Colleen Chesmore, a registered respiratory therapist, has one of the most in-demand skillsets in the medical industry today. Having practiced since 1986, her decades of experience make her almost impossible to replace. Nevertheless, the Massachusetts hospital where she faithfully worked for years put her on a year-long probation for expressing concern over radical gender ideology.
“If I had a child who wanted to transition, I would encourage them to wait, and I would be upset if a man walked into my daughter’s locker room,” Chesmore told IW Features. “Somebody overheard me say that and they reported me.”
Chesmore worked for Baystate Medical Center in Westfield, Massachusetts, which she described as an extremely left-wing institution that is at odds with the more conservative community that surrounds it.
“When I started there, everybody said, ‘It’s really woke at Baystate, so be careful. You can’t talk about anything,’” Chesmore recalled. “Everybody kind of knew that in the back of their minds, and we all whispered about it.”
Chesmore single-handedly covered the night shift at Baystate for patients requiring oxygen, CPAP devices, or other respiratory equipment, a difficult and demanding position that few others wanted or were qualified to handle, she explained.
“You’re kind of like the firefighter in the hospital,” she said. “You just go from putting out one fire to another, and the nurses would call me if they had anybody in distress.”
During those long nights, however, she said she formed close bonds with her coworkers.
“You never know what’s going to come through the door in the ER, so you do become friends with the doctors and nurses. You’re a team, and I really had a great rapport with all of them,” she said.
Late one night, Chesmore said, she and four other staff members were engaged in a discussion about gender ideology and the negative consequences of so-called “gender-affirming care.” Unbeknownst to them, a Certified Nurse Assistant (CNA) had eavesdropped on the conversation and reported the entire group to Human Resources (HR), who investigated all five of them for their alleged offense.
“We all got called at home, and we were asked what happened,” Chesmore said. “The HR person said, ‘This is what you were heard saying.’ And I said, ‘That is true, because that is my belief.’”
Of all five people, Chesmore was the only one written up by HR. She believes this is because two of the women involved were travel nurses who would be protected and backed by their travel company, and the other two nurses were part of a union. Because registered respiratory therapists like Chesmore are not unionized, she believes this made her an easy target for Baystate.
HR called Chesmore in to hand her a year’s probation, and she “was told not to mention the subject again,” she said.
Despite this blatant violation of her right to free speech, Chesmore alleged that Baystate’s influence on Massachusetts is so powerful that no lawyer would take up her case.
“I filed a grievance with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and I filed a religious complaint,” she said. “Nobody would take my case because as soon as you say Baystate, no lawyer in Massachusetts wants to go up against them. They’ve got four hospitals in the western part of the state.”
Despite this setback, Chesmore refused to be silenced. With the help of Do No Harm, a medical advocacy group that seeks to keep identity politics out of healthcare, she wrote a “scathing” resignation letter to Baystate and took her extremely valuable skill set elsewhere. Right away, Chesmore found a new job offering a $25,000 sign-on bonus and a $10-per-hour increase.
“Everybody’s so afraid to stand up or say anything, but I just felt like I couldn’t let this go,” she said. “I did nothing wrong, and these are my beliefs.”
