Labels, politics, and the unchosen crusade of Christine Geiger.
Commentary
In today’s America of distant bureaucratic government, labels obscure as much as they reveal, and no agenda embodies this truth more than the Equality Act.
The top legislative priority of the
Biden White
House, the Equality Act would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to
include “sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity among the prohibited categories of discrimination or segregation,” where gender identity
means “the gender-related identity, appearance, mannerisms, or other gender-related characteristics of an individual, regardless of the individual’s designated sex at birth.” It “expands the definition of public accommodations” where discrimination can’t occur and allows the Department of Justice “to intervene ... in federal court on account of sexual orientation or gender identity.”
But, like abstract labels, abstract warnings don’t mean much until they’re concrete, which is what they’ve become in Michigan. There, an informal and formal prosecution under an Equality Act-type state law has hit a single person in ways that next year could occur across the country.
The defendant in this case, which is working its way through Michigan’s courts, is Christine Geiger, a 49-year-old small-business owner and hair stylist who has lived in Traverse City for 28 years. This past year, thanks to Michigan’s law, she has been sued by the state for $150,000, received death threats and hate mail, lost her main product sponsor in the face of social media pressure, and seen her store vandalized, family threatened, and marriage come apart.
Speaking Out—and Starting a Fire
Like most Americans, Ms. Geiger was relatively apolitical until the last decade, when the effects of the Affordable Care Act,
green automobile policy, and woke education policy festered in the corner of her mind until President Donald Trump became her “wake-up call.” More and more, she became angry hearing from her kids at school and her clients at her hair salon about what they felt they couldn’t say—about religion, about politics, and about stranger trends besides.
One of these trends was the way that kids were being encouraged or allowed by schools to “explore” identities—to
embrace gender identities and animal
personae and then discard them. Ms. Geiger’s customers became even less willing to speak out about these trends after a Michigan Supreme Court ruling in 2022 and the
passage of a state law in 2023, which added new protected categories, including gender identity, to Michigan’s longstanding Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act.
Nothing in Ms. Geiger’s life, from quitting a lucrative corporate career when management got too bureaucratic to kicking substance abuse cold turkey, prepared her to be anything but suddenly, decisively, unapologetically outspoken about what she believed.
The day that she chose to speak out was July 7, 2023. She’d been reading about “furries,” the animal personae that customers had been telling her were the new craze for kids in schools, at the mall, and on the street. She posted on her hair salon’s Facebook page, with the hashtag #TakeaStand:
“If a human identifies as anything other than a man/woman please seek services at a local pet groomer. You are not welcome at this salon. Period. Should you request to have a particular pronoun used please note we may simply refer to you as ‘hey you.’ Regardless of MI HB 4744. ... This is America; free speech. This small business has the right to refuse services.”
Ms. Geiger later said she wished she’d changed some of the post’s wording, but she stood by its message—one that doesn’t seem controversial, at least outside a narrow circle. But that narrow circle has quietly developed a loud voice and a growing number of joiners—and it started a fire.
Ms. Geiger’s post was reposted in the Facebook group “Overheard in Traverse City” under the headline “You are allowed to your opinion but you are not allowed to discriminate!” Eventually, the post generated 654 comments and 63 shares. Commenters ranged from Traverse City residents to a drag queen from Canada to concerned out-of-towners to someone who seemed to have joined the group on about the same day: “I want to make this chick famous! FAMOUSLY FAMOUS for her bigotry and selective hatred ... Get a grip!”
A link got posted to Jack Winn Pro, the Texas hairstyling brand that Ms. Geiger represented: The charge against the brand was collaboration with a bigot. Local news outlets picked up the story. Others
spread it nationwide. On July 12, 2023, The Traverse City Record-Eagle
reported that “a group of about 100 protesters circled the block outside of [Ms. Geiger’s] hair salon on Traverse City’s Eighth Street,” saying they “wanted to create something positive out of a traumatic experience.”
Protests Accelerate
But the protests and what followed weren’t positive for Ms. Geiger. Jack Winn Pro bowed to thousands of phone calls and dropped her. Her best friend from the company cut her off. The local LGBT group Polestar
called her comments a “blight” that “we must not allow ... to take root in our town.” Her shop had its window broken. A man showed up in the middle of the day and started yelling; she listened to him say his piece and then told him that he had to leave.
