Despite relative progress in diversity, a new report highlights that the many British retailers still have mainly white boardroom members and inclusion is still a tough “nut to crack”.
Published by the British Retail Consortium, the 2024 Diversity and Inclusion in UK Retail Report revealed that despite dedication to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), 35 per cent of British retailers still have an all-white boardroom and more than half lack any ethnic diversity on executive committees.
However, the report does paint a picture of progress, not least for queer members of staff: 67 per cent of retailers now have at least one queer person in a leadership role.
Meanwhile, the number of women in the boardroom have jumped from 32 per cent in 2021 to 42 per cent in 2024, while ethnic-minority representation has risen from 4.5 to 12 per cent.
On the flip side, the report highlights the lack of role models for disabled employees with only 11 per cent of companies having a disabled senior leader, down from 17 per cent in 2023.
Pinpoint policies towards trans inclusion and social mobility
UK retailers are choosing to ignore recent comments from equalities minister Kemi Badenoch – who believes DEI initiatives “divide, rather than unify” – with 98 per cent having a co-ordinated strategy towards such campaigns and policy.
And eighty-eight per cent of companies have LGBTQ+ initiatives woven into their DEI strategy, with specific initiatives dedicated to the experience of trans and non-binary employees.
The report points out some respondents mentioning that launching trans-inclusive activities is a strong symbol of support to the wider LGBTQ+ community.
Inclusion is ‘nut the industry still needs to crack’
There is still much work to be done, however.
The UK retail sector has an estimated 3.5 million employees, with most working at store level and many feeling a lack of inclusion.
Those feelings are most prominent among those who chose “other” or “prefer not to say” when it comes to their sexual orientation, Black/African/Caribbean employees, and those aged between 25 and 34.
The chief executive of the British Retail Consortium, Helen Dickinson, said:“I am proud to see the strides retailers have made in three years to improve diversity, especially at a time when D&I could easily have been relegated to the side lines in the face of a turbulent economic backdrop.
“But inclusion is the nut the industry still needs to crack. The progress made on diversity will only be meaningful and effective when it happens in tandem with a workforce where every employee feels happy and included.”
Elon Musk is officially a danger to society. As of mid May of 2024, X.com, the platform formerly known as Twitter, has started banning accounts that use the word “cisgender” or “cis,” deriding it as a slur. For those who don’t know, “cisgender” refers to any person whose gender aligns with the genitalia they were assigned at birth. Erasing the word “cisgender” from tweets, or X.com remarks, ensures that gender nonconforming people can’t articulate the bigotry they feel in this world.
Musk has been notorious for his transphobia. It didn’t just start in mid-May of this year. In June of 2023, during Pride month, Musk liked a bunch of transphobic tweets. For instance, he promoted the Matt Walsh documentary, “What is a Woman?”, which was a film in transmisogyny.
Moreover, in July of 2022, Musk’s transgender teenage daughter sought separation from her father because he was hateful toward her and bullied her because of her gender identity. In December 2022, Musk tweeted “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” mocking the words that transgender people need to enunciate who we are. This wasn’t the first time that Musk mocked pronouns.
Musk is becoming increasingly dangerous toward trans people, especially as X.com takes on a new dimension — turning into a warped platform that spews conspiracy views, including right-wing thoughts that trans people shouldn’t exist, and other ultraconservative opinions.
What adds heavy weight to the danger that Musk poses is the relative success of his companies and the wealth, measured in dollars, that he carries on his shoulders. SpaceX is valued at around $180 billion, and Tesla is worth approximately $571 billion. The more wealth Musk accumulates, the more power is attached to his transphobia. Already, he is consciously allowing employees within his companies to mock transgender people. Having a CEO who openly teases a marginalized population is a recipe for that company to tease said population as well.
As a former small business owner, I’m actually a huge fan of Musk’s work. The billionaire is brilliant beyond belief, and, after being bullied in school in South Africa, earned degrees in physics and economics from the University of Pennsylvania. At one point, he was working so hard on one of his first startups that he often slept in the office and showered at a local YMCA. In interviews, it is clear that Musk borders, if not embodies, genius. His intellectual prowess is second to none.
Additionally, the mogul has been open about his diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome and bipolar disorder. It’s impressive, to say the least, that Musk has racked up all of these accomplishments despite having these diseases of the mind and body. He has vocalized his use of ketamine therapy, for instance, in treating his bipolar, which is a ballsy move to make as CEO.
