A FRENCH EMPLOYMENT tribunal found that a hair salon manager was not being homophobic when he called a fired employee a “dirty faggot”.
The wrongful dismissal case was taken by a Parisian employee in 2015 but the details are now being reported after part of the judgement was tweeted by French reporter Mathieu Brancourt and went viral.
HuffingtonPost.fr reports that case in question relates to a hairdresser who was sacked from work after he didn’t come in on day he was ill.
The boss then accidentally sent the employee a message that translates as:
I am not going to keep [the employee]. I don’t have a good feeling about this guy. He’s a dirty faggot.
After he was sacked, the employee took a wrongful dismissal case that also highlighted what he said was homophobic abuse.
But in the court’s ruling it found that the French term ‘PD’, or ‘faggot’, was not homophobic because “hairdressers regularly employ homosexuals”.
BBC News translated the highlighted text as:
If we put it in the context of the field of hairdressing, the council considers that the term ‘faggot’ used by a manager cannot be considered as a homophobic insult, because hair salons regularly employ gay people, notably in female hairdressers, and that poses no problem at all.
Civil Rights group Défenseur des droits says it will be assisting the man in his appeal.
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