That’s what Charlene Hastings said she was told when she called to inquire about breast enlargement surgery at Seton Medical Center, a Catholic hospital in Daly City, Calif.

Now the San Francisco resident is suing the hospital, claiming officials there discriminated against her because she had a sex-change operation.

Hastings, 57, had already had the major surgery she needed to become a woman. She had chosen a San Francisco plastic surgeon with privileges at Seton to perform the breast augmentation in October 2006. But the surgeon, Dr. Leonard Gray, told her that Seton no longer allowed him to operate on transgender patients, Hastings said.

Hastings, who works for the city of San Francisco as a tax collector, said she was raised Catholic. “I think God loves me no matter what,” she said.

Christopher Dolan, the San Francisco attorney representing Hastings, said Seton may argue that it’s within its rights to deny elective procedures to transgender people on religious grounds, but “that’s not what this lawsuit is about.”

“This is a civil rights story,” he said. “It is about transgender people being able to use businesses and other facilities on an equal basis as other people. If you took out ‘transgender’ in the lawsuit and replaced it with ‘African-American,’ this would be a no-brainer.”

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