Unfortunately, though, Musk just won’t stop with his transphobia. He is making X.com a non-democratic place for sponsored conspiratorial speech, and banning words is the farthest thing from freedom, which is a virtue he claims to embody.
Many scholars of Elon have noted that he lives in a distorted reality, and I have to agree with that sentiment. Banning “cisgender” from X.com is certainly a distorted thing to do, and should be looked upon as a danger to society.
Isaac Amend is a writer based in the D.C. area. With two poetry books out, he writes for the Blade and the Yale Daily News. He is a transgender man and was featured in National Geographic’s “Gender Revolution” documentary. He serves on the board of the LGBT Democrats of Virginia. Contact him at isaac.amend35@gmail.com or on Instagram at: @literatipapi.
Rural retail chain company Tractor Supply are facing calls for a boycott for, amongst other things, donating money to diversity and inclusion causes, which included projects that support LGBTQ+ youth.
Right-wing activist Robby Starbuck, who directed the controversial, gender-critical, anti-LGBTQ+ documentary The War on Children, recently took to X (formerly Twitter) to call out Tractor Supply for their diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) work, including: “having Pride month decorations in their office.”
As well as complaining about Tractor Supply’s “LGBTQ+ training for employees, funding pride/drag events, they have a DEI Council, funding sex changes, climate change activism, pride month decorations in the office, DEI hiring practices and LGBTQ+ events at work,” Starbuck also singled out their donations to non-profits.
In a follow up tweet, he wrote: “Wow, Tractor Supply bragged in one of their yearly reports that they donated more than $570,000 to DEI, including LGBTQ+ YOUTH! Yes, Tractor Supply thinks kids can be trans and they support it by the looks of this. How many of their customers know this?”
He attached an image to the tweet, which seems to be a screenshot. It reads: “In 2021, Tractor Supply donated more than $570,000 to DE&I causes, benefitting veterans, persons with disabilities, LGBTQ+ youth, Hispanic Team Members, women and Black and African Americans.”
The screenshot appears to have been taken from a sustainability report released by Tractor Supply in 2022, titled “Stewards of Life Out Here“.
Robby Starbuck on set during taping of “Candace” on July 12, 2021 in Nashville, Tennessee. (Getty)
Starbuck described these donations as “woke priorities” in his lengthy tweet, which was accompanied by an over seven-minute long video where he speaks to camera about the rural “seed and feed” store. The video starts with Starbuck sharing pictures of Pride month screensavers on Tractor Supply’s in-house staff TVs.
The combined tweet and video has had over two million views on X so far.
The majority of replies to the tweet called for a boycott of Tractor Supply over their DEI practices, which are standard in most workplaces. One top reply says: “My husband was just looking at some fencing they have, well over 1000.00. Bet he changes his mind when I show him this later today.”
According to recent figures, many Fortune 500 companies in the US have DEI initiatives. In 2023, 154 Fortune 500 companies released diversity disclosures, nearly double the 79 of 2022, according to a report from marketing firm Purpose Brand. Whether Starbuck intends to go after all 154 of them remains to be seen.
She says she had been asked to do an interview about how the lives and mental health of LGBTQ+ people were being affected by bans and restrictions on drag performances and gender-affirming care.
Electronika shared emails from the production team with Rolling Stone, which show that when they first approached her, the producers offered her the opportunity to participate in an upcoming documentary “tentatively titled It Takes A Village from an award winning director.”
She was told that It Takes A Village intended “to delve deeper [into] exposing how these recent drag bans and gender-affirming care bans have been made, look at how it has affected the mental health of trans people and look forward into what future progress will look and sound like.”
“When I saw Mr. Starbuck walk through the hallway, I was like, ‘Wait a minute. I know this f**ker,” Electronika told Rolling Stone, adding, “they tried to convince me to stay and I said, ‘You need to stop recording right now.’ The little red light kept going … and then they wouldn’t stop.”
Tractor Supply is far from the only retail chain that has faced boycott calls over DEI and Pride initiatives in recent years, though a rural supply company is certainly an unusual target for the right.
In fact, just today, right-wingers decided to take aim at IKEA’s rainbow Pride charity cake. To mark Pride Month 2024, the UK branch of the Swedish furniture chain announced its popular rainbow cake is back in its restaurants and will be sold throughout June, with 100 per cent of the profits going to LGBT+ Switchboard.
