Summary

Walmart fired Dani Davis, a 6’4" cisgender woman, after a man who mistook her for transgender verbally threatened her in a women’s restroom at a Florida store.

Davis, visibly shaken, reported the March 14 incident to her immediate supervisor but was fired for not informing salaried management, allegedly creating a “security risk.”

Davis called the firing discriminatory. After viral backlash, Walmart offered to reinstate her with back pay.

Davis, a longtime employee, is uncertain about returning, citing fears of a hostile work environment.

  • chetradley@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    When you’re so committed to “protecting women’s spaces” that you go into a women’s restroom to harass a woman.

  • cley_faye@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    So, she was fired because… some dude was wrong?

    Our society really likes to shit on women all the time, doesn’t it?

    • GlendatheGayWitch@lemmy.world
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      She was fired because a man (without affiliation with walmart) entered the women’s restroom and verbally assaulted her. He wasn’t just factually wrong assuming that a woman can’t be tall, he entered a space that he knew he wasnt supposed to enter.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Men entering women’s restrooms to use the restroom: Nightmarishly immoral

        Men entering women’s restrooms to harm a woman: Laudable and in the spirit of their Dear Leader

        In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Amy Dorris alleged that Trump accosted her outside the bathroom in his VIP box at the tournament in New York on 5 September 1997.

    • InputZero@lemmy.world
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      And low wage employees. It’s cheaper and easier to fire an employee than to confront a customer about their mistake. Remember kids, your job is only one crazy person’s ranting away from being taken away.

    • buddascrayon@lemmy.world
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      This is also taking place in Florida. A state that began horrible and has just doubled down on it in the last 20 years.

      • Tail11@lemmy.world
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        In 1977, Anita Bryant famously led the campaign claiming to “save the children from gays” during a vote in Miami-Dade County. While the law she supported was later overturned, Florida has long had a history of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment.

  • Granbo's Holy Hotrod@lemmy.world
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    WTF. For not informing salaried management? GTFO. She has a job to do and your bullshit corporate structure is dumb. Its a management failure for adding complexity where there shouldnt be any. Instead of any 360 introspection, they took what they thought was the easy way out. Salaried employee? Yeah, where was the manager when all this was happening? Great question. Not a brain cell fired, no pause at sanctioning harassment of employees. Walmart can suck it. Cheap disposable shit anyway. Leaches created the environment that requires their teet. Do all you can to shop direct and local.

    • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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      For a while now I’ve been paying attention to the way customers are treated, and noticed a kind of symmetry with how the employees of a given business/institution are treated. If you’re seeing one kind of abuse/neglect, the other is very likely to also be the case, because it all comes from the same place.

      In the case of Walmart: employees under a rather heavy yoke of part-time-no-benefits-never-unions labor, and customers are given a dis-compassionate choice between poorly made and barely viable goods from dubious origins. It’s not that management/ownership doesn’t care about this or that, it’s that they generally don’t care about people and are grotesque about it. It’s all here.

  • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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    3 days ago

    How the fuck can you reprimand someone for not reporting an incident properly when they report it to their supervisor? The supervisor’s responsibility at that point is to either inform the employee of the proper way to report it or report it on their behalf. If the report doesn’t come through properly then the supervisor has failed to fulfill their duties, not the other employee.

  • Doctor_Satan@lemm.ee
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    4 days ago

    This story is so depressing on so many levels.

    First and most obviously, we have a biological male entering a women’s bathroom to harass and threaten a biological woman because he doesn’t want biological males entering the women’s bathroom to harass and threaten biological women. Dumb redneck stared into the abyss and it stared back, as it always does. Congrats, dickhead. You are the thing you claim to hate.

    But then we have this shit:

    Dani Davis, who is queer, took to social media on March 24 and wrote a post about what she said happened while she was at work. The incident occurred on March 14 at the Walmart in Lake City, Florida. She noted she was a nearly seven-year employee of Walmart and holds several other part-time jobs, including the “joy and privilege" of tutoring "special-needs children as requested,” describing herself as a hard worker who has never been in trouble.

    How many more reminders do we need that Capitalism hates us and our employers don’t even see us as human? A person should not have to work “several part-time jobs”, one of which is with the biggest private employer on earth, just to get by.

    Does anyone else remember the ‘Hey Mon’ sketch from ‘In Living Color’ about an immigrant family that all had like 10 jobs each? It was supposed to be a joke to have to work that much to make ends meet. We weren’t supposed to make it a reality for everyone.

    I hate this world.

    • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Dani Davis, who is queer

      Ohhhhh

      None of this made much sense until then. This is why she was fired. Not capitalism or whatever bullshit you’re talking about.

