Last week in LGBTQ+ rights: ‘You are not welcome at this salon’

This series is a weekly roundup of LGBTQ-related news, covering various laws and bans, as well as efforts to push back against them.

Last week, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals allowed a Kentucky law banning gender-affirming care for minors to go into effect, a week after a similar law in Tennessee was upheld. A Michigan salon owner made headlines for publicly stating transgender people are not welcome at her establishment, a Wisconsin teacher was fired after she complained about her school’s decision to ban a song with inclusive lyrics, and officials in a small Kansas town are trying to terminate their library’s lease over LGBTQ+ materials on the library’s shelves.

Kentucky’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors is now in effect.

A Kentucky law banning puberty blockers and hormone treatments for transgender minors is now in effect after a district court judge stayed his own injunction that had prevented it from taking effect.

Judge David Hale of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky, an appointee of President Barack Obama, on June 28 temporarily blocked a portion of the law that was set to go into effect the next day. He reversed his decision on July 14, allowing the law to immediately go into effect.

Hale’s ruling states that the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision in the case of a  similar gender-affirming care ban in Tennessee now makes it unlikely the Kentucky case will succeed on appeal and that there is no basis to deny the stay requested by Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron. The Sixth Circuit consolidated the Kentucky and Tennessee cases for appeals purposes, Hale explained in the ruling, and both are set to receive an expedited ruling by Sept. 30.

Cameron was quick to cast Hale’s reversal as a “win for parents and children,” saying in a press release that he is “grateful to the district court for doing what the law requires, which is protecting Kentucky kids from the irreversible harms that these experimental drug treatments would cause.”

The law will cause immediate harm to transgender youth in the state, ACLU of Kentucky communications director Angela Cooper told the American Independent Foundation last week during a discussion of the Sixth Circuit’s ruling in the Tennessee case. The Kentucky law requires patients receiving hormone therapy or puberty blockers to immediately begin to discontinue treatment, Cooper said. The ACLU of Kentucky and the National Center for Lesbian Rights issued a statement decrying the decision and calling the law ​​an example of “harmful, discriminatory, and egregious government overreach.”

The state ACLU and the NCLR, along with law firm Morgan, Lewis, and Bockius LLP, represent the seven trans children and their parents who are the plaintiffs in the Kentucky case.

“Six federal district court judges have ruled on challenges to medical bans, including Kentucky’s. Each one has listened carefully to the evidence and found that these bans have no basis in medical science, discriminate against transgender youth, and cause serious harms by denying medically needed care,” said Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the ACLU of Kentucky’s co-counsel in the case. “We are hopeful that when the Sixth Circuit reviews the record and has the benefit of full briefing in this case, it will reach the same conclusion.”

A Michigan salon owner draws ire for a discriminatory post against trans people.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in 303 Creative v. Elenis, which opened the door to allowing businesses to refuse service to LGBTQ people, a Michigan salon owner is under fire for posting to social media that trans people are not welcome at her business and equating them to animals.

Christine Geiger of Studio 8 Hair Lab in Traverse City, Michigan, wrote a now-deleted post on her salon’s Facebook page that read: “If a human identifies as anything other than a man/woman please seek services at a local pet groomer. You are not welcome at this salon. Period. Should you request to have a particular pronoun used please note we may simply refer to you as ‘hey you.’”

She expanded on her statement in a subsequent post, writing, “LGB are more than welcome however the rest of it is not something I support,” the Associated Press reported.

Protesters demonstrated outside the salon on July 12, and Traverse City officials are investigating whether Geiger was violating a local anti-discrimination ordinance, according to the AP.

While some reporting suggested Geiger’s statements could mark the first instance of discrimination against LGBTQ+ people after the 303 Creative v. Elenis decision, Geiger told the AP she was motivated by her own experiences and grievances over children being informed about gender identity in educational and medical settings — a common theme in right-wing political discourse these days.

A Wisconsin teacher who spoke out about a ban on the song “Rainbowland” is fired.

A Milwaukee-area elementary school teacher was terminated last week after she spoke out against the district’s decision to ban a song with inclusive themes from a spring concert.