Bigots, of course, were naturally outraged by the existence of this multi-coloured confectionery.
Each year for the last six, gay advocacy group Out Leadership has produced an index gauging the business climate for gay and transgender people state by state, mapping out where they can live and work with the least discrimination and hardship.
Last year as anti-LGBTQ+ bills swarmed statehouses across the country, the average score for all 50 states dropped for the first time.
New York was the highest-ranking state in LGBTQ+ equality for the fourth year in a row, scoring 93.67 out of a possible 100 points. Arkansas was the lowest-ranking state for the second straight year, scoring an all-time low of 27 points.
2024 alone, over 500 anti-LGBTQ laws were introduced in state legislatures across the nation. Even more alarmingly, for the second year in a row, the Out Leadership State LGBTQ+ Business Climate Index has found that the political, social, and economic standing of LGBTQ+ Americans has declined.
The changes in this year’s Index reflect prevailing trends in American politics and culture. As we enter an election year, the political and cultural environment in the United States has become increasingly polarized with LGBTQ+-friendly states becoming increasingly inclusive while the worst states for equality become evermore hostile to equality and freedom.
Now, more than ever, businesses need to leverage their economic power to propel LGBTQ+ equality forward in the states in which they conduct business. In doing so, businesses will simultaneously benefit from the favorable business conditions created by a free and inclusive economy.
Launch Video
Six years ago, Out Leadership launched its first State LGBTQ+ Business Climate Index in the US. This index provides leaders with a roadmap to better understand the many challenges still facing LGBTQ+ Americans. In 2024 alone, over 500 anti-LGBTQ+ laws were introduced nationwide.
Before the State LGBTQ+ Business Climate Index, there was no single factual source that served to explain both the issues at hand and their impact. The Index highlights the issues, demonstrates the economic cost of discrimination, and, more importantly, highlights the economic opportunity enjoyed by states that are more LGBTQ+ inclusive.
The climate index ranks all 50 US states across 5 key categories, and measures them in every US state. The categories are:
Legal and Nondiscrimination Protections
Youth and Family Support
Political and Religious Attitudes
Health Access and Safety
Work Environment and Employment
Each section totaled 20 points and accounted for 1/5 of the Index total.
Our scoring process is transparent and meaningful. All the data used in the study is publicly available and objective. We are grateful to our key partners: the Movement Advancement Project and the Williams Institute who graciously shared this data.
The administration of President Joe Biden is urging tech and financial industries to help stop the spread of abusive, AI-generated “deepfake” sexual images used to harass real-life school kids and educators — particularly girls, women, and gay kids in schools. These images can ruin their lives, the Biden Administration says, but current school policies and laws don’t provide consistent ways to prevent their dissemination.
“As generative [artificial intelligence] broke on the scene, everyone was speculating about where the first real harms would come. And I think we have the answer,” said Biden’s chief science adviser Arati Prabhakar, director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, according to Fortune. “If you’re a teenage girl, if you’re a gay kid, these are problems that people are experiencing right now.”
Sexual deepfakes place an individual’s face onto a naked body or a sexually explicit scene. These images are then distributed to students online as a way to humiliate and harass others in schools.
“[Creating sexual deepfakes] used to take roughly between 100-200 photos of the victim’s face; you had to have a high-powered computer; you had to have a good amount of technical ability and skill,” said Omny Miranda Martone, chief of the Virginia-based nonprofit Sexual Violence Prevention Association. “Now … you only need one or two photos.”
The Biden Administration will release a document on Thursday asking AI developers, online payment processors, financial institutions, cloud computing providers, search engines, and Apple and Google to restrict applications that help generate and distribute sexually explicit deepfakes for profit, Politicoreported.
The administration has already gotten voluntary promises from Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and other major tech companies to help minimize any harm caused by new AI systems before they’re publicly released. However, those commitments “[don’t] change the underlying need for Congress to take action here,” said Jennifer Klein, director of the White House Gender Policy Council.
Current laws criminalize the production and possession of sexual images of children, even if the images have been entirely fabricated by AI image-generators. In fact, 20 states have already criminalized the dissemination of nonconsensual AI-generated pornographic images. Some states also have laws forbidding the distribution of “revenge porn” (that is, sexually explicit images released without the photographed individual’s consent). But, it can be difficult to identify the individuals and companies behind the online, fly-by-night AI image-generating tools that make it easy to spread sexual deepfakes.
