Lesbian teen claims she was forced to prove she’s a woman while using restaurant bathroom
18-year-old Gerika Mudra alleges she was forced to expose her breasts to a restaurant server to prove she’s a woman. (YouTube/Gender Justice)
18-year-old Gerika Mudra alleges she was forced to expose her breasts to a restaurant server to prove she's a woman. (YouTube/Gender Justice)
A lesbian teenager claims she was forced to prove she was a woman while using a restaurant’s bathroom.
Minnesota teen Gerika Mudra filed a discrimination lawsuit against a Buffalo Wild Wings branch on Thursday (7 August) after alleging that, while using the restroom, a member of staff confronted and challenged her over her gender.
The alleged incident occurred in April while Mudra was out with a friend in Owatonna, a city just south of Minneapolis. While using a toilet stall, the 18-year-old alleges that a staff member began banging on the door, yelling that “this is a women’s restroom. The man needs to get out of here.”
Mudra, who is a cisgender lesbian, was claims she unzipped her hoodie in front of the server to show she had breasts to get her to stop, according to Gender Justice, the legal team which filed the discrimination charges on her behalf.
The teenager alleged that this isn’t the first time an incident like this has happened, according to NBC News. She said that typically when a person suggests she is in the wrong restroom, she tells them she is a woman and they leave her alone.
However, during the alleged incident inside Buffalo Wild Wings, Mudra said she told the server, “I am a lady,” to which the server responded, “You have to get out now.”
“She made me feel very uncomfortable,” Mudra said. “After that, I just don’t like going in public bathrooms. I just hold it in.”
Shauna, Mudra’s stepmum, said she was “enraged” after hearing about the alleged incident, describing the server’s actions as “cruel and humiliating.”
“It’s not okay. Don’t normalise this,” she said. “If you’re in the bathroom and you hear this happening to someone else, you need to say something.”
Gender Justice says it has filed a charge of discrimination with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights (MDHR), the state agency responsible for Minnesota’s Human Rights Act.
The state law strictly forbids discrimination based on gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, sex, or race. Businesses in Minnesota are legally required to train staff on anti-discrimination policies.
Sara Jane Baldwin, Gender Justice’s senior staff attorney, said during a Tuesday news conference that the server’s behaviour was “based on assumptions” about Mudra.
She warned that businesses which don’t fulfil their legal obligation to follow anti-discrimination laws are “liable for the harm caused.”
The legal group said the alleged incident was reflective of a “broader climate of fear and suspicion” aimed at transgender and gender-nonconforming people, as well as those who “don’t conform to narrow expectations of what girls and women ‘should’ look like.”
At least one in four trans people in the US live in one of the nineteen states which ban trans people from bathrooms and facilities exclusive to their gender identity, according to the Movement Advancement Project (MAP).
“This kind of gender policing is, unfortunately, nothing new,” Megan Peterson, executive director of Gender Justice, said in a statement. “Yet, in our current climate, we have to ask: What if Gerika had been a trans person? Would this story have ended differently? That’s the terrifying reality too many trans people live with every day.”
PinkNews has contacted Buffalo Wild Wings for comment.
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