    • ansiz@lemmy.world
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      Sorry to bust your bubble but that won’t happen. Walmart is infamous for drowning people that sue them in litigation until they are bankrupt.

      She’s free to sue them for sue but that at best will get her a small payout that her legal bills will immediately consume. That’s only if Walmart offered her a payout, I’d say in this political climate and in Florida they would just grind her down.

    • pyre@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      making sure there are no “biological males” stalking and harassing “biological females”… by stalking and harassing them himself. every accusation is a confession.

          • andros_rex@lemmy.world
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            Yes. It’s an amazing video, as every single video he’s made is - most TERFs use the same rhetorical strategies, and knowing how Posie Parker’s brain works teaches you a lot about how the TERF brain works. It’s conspiratorial delusions (trans women are hiding every where in secret to try to sexually assault cis women, big pharma is pushing people to become permanent patients, therapists hate butch lesbians and masculine women so much that they tell them they have to be men) which they are attempt to use to explain their generalized sense of fear and anxiety.

            They aren’t the Serena Joy’s but the “feminist” orgs who teamed up with her. Everyone forgets one of the lessons of Handmaid’s Tale - anti porn feminists teaming up with conservatives are what start the ball rolling. (A lot of TERF bloggers celebrate state porn id laws without realizing that lesbianism in itself will be considered pornographic).

  • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    It doesn’t really matter if she is trans or not IMO. nobody deserves to be treated like that.

  • Suavevillain@lemmy.world
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    Transphobia rots the brain. The fact the store still fired her is insane. I hope she just takes them to court instead of taking her old job back.

    • Boddhisatva@lemmy.world
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      Obviously he was just there to make sure everyone using the women’s restroom had and honest, God-given pussy.

    • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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      If he’s a man concerned about protecting murica against the scourge of the trans, and a donvict-supporting magoff, well, then, by Jehovah, it’s his right to be in that bathroom inspecting the genitalia of anyone in there.

      You know, to Protect Women and Girls ™.

  • Cool_Name@lemm.ee
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    It bares repeating, transphobia hurts cisgender people and transgender people.

    • aeshna_cyanea@lemm.ee
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      Is it really worth drawing significant attention to? It may feel nice as a gotcha but I really feel the emphasis should be that trans rights are worth protecting for their own sake

      • insaneinthemembrane@lemmy.world
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        Yeah it’s the same as “the patriarchy hurts men too”. It is worth pointing out in the sense that if some people aren’t free then no-one is free, but it also feels like we shouldn’t have to and we take the focus away from the ones that are most hurt.

      • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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        They are. But by pointing out that it hurts cis people too we attempt to move it from “it’s a shame that they treat you like that” to an understanding that transphobic rhetoric may hurt them or other cis people in their lives. Because the fact is, most cis people who love a trans person have maybe one or two of us in their lives. Some have a lot, but we’re a small minority that’s spread out. And maybe you love your cousin you see every few years, but are you going to riot so they can take a peaceful crap in a public restroom?

      • Cool_Name@lemm.ee
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        I don’t mean it as a gotcha. Clearly too many people don’t care about the rights and dignity of other people unless it affects them. I wish they did, but the current political climate makes it clear that they don’t.

        So I think this is worth bringing up to people about any social justice issue. Racism and nativism are used to control white workers. Patriarchy hurts men. Transphobia hurts cisgender people.

        However, it is crucial to communicate to people that these ideologies are fundamentally bad and need to be abolished or else people can walk away thinking “We need to implement transphobia the ‘right’ way so it stops hurting cis people.”

  • buddascrayon@lemmy.world
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    I would boycott Walmart but I already started boycotting them over a decade ago. I understand some people in tight financial situations need the lower prices they can get from places like Walmart. And therefore they cannot so freely boycott such a place but if you’re somebody who can avoid it I would advise steering clear of that shit hole. Their policies are trash and the family that owns it are oligarchical douche bags.

  • inb4_FoundTheVegan@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    “The voice was much louder than simply someone yelling in from the door. This man was fully IN the restroom, yelling something about” transgender women, Davis wrote.

    Davis said the man yelled he was going to “beat" them and was going to “protect his wife/girlfriend from them” while his wife or girlfriend was pleading with him to stop and leave before he got into trouble.

    Davis wrote she was scared and froze, not knowing if the man was going to physically attack her.

    So to protect cis women, he is threatening and scaring cis women.

    • Hellahunter@lemmy.world
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      What a total douche. Also, how does Walmart come to the conclusion that firing this woman was for the best?

      Like they tried to save face and make up for it, but it was too little too late.

      Walmart has been and will always be garbage.

    • FreeHat@lemmy.world
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      I find it fascinating that guys like this usually have a wife/girlfriend who somehow excuses their behavior like WTF is in their head? Are they stupid or just as shitty as the person they’re following around?