A unisex salon refused to give a manicure to a gender-fluid singer ‘because the beautician is Muslim and cannot touch a man’, reports Metro.

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Andrea Di Giovanni, 26, said Style Studio in Wimbledon, London, called them an hour before his manicure appointment on May 19.

After hearing Andrea’s voice and asking about their gender, they allegedly said ‘you’re a man’ and then cancelled his appointment. The salon claims it refused Andrea before seeing them and without knowing they were gender-fluid – assuming they were a man from their voice.

Andrea said:

When she first called up and asked me directly, “Are you a man or a woman?” I was puzzled, because that question asked with that intention felt transphobic anyway.

There was a way to go about it – who calls up a customer one hour before an appointment to inquire about their gender?

They advertise themselves as a unisex salon. The only-female treatment listed on the website is massages, which is fair enough.

It just felt very suspicious. Were they going through their bookings looking for people to call out?

If you call yourself a unisex salon, you should have employees who can do treatment on queer folks (instead of men) – trans women are women anyway, so the assumption that I’m a man is already transphobic.

Oh dear.

Style Studio’s director, who would only give the name Maria, said she had called Andrea to ask about changing their appointment, heard their voice and told them the salon’s beautician was Muslim and does not manicure men.

At this stage not having seeing the person on the other side of the line, the beautician could not in any way discriminate the client on the basis of being transgender or non-binary.

Andrea however believes Maria is using her beautician’s religion to ‘dodge accountability’.

She was shifting the blame to the religion of her employee – and it’d still be discrimination. Religion doesn’t exempt somebody from discriminating.

If she’d [Maria] called me and told me about the situation, apologised and said “how can we find a way around this”,  it still would have been bad but I wouldn’t have gone full throttle.

I just wanted a manicure, for f**k’s sake.

Welp, that’s quite the conundrum for aggressively woke types. Who do you side with – the Muslim salon worker who is following the rule of their religion or the gender-binary person who just wants a manicure? Whichever side you go with on this one you’re going to be accused of some kind of prejudice or phobia.

Sure enough, Andrea is trying to get the salon removed from Treatwell recommendations:

. @Treatwelluk this salon shouldn’t be listed on your website. It’s disgusting. I hope you take some action. Being discriminated for my identity is an actual CRIME.

— Andrea Di Giovanni ~ ADG✨ STREAM REBEL OUT NOW! (@andreadgiovanni) May 19, 2021

Salon director Maria argued that not serving Andrea was respecting her beautician’s right to freedom of religion:

We have had numerous male clients previously enquiring about the beauty services and had no issue with anybody after clarifying the circumstances and reasons for not being able to provide the service in question.

Clients always had respect and understanding towards the religious beliefs and rights of our beautician.

I am actually quite shocked and outraged that this situation had been taken out of context at such great level and has been turned into an issue of discrimination against transgender and non-binary community, when this fact is irrelevant to the whole situation in question.

Well if that’s true and the worker has refused to work with certain clients before due to religion (whether that in itself is right or wrong), then I don’t think it’s really necessary for Andrea to be throwing his toys out of the pram like this. Just go get your manicure done somewhere else – simple. Then again does Andrea look like the sort of person who was ever NOT gonna make a fuss about this? They’re a gender-fluid Italian ‘pop star’ ffs! Not going down quietly, that’s for sure.

For the non-binary Londoner who is getting surgery to transform themselves into a ‘genderless monster’, click HERE. Whatever floats your boat I guess.