Traverse City is a relatively progressive area completely surrounded by people that still have Trump signs in their yards. If the state had any kind of forethought, they would have quietly waited until 2024, then filed suit under the new LGBTQ protections that go into effect January 1.
In a now deleted Facebook post, the salon wrote that those who don’t identify as “man/woman” “are not welcome at this salon.”
The law linked to in the article is pretty explicit about there being two sexes, albeit in a section regarding private clubs:
This section does not prohibit a private club from sponsoring or permitting sports schools or leagues for children less than 18 years of age that are limited by age or to members of 1 sex, if comparable and equally convenient access to the club’s facilities is made available to both sexes and if these activities are not used as a subterfuge to evade the purposes of this article.
The way a court would rule depends on decades of precedent which I’m totally unfamiliar with, but the law as written does not seem to prohibit this sort of behavior.
Back when gay marriage was the controversial national issue, one of my arguments in favor of legalizing it was that gay people just wanted to be left alone. Letting them get married wouldn’t be a burden of any sort on anyone else, so even someone who personally opposed gay marriage would not be harmed in any way if it were legalized. In that context, I am disappointed to see civil-rights activists push as far as they’re pushing here. I think future progress will be more difficult if opponents know that they must resist or be crushed, and as a matter of principle, it seems wrong to ask someone who hates you to tolerate you if you don’t intend to tolerate him once you have the power.
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