Glasgow tragedy
Oh no, a 19-year-old was not allowed to order alcohol in a pub because the photo on xir id didn’t resemble xir. Tears ensued.
A transgender woman has spoken of her upset after she was refused service in a pub because staff did not think she looked like the person on her ID.
Savanna Galloway, 19, said she left Wetherspoons on Tuesday in tears after being told she would not be served.
She showed her passport to prove her age, but was told by two members of staff her picture did not resemble her.
Wetherspoons has issued the required groveling apology but has also said it still requires “‘a valid ID which resembles the person presenting it’ to be provided when proof of age is needed.” Because they could get a very stiff fine if they served alcohol to a 17-year-old.
The barman who came to deliver the drinks challenged Ms Galloway’s age and asked to see her ID.
She showed him her passport, but Ms Galloway said he told her: “That’s not you”.
He said her ID could not be accepted and sent for a manager, who agreed the passport was not acceptable.
Ms Galloway said she explained she was transgender, and even offered to remove her wig to show them what was underneath – as in the passport picture she had short hair.
But it was no use, and the poor little mite left the pub in tears. In tears.
It remains unclear what Wetherspoons could or should have done differently.
So does the passport say X gender? I wonder if (he/she) should simply get a new passport reflecting (his/her) current appearance? Might prevent some teary episodes?
Most Oppressed Minority Ever™
Finally. The popular trans rights phrase “they’re invalidating who I know I am” actually applies.
Tearful cos no beer that night? I wonder if the theatre was a performance of ‘femininity’.
Poor, blue Savanna sounds like a part-time trans to me. Short, man’s hair for the day job, fabulous wigs for the glamorous evenings in…erm…Wetherspoons.
For the benefit of non-Brits, Wetherspoons is a pub chain that works to a template, and their pubs are to a good night out what Steven Hawkings was to ballroom dancing.
How many times has this happened to someone who grew or shaved off a beard or mustache, dyed or restyled hair, gained or lost significant weight, or had facial injury or surgery? But THIS case is somehow noteworthy. You change how you look, be prepared for problems with your old ID card.
Sackbut, the same goes for the inevitable process of aging. If your ID isn’t updated quickly enough (and we have 5 year driver’s licenses here), you can age out of your picture. Of course, you will usually look quite a bit like yourself, but my sister, after she had chemo, looked almost nothing like herself.
Lots of things, and as you say, this is worthy of news? Poor, marginalized trans.
Reminds me a little of this story:
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/newspolitics/trans-woman-required-to-identify-as-male-by-immigration-canada-it-was-agony/ar-BB16Fl3S
So the upshot is that people who indulge in first world luxuries have first world problems? Because if the trans cult isn’t a first world indulgence then I don’t know what is.
Don’t really know how to say it… so, i’ll just say it and see how it goes.
We are here talking about a very young person. Because 19 is very young and at 19 you are still very much the product of what society around you made… well made you.
So, what I see here is an agenda, by the press, and an overly eager urge to be seen as a progressive section of the media (and contrarily on the right end of the political spectrum an eagerness to prove all progressive people ‘barmy’) and what I see above all is a victim of that agenda. So maybe a bit of kindness is required here.
My understanding of the British press is this: unless there is evidence to the contrary anybody who appears in the pages of a British newspaper is a victim of the British media…
Yes, fair point, Arnaud. My disgust was in fact at least as much at the BBC as at the young person, but I didn’t spell that out.
Still, people age 19 have some ability to think critically and question what they’re told; if they didn’t they couldn’t do well in higher education for instance. They’re young, their prefrontal cortex is still a work in progress, but they’re not children.
But you make a fair point.
I don’t think I agree… I think there is a very real possibility that the 19 year old – an adult, mind – is the one using the media, feeding the storyline of oppression. “Savanna” was told that the reason for being thrown out was non-resemblance to the provided ID, and chose instead to bleat about trans oppression. I’ve been thrown out of a casino at the age of about 19, ruining a group night out, because I forgot my ID and looked too young. I managed to not fall to pieces.
I agree, Holms. How did the BBC get onto the story? It’s not as though they have reporters in every town and city, hanging around the pubs and clubs on the off-chance some kid gets refused service because of a problem with I.D., and somebody being turned away is hardly an event that a reporter will pick up on in the normal course of things.
If there are potential ‘victims’ of the media as Arnaud suggests then they are the staff who refused to serve Galloway. What the BBC has failed to point out is that the staff have to err on the side of caution when deciding whether to serve somebody who may be underage as it is not the landlord or company that is fined for serving minors, it’s the member of staff who serves them (and who is likely to lose their job if convicted, too). Because it’s impossible to have worked in a pub for more than a couple of weeks without having had some kid try to use an elder siblings I.D., hoping that it gets no more than a cursory glance, then when the person doesn’t appear to match the picture on the I.D. the barstaff has no choice but to refuse service.
If young Galloway could extract his head from his anus for a spell he might understand that the staff weren’t engaging in transphobia, it was nothing personal, they were simply protecting their finances and their jobs.
