My Employer says I can't have cake because I'm a lesbian.
by Liv | Published on February 12th, 2009, 8:12 pm | Greensboro
I'm writing the following post knowing many of you will drop your mouth, cough and into your collar say "Shut up, Liv"- "Liv's gone loco".... "she's gone postal." I assure you I'm not. I however have to talk about this. Luckily I'm almost finished with dealing with the company and I have absolutely no monetary and vindictive reason to write it. All I wanted was what was fair. (God I sound like Billie Jean)I had my legal name change around June of last year. You might remember that, right? After having the local court sign off on the paperwork. I left the court with a NC court order and provided it to my employer. Now some 6-7 months later I'm still receiving stuff in my old name. The latest was a set of stock purchases earned in the last quarter of 08. Well after the name change. They've basically sent them to a person who no longer exists. They want me to simply transfer them, but I've conferred with a few people that suggest not to transfer them because it will look like that non-existent person had obtained assets... and may be taxed. Furthermore, since I "technically" never received the stock, it's possible that this could be considered illegal garnishment of wages. My employer refuse to handle the situation; requires documentation, notarized, and sent insured through the mail... on stock which should have never been issued at all in this name and is going to cost me time and money to correct.
I suppose I shouldn't complain except this is the same company who has refused to correct my personal information on my HMO through the company. It's still wrong to this day. Apparently "Lesbians like us" don't exist in their database and according to my HR rep "It's administratively impossible"... At one point it became such an issue Shannon was denied a "female" exam because of her name being Shannon.... and my HMO assuming she was my husband. For some reason, they had her gender marked as male and denied the billing. After getting that fixed, things went down hill. I provided them a layman's cease and desist order, to which they never responded too, and a friend (cough) suggested to contact Lambda Legal. It's at this point I stepped back, and caught my breath. I needed to take some time to clear my mind. I wonder now if it was a mistake... but the economy was turning bad, and I needed to get through Christmas for the kids.
The final card was dealt with my latest medical issues. I'm have quite a difficulty with speaking as my glands are very swollen. Since my job is nothing but speaking, I asked if I could work in some other position and they said no, you'd have to take short-term disability. I did so. So I provided all the medical documentation, but for some reason Cigna (the third party vendor) continuously looses the paperwork, and refused to accept medical documentation from anyone other then my primary care physician. (Though I have a fax log that says otherwise) Then when she (my doctor) provides it, I was told that no doctor would use that kind of letter head (My doctor puts smiley faces on their notes) and that I must have forged it. Eventually I asked my doctor to put it on Cigna documentation... to which I was advised by the medical staff that Cigna has been basically harassing the office staff.
This is but a bit of what's been going on. So a few days ago, when I said I'm done... you can now understand why. This is a company that claims it's diverse yet whose HR representative has told me to my face "[you lesbians] just want your cake and eat it too" in reference to health care, and marriage.
