When the Supreme Court ruled that a website designer could refuse to design a site for a theoretical same-sex wedding based on her personal beliefs, critics slammed the decision for opening the door to rampant discrimination against LGBTQ+ people. Sure enough, within days of the ruling, the owner of a hair salon in Michigan announced her intention to refuse service to customers based on how they identify, apparently super excited at having permission to show her bigotry to the world.
“If a human identifies as anything other than a man/woman, please seek services at a pet groomer,” Christine Geiger declared on the Facebook page for Studio 8 Hair Lab in Traverse City. The phrasing is a head-scratcher, but you can guess she means transgender, nonbinary, and genderqueer people. “You are not welcome here,” she wrote. “Period.”
The post went on to rant about pronouns and proclaim a “free speech” right to completely misunderstand everything about what gender means or what pronouns are and inflict those views on others at her publicly-serving professional business.
The business page appears to have been deleted after the owner faced backlash in the local Facebook group, where a community member shared a screenshot. There the post drew hundreds of comments, including some who defended the salon owner, but many more who called out the hatred of not only refusing service to a class of people but equating them with animals.
“They better stop messing with my trans homies or their pronouns are about to become was/were,” one commenter wrote (before clarifying that the pronoun in this case referred to the business, not the person). “It’s good that they posted this. Now we know where NOT to go,” said another. And a few brave souls jumped in to explain that no one is out there identifying as animals, something that unfortunately turned out to be necessary.
Geiger herself showed up in the group to dig herself in deeper, writing, “I have no issues with LGB. It’s the TQ+ that I’m not going to support.” As if she hadn’t already shown herself to be a deeply horrible person, she went on to insist that the plus sign stands for “minor-attracted person,” which it definitely does not.
As for her insistence that there are 800 licensed stylists in the county and the people she hates can just go elsewhere, sure, they can, and they most certainly will steer clear of her establishment, along with anyone else who cares to support businesses that aren’t promoting such hatred. But not everyone lives in a place where they have access to numerous choices. And while Geiger might be among the first to make the news, she’s definitely not the only business owner celebrating her newfound right to discriminate.
Now that the Supreme Court has given bigoted business practices its blessing, this is going to happen more, and LGBTQ+ people are now going to have to approach every business interaction with the knowledge that they might be turned away based on their identity. It’s an ugly and demeaning new reality.
(via the New Republic; featured image: HBO Max)
