Lesbian files lawsuit after being booted from ladies room for manly appearance Jason Rhyne

Published: Wednesday October 10, 2007



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Print This Email This A 28-year-old lesbian is filing a gender-discrimination lawsuit after being booted from a New York City restaurant by a bouncer who mistook her for a man in the women's restroom. Khadijah Farmer and her girlfriend had stopped by Greenwich Village's Caliente Cab Company this past June -- right after attending a gay pride parade -- but trouble started when a female patron complained that a man was using the ladies room. Farmer was then forced to leave. According to the New York Daily News, the lawsuit was filed in Manhattan Supreme Court and demands that the restaurant "provide sensitivity training for its workers" in addition to seeking "an unspecified amount of money." "Now what happened to me inside of Caliente Cab should not happen to anyone anywhere," Farmer said in an Associated Press video. "New York City has always been and will continue to be an extremely diverse place to live in, and men and women come in all shapes and sizes." "I told him I was a woman, and I tried to show him my I.D.," Farmer told AP about the bouncer who confronted her in the bathroom. "He refused to look at it. I was extremely uncomfortable and quite humiliated." Her lawyer, Michael Silverman, who heads the Transgender Legal Defense & Educaton Fund, said he wasn't satisfied with how the restaurant handled the incident. "Their response was that Khadijah can have a free meal, which is the equivalent of flipping us the bird," he said, according to the Daily News. The restaurant responded to the lawsuit with a statement that "denies wrongdoing and accuses Farmer of being out for money." "Farmer," the statement continues, "is not interested at all in getting at the truth here," and is "threatening continuous weekly protests of our business rather than expose the facts to the light of day in an appropriate forum." "I don't go out of my way to put on pearls and pink dresses," Farmer said, adding "however, I shouldn't have to." The following video is from The Associated Press, broadcast on October 9, 2007.









