ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) – Harassed and fired for being transgender. That’s what one Albuquerque woman is claiming happened to her after she came out to her employer.

Now, she’s fighting back. She says she was bullied and ridiculed by management at ABF Freight Company. Now, she wants her former employer to pay for it.

“I went from being the person everybody came to when they had a problem to being treated like I had the plague,” Diane Roberts says.

Roberts spent four years working at ABF Freight in Albuquerque. “I was a diesel technician,” Roberts says. Diane Roberts is on the outside looking in after coming out as transgender in 2016.

Roberts and the ACLU have filed a lawsuit against the Arkansas-based company, claiming she was discriminated against and wrongly fired. “This can’t be tolerated to treat trans people this way,” Roberts says.

Roberts says before her transition, she met with management. “They were very supportive and they made me promises on everything that needed to be done,” Roberts says.

Things like a women’s bathroom and locker room and training for her co-workers. Roberts says those promises were not kept. “I walked into a hostile environment. I mean, you could literally feel the hate in the building when I walked in,” Roberts says.

Roberts claims she endured constant harassment from managers and other employees. “They would have transphobic programs on where I couldn’t escape from it,” Roberts says.

She says the bullying got so intense, she took medical leave to address PTSD. While she was gone, “They terminated me from the company. They basically haven’t given us a good explanation for why they fired me,” Roberts says.

Now, she wants to make an example out of ABF. “To do everything I can to see that this doesn’t happen to anybody else because it’s devastating,” Roberts says. Roberts says she still suffers from PTSD and hasn’t been able to work since she was fired in 2017.

An ABF spokesperson responded to the lawsuit saying, ‘The claims are wholly without merit, and we intend to vigorously defend the company against these accusations. Because the matter is in litigation we are unable to offer any other comment,” says Kathy Fieweger.