A trans woman from St. Louis, MO is under investigation by the attorney general for using the women’s locker room at a LifeTime Fitness gym.
Eris Montano, a trans woman who is legally defined as female on her government-issued documents, joined her local LifeTime Fitness in St. Louis and used the locker room the following day. A woman who was in the locker room sauna approached Montano, misgendered her, and said she didn’t belong there. Montano argued with the woman that she was a real woman, tugging at her own bikini top to prove this point. She had a meeting with the manager of the gym before she had joined because she wanted to be more clear on the policies regarding trans members and found in using the gym that other patrons were largely welcoming of her.
A spokesperson for LifeTime, Natalie Bushaw, says that they are bound to follow the laws within each state (Missouri is one of 18 states that lacks legal repercussions for discrimination on the basis of gender/sexuality) but also showed the staff at the gym their copy of Montano’s driver’s license, where her gender is legally listed as female. LifeTime’s policies say that members are allowed to use the locker room that corresponds with the gender on their license, which would make Montano very much allowed to use the women’s locker room.
A protest happened the Friday after the harassment occurred by those sympathetic to the harasser, which drew the attention of Missouri’s Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey. Bailey sent a letter to LifeTime that misgendered Montano repeatedly, accused the location of “criminal behavior,” and stated his intent to enforce the laws violated by the gym and Montano herself. His precedent for indicting Montano under public trespassing (despite LifeTime’s aforementioned license policy) was a 2015 case of a man who was cited for trespassing a women’s gas station bathroom. To the knowledge of all involved in this case and hereafter, the man identified as cisgender and had intent to masturbate in the bathroom for several hours—The situations between this case and Montano’s case could not be more opposite.
The saga of which bathroom/locker room trans people can use has been an ongoing battle in the United States for the better part of the past decade. States such as Ohio have passed laws that disallow trans people from using the bathroom for the gender they align with. Montano added that she only changes clothes in the single-stall dressing rooms in the locker rooms. She said that she is “not there to see anyone else. (She is) there to change clothes and get the heck out of there.” Montano is not deterred by the negative attention and the attorney general’s threats and intends on continuing to return to the gym.
Photo courtesy of social media