This attempt at self-promoting as the latest martyr for the cause of faux-womanhood only serves to show Galloway to be just another selfish little me-me-me brat.
Yikes, I didn’t realize that about staff.
Yeah, I’ve worked in places that served alcohol, too, and you must be very careful about minors. I don’t know about British pubs, but it isn’t unusual in the US for there to be police plants who don’t give you a correct ID, or aren’t ID’d, or even who are underage people persuaded to work as a “plant” for the police to catch a hapless bartender being derelict. In my case, I wasn’t a bartender, I just worked at a pizza place, but same rules apply.
And I also know that challenging someone who doesn’t match their ID, or doesn’t show one, takes a certain amount of courage. Maybe not in the UK, but certainly in the US, where one is always uncertain about whether anyone in management will have your back when things get ugly.
So, yeah, I’m more sympathetic with the staff than the young-man-putting-on-a-wig-pretending-to-be-a-young-woman. In fact, it may have been a Yaniv type move, designed to get press and sympathy.
Yeesh, I’ve been sheltered. I worked in the restaurant biz in my youth but not in places that served alcohol, so I never had to deal with that so didn’t realize how fraught it is.
I lost 45 lbs. over the space of a year once. My driver’s license pic only somewhat resembled me afterward. So I got a new one, because I live in the real world, where people are neither clairvoyant nor clairsentient. These people have to deny the world as it is, because they deny themselves as they are. Is it any wonder that someone accustomed to having their claimed identity affirmed on request would have a hard time accepting it when reality intrudes?
Just to add to AoS’s information at #13 – the fine is £5000. It’s absolutely not worth the risk just to “be kind”. Not only do the police send young people with no / invalid (ha!) ID into these places when they have reason to believe that the law is being broken, some companies do this on a sort of “mystery shopper” basis. It’s just a bollocking and further training instead of a fine, but still, you want to avoid it. And it’s not even just about looking, or not looking 18 – the “Challenge 25” scheme means anyone looking younger than 25 gets asked for ID. The idea being that if you look like you’re 26, you’re pretty definitely 18. At this point, anyone under the age of about 30 expects to have to show proof of age occasionally, and if you’re 19, there’s no way you can imagine you’ll get away with looking massively different than your photo ID.
Fun fact: I was asked for proof of age by a cashier at B&Q last year when I was buying some kind of adhesive. I was 40. The cashier looked about 14. People are paranoid about this stuff.
Yes, that’s what is called the Challenge 21 (in some places Challenge 25): basically you are supposed to ask for ID anybody attempting to buy alcohol who looks under 21. All the points made here about licensing laws in Britain and how they are enforced are true. My point was NOT to criticize the bar and door staff, let’s be clear. This is, after all, what I do to earn a (meager!) living. As far as I can see they did absolutely nothing wrong. The number of tricks teenagers use to try to convince you they are of age! (One of my favourite was the clearly underage kid who showed me his tattoo: “Everybody knows you have to be 18 to have tatts!”) I don’t see why Wetherspoon’s thought they had to apologize so profusely either… But we are definitely fighting against the zeitgeist here.
Which was rather my point. If we argue that teens and young teens are being used by extreme TRAs for the furthering of their agenda, and that this, and the too-ready acceptance of their narrative by society at large, causes them damage, how can we not see them as anything but victims? (I may have gotten mixed up in my negatives, there… ‘can we NOT’, ‘as anything BUT’. Oh god, you will have to tell me!)
So yeah, I was definitely reacting to the (in my view) tone of some of the comments. And I am aware that calls for kindness and a gentler tone are often used to stifle criticism of any kind and to portray indignation as unhinged extremism. That doesn’t mean we have to forgo kindness altogether.
Heh, yes, that’s a tricky one. How can we see them as anything but [anything other than] victims? Or: how can we not see them as victims?
To add to what other Brits have said, it’s so common for the police to send underage drinkers into pubs in an attempt to catch-out the staff, the government regulates it.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/913507/13-537-code-of-practice-age-restricted-products.pdf
Note point 14(b)
“The test purchaser may be allowed or instructed to dress as a young person normally would for visiting the particular type of establishment where the test purchase(s) are to be attempted, and to wear such jewellery and make-up as he or she would normally wear for visiting that type of establishment”
So a heavily made-up youngster attempting to purchase alcohol would actually put the staff on alert.
Not only does the proprietor risk a fine and the loss of an alcohol licence (which would basically close down the establishment) the bar tender – almost certainly a young minimum-wage worker – would also face prosecution and a criminal record.
Arnaud, if it seemed like I was being snide to you, I wasn’t. I was being snide about the constant exhortations to be kind when what is actually meant is “shut up, stop thinking about how little sense any of this makes, and do as we say”. Maybe it’s kind to pretend to believe that a boy dressed up as a girl matches the ID photo of a boy, but nobody who sells age-restricted goods is going to risk a massive fine and their job to be kind.