A former TD Insurance associate VP is suing the bank for more than $400,000 after she was fired in January for adding "I am HIS ✝️" to her email signature. Sonja Denobrega did it after a colleague was told to drop "Pronouns: I am HIS ✝️," a line a complaint called a possible microaggression. She says the rules left room for gender identification and none for creed. TD says she was warned, refused, and was fired for insubordination. Nothing has been proven in court.
Denobrega, 52, had joined TD only months earlier, in July 2025, as associate vice-president of underwriting operations on a base salary of about $210,000 plus bonus and equity eligibility, after more than 25 years across the insurance sector. Her statement of claim, filed with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Toronto and first reported by the National Post on September 29, seeks roughly $446,600 in specified damages — pay in lieu of notice, punitive and human-rights damages — plus benefits, interest and costs.
The dispute traces back to late October 2025, when human resources received a complaint about another employee, Michelle Tamlin, who had added "Pronouns: I am HIS ✝️" to her corporate sign-off. The complainant said the wording could be perceived as a microaggression against LGBTQ+ employees, and the bank told Tamlin the line violated email-signature standards. Denobrega then added "I am HIS ✝️" — without the word "pronouns" — after learning Tamlin had been ordered to remove it. She said she acted in solidarity, and in support of Christians facing persecution in Nigeria.
Denobrega met repeatedly with her supervisor and HR staff through December 2025. She asked the company to review all employee signatures for consistency or to permit other statements of identity; the bank declined a company-wide audit but sent a reminder about signature standards to roughly 10,000 insurance-division staff. Managers instructed her to remove the line, including a 24-hour deadline from a senior vice-president. After further meetings the bank placed her on unpaid leave, and on January 8, 2026, terminated her.
In its statement of defence, TD says the firing had nothing to do with Denobrega's religion, age or any other protected characteristic. The bank describes its email-signature rules as treating signatures like business cards: they prohibit quotes, taglines, icons, images, slogans and other personal statements, while allowing limited voluntary identifiers such as personal pronouns. TD says Denobrega repeatedly refused instructions after warnings, that her pronoun policy was non-negotiable, and that her willful insubordination as a senior leader destroyed trust and gave the company just cause to dismiss her without notice.
That is the gap. Freedom at work is not only the right to hold a belief. It is the right to say who you are on the same terms as everyone else. If a pronoun line is treated as identity and a Christian line is treated as defiance, the freedom is already uneven. A signature is a small thing. The rule behind it is not.