Gender stories in town
Station10 salon in Longueuil was ordered to pay $500 recently because their offerings were divided into styles for men and women, and a nonbinary client brought a complaint before the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal, claiming this made them a victim of discrimination.
The salon is appealing, supported by the Association Coiffure Québec, who hold that this decision affects every salon in the province and possibly other kinds of business as well.
In tangentially related news, a teacher has gone to court saying her Charter rights were infringed when she was ordered not to tell a student’s parents that they had adopted male pronouns at school. In Quebec, students aged 14 and up are permitted to do this at school without the parents being informed. Details have had to be omitted from this story, so it’s not easy to discern whether the teacher was afraid she might let something slip to parents and find herself in trouble, or holds a more unfavourable view about the issue.
jeather 17:13 on 2026-03-11 Permalink
They phoned the salon to ask for help and the salon refused to do anything. After they went to the court, then the salon could suddenly change their website. I’m not particularly sympathetic to the salon in this story. So what if salons have to change pricing from men/women to hair length (women’s cuts are often separated by length as it is) or time taken or some other metric?
Kate 18:25 on 2026-03-11 Permalink
I’ve heard that most salons impose a “pink tax” but it’s unavoidably true that many women want more complex cuts and hair treatments than most men do.
I’ve never been involved in that world so I don’t know how it might disadvantage a salon to have to post a list of prices with no reference to gender.
jeather 19:35 on 2026-03-11 Permalink
And if they want a more complex cut it treatment or just have more hair it is fine that it costs more.
I assume it is just inconvenient to change, since, as we have noted, the salon in question went to gender neutral options.
bob 19:52 on 2026-03-11 Permalink
This hair thing had nothing to do with pricing. It had to do with an online form that had only two options, “male” and “female”, for booking a haircut online.
I note with some irony that the video accompanying the story seems to indicate that the complainant has no hair.
Ian 19:57 on 2026-03-11 Permalink
Lots of businesses in Ontario that got fined for not having WCAG standard accessibility on their transactional websites complained, too. If you have a commercial website, you have reponsibilities to the public. I know a LOT of coders that are making a solid livelihood out of accessibility compliance.
This may not be on the same level as a bank whose website can’t be tab-navigated or a grocery store whose online ordering system isn’t accessible to a text-to-speech system … but rights are rights, it’s not up to the business to pick & choose. You don’t like it, don’t have booking on your site, only accept bookings by phone or in person.
As far as the 14 year old goes, that is the age at which BY LAW doctors and teachers etc are not allowed to tell parents anythign unless the kid consents. It is specifically to make sure that kids can get sexual health services or report abuse. As a parent I understand how it is frustrating when your kid is having trouble communicating their needs to a doctor but having known lots of people that were abused or their parents simply flipped out when they found out they were having sex, I totally see the point.
Ian 19:59 on 2026-03-11 Permalink
@bob in the US there are blind people that are hired by law firms to go to various bank sites to test them out for accessibility, and if the site is not accessible, they get a class action suit launched agianst them under accessibility law. It might seem predatorial but if someone has their right being violated, it’s not about whether they wanted to open an account … or in this case, get a haircut.
Ephraim 22:16 on 2026-03-11 Permalink
This is exactly why I am becoming more cynical about the word “woke.” The world is facing massive, pressing issues, yet we are stuck focusing on whether someone is offended by choosing between a “male” or “female” haircut.
We have hundreds of people living on the streets without homes. In the face of that, it seems trivial to complain about a menu that describes a style of cut rather than what is in a person’s pants. Nobody was asking them to flash their genitals just to get a specific price. Or did I miss that? Were they required to show their genitals for pricing? Is that going to be the new norm? We all have to show our genitals to get accurate haircut pricing?
MarcG 07:46 on 2026-03-12 Permalink
In order to understand issues like this, it could be helpful to imagine yourself in a similar situation. For example, we know that Kate has red hair, which is somewhat rare and perhaps part of her identity. She could, without too much difficulty, consider a world where her hair colour was the source of great suffering throughout her life – something for which she was mocked, shamed, mistrusted, outcast, threatened, denied employment, etc. On a daily basis she encounters a society that excludes her: Blonde and Brunette bathrooms, Blonde and Brunette holidays, etc. She notices that the local hair salon she walks by every day only has Blonde and Brunette options and wonders if this might be an opportunity to change something.
Ephraim 07:53 on 2026-03-12 Permalink
People with afros will tell you that their hair needs special treatment. So, should they sue a hairdresser who says that they don’t have the skill to do their hair? Waxing female and male genitalia takes different skills, so do I use the waxer because they don’t know how to do male genitals? Or do I go to the appropriate shop?