The furor also affected Ms. Geiger’s family, she told me. Death threats came, but it wasn’t until her husband received one mentioning how cute their boys were and where they went to school that he left the boat store that he owned and worked from home for six days. Eventually, at the end of August, Ms. Geiger’s marriage broke down.
The eeriest part was the messages to Ms. Geiger’s cell, which is publicly listed because she uses it for business: Most seemed to come from burner phones, or out of state. She described some of them as “witchy”—“almost like they were casting a spell.”
The Government Gets Involved
But in today’s America, mobs aren’t the worst consequence that a person can face for speaking out. Powerful administrators can also prosecute people for speaking their minds.For Ms. Geiger, this process began with a
condemnatory statement released by state Rep. Betsy Coffia, who represents Traverse City. Ms. Coffia additionally
commented to local media that “my vision for ... an accepting community is that we get to the point where people ... would never again feel comfortable saying something so hateful and dangerous.”
Traverse City’s government also condemned the post,
announcing that it was investigating whether Ms. Geiger had violated a municipal nondiscrimination ordinance or other state legislation. Finally, on Nov. 15, the week before Thanksgiving, the executive director of Michigan’s Office of Civil Rights, John E. Johnson, held an online news conference
announcing discrimination charges against Ms. Geiger, who hadn’t been independently informed.
The charges were leveled under the amended reading of Elliot-Larsen, based on three of 21 complaints received from individuals who “felt that they were impacted by [Ms. Geiger’s Facebook] advertisement,” which the government said discriminated based on gender identity. The government stated that possible remedies included monetary damages, Ms. Geiger handing over her license, posting nondiscrimination ordinances, and taking nondiscrimination classes.
Given that
a report by Michigan’s Office of the Auditor General showed that it takes the department an average of 19 months to complete investigations, much less level charges, Ms. Geiger suspected that her case was given special priority.
What’s more, the case against her is likely inaccurate when it comes to the facts, at least in the view of Ms. Geiger’s lawyer, David Delaney, who is fighting the case in court.
In Mr. Delaney’s view, Ms. Geiger neither refused service nor communicated that she would refuse service, the two ways that she was alleged to have violated Elliott-Larsen’s statutes. Nor did she even reference a protected class: Her words were that she wouldn’t serve someone who identified as “anything other than a man or a woman,” whereas transgender individuals are biological men or women who identify as the opposite.
Instead, in Mr. Delaney’s argument, which he made to the court and outlined to me, Ms. Geiger was exercising pure speech, and the city and state were depriving her of the right to express a “sincerely held religious understanding that God created a man and a woman and that any other conception of a man and a woman violates God’s plan.”
What About the Rest of Us?
In the fall of 2023, Ms. Geiger began making plans to leave Michigan. She’s scouting new states, and plans, once she makes a move, to commute to work at her shop in Traverse City and to be with her kids. Her first hearing was held in February.
As the case makes its way through the courts, Ms. Geiger is posting more political content on her salon’s page, and
marketing free speech T-shirts and mugs. As she sees it, society went all-out to silence her. The last thing that she’s going to do now is knuckle under. Today, she’s eager to talk about the experience. When she spoke to me, wearing a green-brown dress, laughing low and easily, she projected camo-elegance: the bearing of a stylish free speech warrior.
Frighteningly, what Ms. Geiger saw in Michigan may soon be true throughout the country, thanks to powerful Washington nonprofits. Today,
these groups and state and local LGBT groups are a heavy presence in Michigan. Their likely effect has been profound, pushing to expand Elliott-Larsen’s decades-old public accommodations laws and pushing to have LGBT voters
considered for “communities of interest” districts to concentrate their political power in the name of combating discrimination.
If the Equality Act passes, the costs of these stealth institutional moves might finally become clear nationwide. People such as Ms. Geiger are warning the rest of us to stand up before worse comes. They’re also showing us another possibility: that, by standing up, we might discover something we like about ourselves.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