“Today I was fired for tweeting that first graders couldn’t sing Rainbowland by @MileyCyrus featuring @DollyParton,” Melissa Tempel, a first grade Spanish and English dual-language teacher, tweeted July 12 after the Waukesha School District board voted unanimously to fire her. “Tonight I have an achey breaky heart but tomorrow I’m gonna get up and keep fighting for what is right. Thanks for all the love!”

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Tempel had been on administrative leave since April, a little less than two weeks after she tweeted her frustration that the school district  had vetoed the use of “Rainbowland” for a concert.

“My first graders were so excited to sing Rainbowland for our spring concert but it has been vetoed by our administration,” reads Tempel’s original tweet. “When will it end?”

District officials were cagey about their reasoning for rejecting “Rainbowland” in the aftermath of Tempel’s tweet; the Journal Sentinel reported that the district simply deemed the song “controversial” and declined to explain exactly why.

The song includes lyrics such as “Wouldn’t it be nice (So nice). To live in paradise? Where we’re free to be exactly who we are.”

The principal at Heyer Elementary School, where Tempel worked, explained during the July 12 hearing that the decision to ban the song from the spring concert — a decision that was originally his — stemmed from Cyrus’ reputation.

“If the students are Googling or researching one of the artists, some inappropriate images or videos could appear. I just felt there were better options for a first-grade concert,” Schneider said, according to reporting by the Journal Sentinel.

The school district’s attorney stated that Tempel’s decision to post publicly on social media about the song ban rather than discuss it privately with her principal was the impetus for her firing.

At least one person demonstrating outside the Waukesha School District meeting at which Tempel was fired interpreted the action as taking a stand against LGBTQ activism, though, the newspaper reported.

“The fact that they’re willing to take a stand and be like ‘OK, if one of our teachers is not going to be in line with the way that we are running our school district and she’s going to be promoting the LGBTQ agenda in her classroom and things like that, them taking a stand against that is encouraging because most school districts won’t take a stand against that,” Markus Schroeder told the Journal Sentinel.

Officials in a small Kansas town make threats over LGBTQ+ material in a public library.

Officials in a small Kansas town have threatened to pull the lease of their public library because of books with LGBTQ+  themes on its shelves.

St. Marys, Kansas, about 30 miles northeast of Topeka, is a town of fewer than 3,000 people, the majority of whom are members of a conservative Catholic sect called the Society of St. Pius X.

According to the Kansas City Pitch alternative newspaper, the five members of the town’s city commission, all members of SSPX, have held numerous meetings over the last several months exploring the termination of the lease for the Pottawatomie Wabaunsee Regional Library’s St. Marys branch over materials they deem objectionable.

“Some things are wrong,” one St. Marys commissioner, Richard Binsfeld, said during a discussion about books that mention transgender people, according to the Pitch. “If you live up to your morals, if you stand by your morals at all, you’d look at it and say, ‘Why do we have it?’”

Another commissioner called trans-related materials at the library “garbage,” the Pitch reported.

The city commission already came close to terminating the library’s lease in December, but relented after an uproar from some in the community and voted unanimously to extend the lease one more year, through the end of 2023. If the commission ends the lease, the library will have to move out of the building it has occupied since the 1980s.

The Kansas Reflector reported in December that one St. Marys commissioner sought to enforce a lease that mandated the library not “supply, distribute, loan, encourage, or coerce acceptance of or approval of explicit sexual or racially or socially divisive material, or events (such as ‘drag queen story hours’) that support the LGBTQ+ or critical theory ideology or practice.” The current lease was ultimately renewed with no restrictions.

St. Marys city commissioners cited their religious beliefs in their earlier discussion about terminating the lease, according to the Reflector. Commissioners are continuing to push that line of reasoning, with one saying, “God doesn’t make mistakes” during discussion about the lease, the Pitch reported.

The city has little jurisdiction over the library, part of a regional system that extends outside the city’s boundaries, other than the lease that has been renewed annually for decades, according to the Pitch. The St. Marys library is a headquarters for the other eight libraries in the system.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.