News (World)

A men’s barbershop refused to serve a trans man

A men’s barbershop refused to serve a trans man
Photo: Shutterstock

A transgender man has filed a complaint against a barbershop alleging they refused to serve him and called him an anti-trans slur.

On October 4, Casey Franklin went to Kingsmen Hair in Tuggerah, a town about 50 miles north of Sydney, Australia.

He said he asked for a haircut but a worker told him, “We only cut men’s hair.” When he said that he is a man, the worker responded, “No, you’re not.”

He told his partner Blaise Harris what happened and she went with him to confront the barbershop, which led to more insults.

“They told her I wasn’t a real man and called me ‘she’ and ‘a woman’ the whole time,” Franklin said.

Harris, who speaks Arab, heard a staff member say in Arab “another fucking tranny.”

“I got angry at this point and asked them not to speak about me in that way,” Harris said. “I said ‘How dare you.’ [They] said ‘How do you know what I said?’”

Franklin has filed a complaint with the Anti-Discrimination Board. “It has left me annoyed that they treated me like this, and I refuse to allow it to happen to any other member of the transgender community,” he said.

The barbershop’s lawyer Doug Eaton presented a very different story in his response.

He said that Franklin approached a barber named Hussein Al Saadi for a haircut, and Al Saadi said, “I’m sorry, we are a men’s only barber.”

According to Eaton, when Franklin said that he’s a man, Al Saadi responded politely, “I’m sorry, you are dressed like a woman and I couldn’t tell.”

Franklin told Pink News that he was “dressed in all menswear, including a men’s shirt, men’s chino shorts, men’s shoes, and a binder which hides my boobs.”

At this point, Eaton wrote that Franklin got angry. “Mr. Franklin then grabbed his crotch and stated the words ‘Look I have a dick.'”

Franklin says he didn’t do that.

Eaton’s response misgendered Harris by calling her “male.”

The response accuses them of saying they wanted to “ruin the shop on social media” in order to get money from “stupid Arabs.”

Harris denies she said that. “I have never been, nor would I ever be racist against Arabs or make such comments,” she said.

Franklin says that the harassment hasn’t stopped. “They have tried to stare me down, they stand in front of the shop to intimidate me and mumble under their breath when they pass me,” he said.

“They have told me that I’m a liar and that I’m only after money and ruining them. The owner said he didn’t believe anything I said and that he believed it was a false complaint made by a competitor to ruin them.”

A spokesperson for Kingsmen Hair refused to comment on the complaint, but it’s telling that they managed to misgender Franklin again in the single sentence necessary to refuse to comment: “I have no idea what’s going on with that lady.”

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