MarcG 08:32 on 2026-03-12 Permalink
“miss the forest for the trees”: to not understand or appreciate a larger situation, problem, etc., because one is considering only a few parts of it
jeather 10:05 on 2026-03-12 Permalink
Men and women do not have different hair. They have different traditional hair styles, yes, but there’s no rule saying which style you need to choose. No one is saying that the stylist needs to do balayage if they don’t feel able to do it, but if they can do it, it’s the same process on men with shoulder length hair as on women.
DavidH 10:16 on 2026-03-12 Permalink
This reminds me of Révolutions Cycles, the bike shop/hair salon in the Village that advertised ‘lesbian haircuts for everyone’. They were onto something.
Kate 15:00 on 2026-03-12 Permalink
MarcG: Except nobody refused to give the person a haircut. All they had to do was book, go in and describe what they wanted. Nobody was telling them to keep away.
But, as bob noticed, the subject of this story appears to have a shaved head. Was a haircut really the point of this story at all?
MarcG 15:27 on 2026-03-12 Permalink
It appears that my attempt to illustrate that it has nothing to do with haircuts or genitalia and everything to do with rights, safety, and inclusion for all, missed the mark.
Shaved heads need to be re-shaved pretty frequently to keep the cueball look, unless you really have no hair to grow back.
H. John 16:03 on 2026-03-12 Permalink
Migneault, who is non-binary, explained that because of medical treatments they were loosing their hair which made them self-conscious. They saw the ad for Station10 in the Metro offering a service that billed by the minute based on the service chosen “if booked online.” Drawn to the opportunity to pay less for a haircut, they went to the website.
The web site required the choice of male, female, or child.
Migneault, a non-binary rights activist, had gone as far as going on a hunger strike to pressure the Government of Quebec to allow an ‘X’ (non-binary) gender marker on provincial health insurance cards (RAMQ). Quebec had begun allowing ‘X’ markers on birth and death certificates, but Migneault and other advocates highlighted that the RAMQ and other agencies were slow to adapt, with the health board initially stating its systems could not support the change.
in September 2025, the CAQ government proposed a ban on gender-neutral language (such as “iel” or “toustes”) in official government communications, although they stated that the ‘X’ marker would remain available on certain documents.
It doesn’t seem difficult to understand why Migneault would be the last person you wanted to try and force to choose traditional gender markers.
After seeing the web site, Migneault tried to make an appointment by phone. Salon10 doesn’t make appointments by phone. Migneault tried to make an appointent in person at the salon. Migneault was told it has to be done on the website and to just choose one or the other, and it could be worked out when they showed up for the appointment. When Migneault tried email the salon wrote that if that wasn’t acceptable they could look elsewhere.
Migneault went to the Human Rights Commission. They investigated and agreed, based on Quebec law, that Migneault had been discriminated against. The Commission made a recommendation for a resolution that Station 10 chose to ignore.
The next step was for the Commission to decide whether or not to take the case to the Human Rights Tribunal for a formal hearing. It assesses if a complaint is “well-founded” based on evidence. If substantiated, the Commission considers the public interest, the severity of the rights violation, and the possibility of a remedy to decide whether to bring the case to the Human Rights Tribunal. In this case, it chose not to proceed, leaving it to Migneault to proceed if they wanted.
Migneault chose to hire lawyers and take the case to the Tribunal. The Tribunal ruled in Migneault’s favour on one of the three claims, moral damage, and awarded them $500. Both sides have to pay for their own legal costs.
https://www.canlii.org/fr/qc/qctdp/doc/2026/2026qctdp5/2026qctdp5.html
Station10 chose to appeal the decision.
Ian 17:01 on 2026-03-12 Permalink
Thanks for the précis, H. John.
This goes well beyond “woke”. Providing a non-binary option literally takes no effort, and improving accessibility benefits everyone.
Kate 17:04 on 2026-03-12 Permalink
MarcG: I disagree that I missed the point. We all have to live with the existential conditions of our lives.
Kate 17:05 on 2026-03-12 Permalink
Is this accessibility, though? This is not a person in a wheelchair confronted by stairs.
Ian 18:05 on 2026-03-12 Permalink
It’s an accessibility issue in the way that gendered bathrooms are an accessibility issue.
|It’s not even so much about the binary, it’s the underlying normativity that is an issue.
Tim S. 09:24 on 2026-03-13 Permalink
So they never actually refused to cut the hair?
I get the idea that it’s about normalizing the non-binary option, I just find it odd that a random hairdresser happens to get contacted by an activist who takes issue with their website setup and ends up before a tribunal. That seems like a pretty unfair way to achieve social change, and I have some sympathy for a worker/small business owner who shows up at work one morning really not intending to be part of a culture war, and yet..
Tim S. 09:54 on 2026-03-13 Permalink
On the other hand, if I had showed up in person to resolve an issue caused by an inadequate website, and was just told to go back to the website, well, I see the temptation to escalate.