A aggression through the toilet door. An 18-year-old young woman from Minnesota (United States) filed a complaint for discrimination on Tuesday against a restaurant. She accuses a waitress in the place of having followed her to the women’s toilet to ask her to “prove” that she was a girl, reports NBC News.
The facts date back to the month of April, when Gerika Mudra goes to the restaurant of the “Buffalo Wild Wings” channel of Owatonna for dinner with a friend. After noticing at first that one of the waitresses insistently looked at her, Gerika decides to go to the toilet and be followed by the employee.
“These are women’s toilets. This man must get out of here, ”shouts the waitress by hitting the door of the toilet, reports Gender Justice, an association for the gender equality of Minnesota. Gerika Mudra tells her that she is indeed female, but the waitress still shares her to “get out immediately” from the toilet.
Humiliated, the client explains that she felt the need to prove to the waitress that she was a woman and therefore opened her jacket to show that she had chest. “She looked up in heaven and moved away,” says Gerika, who specifies that she had not received excuses from her.
“I no longer like to go to public toilets”
“Since then, I no longer like to go to public toilets. I hold back … I want to be able to go to the toilet in peace, ”she explains. If it is not the first time he is told that she is wrong with toilets, she claims that people have always left her quiet when she told them to be a woman.
Gender Justice filed a complaint in the name of Gerika for discrimination with the Minnesota (MDHR) Ministry of Human Rights. The association stresses that what happened to it violates the law on state rights, which notably protects people against discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.
The role of the MDHR is to enforce the Human Rights Act in Minnesota, which is one of the strictest laws on civil rights in the United States.
“Companies have the legal obligation not only to have anti-discrimination policies, but also to train their staff and to ensure that these policies are applied in real time,” said Sara Jane Baldwin, lawyer for Gender Justice. “This type of gender control is unfortunately nothing new,” said Megan Peterson, Managing Director of Gender Justice, in a press release.