An 18-year-old British woman says she was asked to leave a popular gay nightclub in Manchester after staff deemed her wheelchair a “safety risk.”
Maddie Haining, of Oldham, told the BBC she was out with a friend on April 11 and had visited several bars before heading to Club Tropicana on Canal Street in Manchester’s Gay Village. Within five minutes of entering, she says a bar manager asked her to leave.
In a video recorded by her friend and later posted to Instagram, Haining is seen speaking with the manager, whose face is blurred. She says she showed him the United Kingdom’s 2010 Equality Act — which prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities — and told him that asking her to leave was discriminatory.
Haining also said in the video that the manager threatened to pass along any fines the venue might incur for violating its fire code to her.
Haining — who called the incident “embarrassing and infuriating” — told the BBC that when she arrived, security staff helped lift her wheelchair into the venue and told her and her friend there was no problem with them being there.
But when her friend went to the bar to buy a drink, security staff told her they were “really sorry” but had been instructed to ask her to leave. She demanded to speak to the manager, who she described as “horribly rude.” That conversation was filmed by her friend.
She said the manager told her she was a “safety risk.”
“I asked ‘how was I a safety risk?’ If I was a safety risk, they wouldn’t have let me in in the first place,” Haining said. “They wouldn’t explain why, and then the story changed to that I was a fire risk.”
She said she had never encountered a similar situation, but as a person with disabilities, she was familiar with her rights under the Equality Act. The law requires venues to make reasonable adjustments to ensure access for disabled people, such as adding ramps or lifts, and refusing entry based on a person’s disability could violate those protections. The manager did not back down.
After Haining posted the video to social media, Club Tropicana faced backlash online, with many people criticizing the nightclub. Its Instagram account appears to have been taken down.
Initially, the nightclub said it had not been contacted directly by Haining but was aware of the incident, adding that an investigation was underway.
Club Tropicana later announced the results of its investigation and issued an apology to Haining, reportedly telling her the manager she spoke to had been fired, according to the British media group LADbible. The nightclub also said it would review its staff training procedures and consider adding accessibility improvements to prevent a similar situation, according to The Manchester Evening New.
“We take full responsibility as business owners for the treatment of Maddison on the night,” the nightclub’s owners said in a statement. “It was completely indefensible, unacceptable and appalling. Once again we offer our sincerest apologies to Maddison for the stress and embarrassment that she experienced in our venue.”
The Montana Supreme Court upheld a lower court order blocking the state from enforcing policies that prevent transgender people from obtaining identity documents that reflect their gender identity.
In 2021, Montana lawmakers passed a law restricting transgender people from obtaining birth certificates that reflect their gender identity unless they provide a court order showing they have undergone gender confirmation surgery. Two transgender people challenged the law, and a district judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking its enforcement.
The U.S. Department of Education has terminated agreements with five school districts and a college that required schools to follow an interpretation embraced by the Biden and Obama administrations extending sex-discrimination protections to transgender students.
The move marks the first known instance of the Trump administration terminating civil rights settlements previously negotiated with schools or school districts.
The five school districts -- Cape Henlopen School District in Delaware, which serves Rehoboth Beach; Fife School District in Washington State; Delaware Valley School District in Pennsylvania; La Mesa-Spring Valley School District in California; and Sacramento City Unified School District -- along with Taft College in California's Central Valley, reached those agreements with past administrations following alleged incidents of discrimination involving transgender or nonbinary students.
Poland’s Supreme Administrative Court has ordered a local civil registry to record the marriage of a Polish same-sex couple who wed in Germany in 2018.
The case involved JC-T, who holds both Polish and German citizenship, and MT, a Polish national. The couple married in Germany while living there under EU free-movement rules. When they later returned to Poland, local authorities refused to register their marriage, citing the constitution’s definition of marriage as between a man and a woman.
The couple challenged the decision, and after exhausting their appeals in Polish courts, the case went to the Court of Justice of the European Union. The court was asked to clarify whether EU law -- including free-movement rights and the EU Charter’s ban on discrimination -- requires countries that do not allow same-sex marriage to recognize valid marriages from other member states.
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