This Michigan Court Just Declared Trans Women Are Really Men in a Baffling, Transphobic Decision
Transphobes are the worst. In 2015, Yvette Cormier filed a lawsuit against Planet Fitness for revoking her membership after she loudly complained for days that she saw a trans woman in the locker room. In 2017 her Planet Fitness lawsuit was unanimously rejected; she appealed and lost, and took the case all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court, who sent it back to the appeals court. This time, the appeals court sent the case back to the trial court, actively embracing Yvette Cormier’s transphobia.
Yvette Cormier complained about seeing a trans woman in the women’s locker room, misgendered the woman and complained to management and other customers. Rightfully, Planet Fitness yanked her membership for being “inappropriate and disruptive.”
Instead of just finding another gym that puts up with her transphobic nonsense, Yvette Cormier filed suit against Planet Fitness, asking for over $25,000 in damages. Her Planet Fitness lawsuit is over-the-top, making multiple claims. Cormier says her right to privacy was violated; that her membership was wrongfully terminated and thus a breach of contract; that the gym engaged in “conduct and communication of a sexual nature”; that she suffered emotional distress, a damage to her reputation and “all other damages that reasonably flow from Defendants’ outrageous behavior”; and, finally, a laundry list of “exemplary damages”: “aggravation, annoyance, discomfort, disgrace, feelings of oppression, humiliation, inconvenience, indignation, insult, mental anxiety, mental suffering, mortification, outrage, scorn, shame, sorrow, vexation and worry.”
You know — there’s an easy solution to all of that: If your transphobia has ruined your reputation, maybe don’t be transphobic.
The trial court, thankfully, saw Yvette Cormier’s Planet Fitness lawsuit for the “exercise in the right-wing victim complex” that it is and rejected her suit in a 3-0 decision. She appealed, and that court agreed with the lower court. She appealed yet again, taking the case to the Michigan Supreme Court. The state Supreme Court, however, sent it back to the appeals court to examine the question of “consumer fraud.”
Unfortunately this time the appeals court was much more in line with Yvette Cormier’s way of thinking. The appeals court apparently agrees that trans women are not women, writing, “Plaintiff’s actions indicate that she strongly preferred a locker room and a restroom in which individuals who are assigned biologically male are not present, and it is thus reasonable to infer that defendants’ failure to inform plaintiff of the unwritten policy affected her decision to join the gym.”
If you notice, the decision only uses the word “transgender” once — in a quote of the previous appeals court decision. Instead, the decision uses transphobic phrases like “men who self-identify as women” and “assigned men.”
Thankfully the appeals court’s idiotic decision — decided by Judges Colleen A. O’Brien, Deborah A. Servitto and Cynthia Diane Stephens — doesn’t mean that Yvette Cormier has won. Her case will now be re-heard by the trial court, and, with any luck, they’ll make the right decision.
