An Indiana IKEA employee was fired after refusing to call his co-worker “they/them” and filed an official complaint due to “unlawful termination,” the Indiana Family Institute said in a Wednesday press release.
Steven Ressler, a “devout Christian who believes there are only two genders” and who’s worked at IKEA since 2019, was under investigation in December for “misgendering” his co-worker. Soon after, Ressler filed for a “religious accommodation request” to “inform my employer of my religious beliefs and engage in the interactive process in good faith,” the press release said.
Three days after filing the religious exemption, Ressler was fired on the basis of “misgendering,” the press release said.
“I believe IKEA discriminated against me by failing to accommodate my sincerely held religious beliefs against using ‘they/them’ pronouns when addressing a transgender employee and terminated me for misgendering,” Ressler said.
Ressler filed a “formal complaint” with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Indiana Civil Rights Commission, the press release said.
IKEA, the Swedish furniture and home goods store, has a page on their website on how to be “an everyday ally” and “mak[e] space” for the “LGBTQIA+ community.”
In 2019, a former Catholic IKEA employee in Poland sued IKEA after being fired for not taking down Bible verses rebuking homosexuality he posted on IKEA’s article for “International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia.”
“I’ve been hired to sell furniture but I’m a Catholic and these aren’t my values,” he said according to Newsweek. The Polish court ruled in 2022 that IKEA was not guilty of religious discrimination, according to Reuters.
An Ohio university professor was told in 2020 to use “the preferred pronouns of transgender students if he wishes to keep his job,” Chad Greene reported for the The Federalist. The Ohio court even upheld the university’s decision to not accommodate the professor’s “religious objections.”
But there have been victories for those who have stood up to gender ideology on religious grounds.
In 2021, the Virginia Supreme Court affirmed the reinstatement of a teacher after he “opposed proposals that would force educators to use students’ ‘preferred pronouns’ instead of acknowledging their sex,” The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd reported.
On the federal level, government employees were told to remove pronouns in their email signatures and anything else that promotes “gender ideology” in their agency by the end of day on Jan 31.
IKEA did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment on whether they respect an employee’s right to refer to another person according to their biology or if they took Ressler’s religious exemption into consideration.
UPDATE: An IKEA spokeswoman provided the following comment after publication: “IKEA is committed to providing an inclusive workplace where all co-workers are treated with dignity and respect. Our actions are consistently guided by our unwavering commitment to our values and upholding our code of conduct. Any indication that we did not have the utmost consideration for the needs of both parties in this case is untrue.”
