’t refuse to use people’s correct pronouns at work because the law says that’s discrimination based on gender identity, which is illegal.
The fact that his reasons are religious doesn’t change that: The law is clear that employers cannot grant religious accommodations that violate state or federal law.
So you can’t legally permit an employee to discriminate against or create a hostile environment toward employees with gender identities he doesn’t approve of (or recognize, or whatever his argument is).
I suspect you’re getting tripped up by his invocation of religion since you know you’re supposed to try to accommodate people’s religious beliefs when you can. But the law doesn’t require accommodations that would pose an “undue hardship” to the employer — and courts have repeatedly affirmed that creating legal liability would be an undue hardship. It might be more intuitive if you think of other situations where someone’s religious beliefs would conflict with your legal obligations to your staff as a whole; for example, if an employee requested a religious accommodation allowing them to treat colleagues differently if they were women, or of a different race, you wouldn’t be able to grant that either.
The law does encourage employers to engage in what it calls the “interactive process” to figure out if there’s any other accommodation you could offer, although I’m hard-pressed to think of a workable one here. In one court case ( Kluge v. Brownsburg Community School Corporation ), a teacher who refused to use his students’ correct pronouns on the basis of his religious beliefs was offered an accommodation where he’d refer to everyone by their last names only — but they had to rescind that after getting complaints.
Regardless, you can’t legally grant an accommodation that allows an employee to use the wrong pronouns for their colleagues. Your employee will need to treat all his coworkers with respect or you would need to deal with it like any other serious disciplinary issue.
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