FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. (AP) – A former Special Forces battalion commander at Fort Bragg is suing the Library of Congress for withdrawing a job offer after learning the new-hire would be coming to work as a woman.

Retired Col. David J. Schroer, 49, was an Army Ranger with more than 450 parachute jumps and two master’s degrees who directed a 120-person classified organization in the war on terrorism. Schroer presented highly sensitive intelligence reports to Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Schroer had accepted a position as a terrorism research analyst at the Congressional Research Service when he informed his future boss he was about to change his name to Diane and would begin dressing as a woman. It was part of a medical transition Schroer was making from being a man to being a woman.

The next day, Schroer’s future boss at the Library of Congress, of which the CRS is a part, called to say that the job offer was being withdrawn given the circumstances, according to a lawsuit filed June 2 in federal court in Washington, D.C.

The lawsuit alleges “gender discrimination in employment” and requests reinstatement and unspecified amounts of back pay and punitive damages.

“After 25 years of work in places that would make a Red Cross refugee camp look like Club Med, I was being told I was no longer good enough to work for the federal government,” Schroer said in a statement on the Web site of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is helping with the case.

Fort Bragg’s U.S. Army Special Operations Command declined to comment on the lawsuit, as Schroer is no longer in the Army, and referred questions to the Library of Congress.

A spokesperson for the Library of Congress declined to comment because the case involves a personnel matter.

Schroer was commander of the 3rd Battalion of the 3rd Special Forces Group from September 1994 to July 1996. The duties included “combat operations in the Haitian Intervention and Rwanda,” the lawsuit states.

Schroer said on the ACLU Web site that while growing up in Chicago he remembered “just feeling I should be a girl and wondering why I wasn’t.”

After leaving the Army in 2004, Schroer began researching gender issues online and “things I’d not comprehended before started rapidly falling into place and making sense,” she said.