A transgender male war veteran has filed a lawsuit against a barbershop in California after it refused to cut his hair.
Kendall Oliver, an Army reserve sergeant who served in Afghanistan and who was born female but identifies as male, sued The Barbershop in Rancho Cucumonga after the shop denied his request for a haircut last March.
"What I'm looking for today is to make sure this never happens again to someone else," Oliver told NBC 4 Southern California.
Shop owner Richard Hernandez said he refused to cut Oliver's hair due to his religious beliefs.
"I have religious convictions that prevent me from cutting women's hair," said Hernandez, who belongs to the Church of God. He said his religious beliefs prevent him from cutting woman's hair even though it's from a transgender.
He added that "it is a shame for a man to have long hair. But if a woman has long hair, it is her glory," citing Corinthians 11:15.
"I don't want to be one who's taking away from her glory," Hernandez said.
But Oliver said the issue is about equal rights.
"Freedom of religion is important and it's protected," said lawyer Peter Renn of Lambda Legal, which works on behalf of LGBT rights. "What it doesn't do is give anyone the right to cause harm to someone else, or for one person to inflict their religious beliefs on someone else."
Hernandez explained that when "people go against what God has created, you start getting everything all out of whack."
Legal scholar Michael Helfand said the odds of the barber to implement such policy is extremely low and unless the owner managed the shop as a private club, it is considered public accommodation and cannot discriminate on the basis of sex.
He said unlike other states, California does not have a religious freedom law.
"In those states, he might have a fighting chance. In those states, a law that prohibited him from implementing his religious beliefs in his commercial enterprise—such a law might be deemed to actually substantially burden his religion, and therefore he'd be protected," Helfand said.
