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.
In his dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, John Marshall Harlan cited one of his objections to Louisiana’s public transit segregation law as being that it effectively left the execution of policy to railroad porters. Homer Plessy was a light-skinned Creole man whose family was free before the Civil War. He would have enjoyed roughly equal rights to Whites up until the first generation of Jim Crow laws in the 1870s. Harlan pointed out that the criteria for “White” and “Black” for the purposes of segregation was not solid, just being whoever was in charge of the segregated facilities looking at them and determining what they are.
There is nothing new under the Sun.
history doesn’t repeat but it sure does rhyme, as once said