Hair Salon Says Trans Customers Should Visit ‘Local Pet Groomer’ After Supreme Court Ruling

Less than two weeks after an atrocious Supreme Court decision all but ruled that discriminating against someone based on their sexual orientation is protected free speech, a small business owner in Michigan has said she’s banning trans people from her hair salon.

“If a human identifies as anything other than a man/woman, please seek services at a local pet groomer,” Christine Geiger, who owns Studio 8 Hair Lab in Traverse City, Michigan, wrote on her business’s Facebook page. “You are not welcome at this salon. Period.”

Geiger’s message comes after the June decision in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, which ruled that an anti-discrimination law in Colorado violated the free speech rights of a Christian website designer, who didn’t want to make wedding websites for gay clients. (For the record, she had never made a wedding website for a same-sex couple and no one had asked her to.)

“Around the country, there has been a backlash to the movement for liberty and equality for gender and sexual minorities,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the dissent. “New forms of inclusion have been met with reactionary exclusion. This is heartbreaking. Sadly, it is also familiar.” As Jezebel’s Susan Rinkunas wrote at the time:

Advocates had warned that this case was about much, much more than LGBTQ rights. Sotomayor underscored that fact in chilling detail, noting how businesses wouldn’t even need a religious objection to refuse people based on race, disability status, and more, because this case was brought on First Amendment grounds.

Geiger also wrote in her post that she was simply exercising her free speech rights: “This small business has the right to refuse services.” She added that, “Regardless of MI HB 4744″ anyone who requests a pronoun will be referred to as “hey you.”

HB 4744 has to do with voter files…so we’re guessing she meant HB 4474, which Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) passed as part of the state’s hate crime law to prohibit discrimination based on gender and sexual orientation. “ my ASS Governor Witchmere ,” Geiger added.

Geiger also took to a different Facebook page, “Overheard in Traverse City,” to further vomit up a bunch of stupid, discriminatory bullshit, while espousing the far-right conspiracy theory that the + in LGBTQ+ is pedophilia. “I have no issues with LGB. It’s the TQ+ that I’m not going to support,” she wrote. “For those that don’t know what the + is for, it’s for MAP (Minor Attracted Person aka: pedophile.).” It is not.

The salon has since made its Instagram page (which says it is “a private CONSERVATIVE business that does not cater to woke ideologies”) private, according to the Kansas City Star, and deleted its Facebook page.