Worse yet, no federal laws or guidelines tell school administrators how to respond when such images appear in educational environments, causing the consequences (or lack thereof) to vary wildly depending on where such incidents arise.
Schools can investigate such deepfakes as a violation of Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination in schools, according to Esther Warkov, executive director and co-founder of the nonprofit Stop Sexual Assault in Schools. In new Title IX rules released by the Biden Administration earlier this year, online sex-based harassment includes “nonconsensual distribution of intimate images that have been altered or generated by AI technologies.” The rules also require schools to address online and off-campus actions that create a hostile learning environment.
“This points to a larger need, which is to ensure that [a school district’s] Title IX procedures are properly in place,” Warkov told Politico. “Many school districts may not identify this problem as a potential Title IX issue.”
Without a federal law or guidelines, it’s unclear who gets disciplined, how minors get treated, and who must report such images to the police, especially since some school districts don’t require employees to report such images to legal authorities at all. The patchwork of existing policies and statewide laws can leave victims feeling unprotected.
“We’re pushing lawmakers to update [laws] because most protections were written way before AI-generated media,” Ronn Nozoe, CEO of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, said, according to Politico. “We’re also calling on the Department of Education to develop guidance to help schools navigate these situations.”
Earlier this month, the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse released a report explaining prevention, support, and accountability efforts for government agencies combating these images. The report said that the Department of Education will soon issue “resources, model policies, and best practices” for preventing online harassment in schools.
The White House also issued a “call to action” this week, urging Congress to pass legislation providing legal recourse for survivors. In the meanwhile, a bipartisan group of congressional legislators is scrambling to tackle the issue.
Senator Richard J. Durbin (D-IL) has drafted the DEFIANCE Act, an amendment to the Violence Against Women Act that would give victims of sexual deepfakes the right to sue creators, solicitors, possessors, and distributors of the images for $150,000 in damages and legal fees if the perpetrators “knew or recklessly disregarded” the victims’ non-consensuality before disseminating the images.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) also recently introduced legislation to fine perpetrators $500,000 for disseminating such images. However, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who is herself a victim of deepfake porn and a supporter of the DEFIANCE Act, has said that some legislators are reluctant to pursue any such legislation for fear that it could infringe on free speech rights or the operation of larger tech companies.
“Going really big, really fast, with something regulatory in an emerging industry space — that can oftentimes run into its challenges,” she said. “Centering the bill on survivors’ rights — particularly the right of action — helps us dodge some of those larger questions in the short term and build a coalition in the immediate term.”
Those were just some of the flash points in last year’s Pride merch madness that tested consumer brands’ relationships with the LGBTQ+ community.
After all the boycotts and right-wing outrage, where do companies stand when it comes to this year’s Pride merch offerings and allyship?
Pretty much where they’ve always been, according to a new survey.
Data from corporate executives and Fortune 500 leaders gathered by Gravity Research and reported by PR Daily indicates that 78% of companies are not planning any change in their Pride strategy in 2024. Thirteen percent were unsure, while 9% said changes are in the works.
When it comes to consumer goods, though, 30% said they’re reevaluating their approach to Pride.
One of those is Target, which bore the brunt of last year’s far-right rainbow backlash.
While the retail giant says they’re “committed to supporting the LGBTQIA+ community during Pride Month and year-round,” they’re slashing Pride-themed merch from at least half of their nearly 2000 stores. They’ll continue to have a presence at Pride events around the U.S., the company told LGBTQ Nation.
A collection of Pride products, including adult apparel, home products, food, and beverages, will be available in select stores and on Target’s website, they said, and “we will have internal programs to celebrate Pride 2024.”
That retreat contrasts with other brands with a long history of LGBTQ+ community engagement.
Hyatt describes their longstanding commitment to Pride and the LGBTQ+ community as “the right thing to do.”
“We also recognize it as our responsibility to create inclusive environments for our colleagues, guests, and customers feel a sense of belonging,” Jonathan Pinkerton, senior social media manager for Hyatt and chair of employee resource group HyPride LGBTQ+ Network, added.
“I’m very optimistic about Pride this year,” said Gerry Rodriguez, senior vice president of brand purpose at Edelman. “What we’re seeing is kind of a trend towards more engagement, more visibility, more authentic engagement and visibility.”
Rodriguez points out it’s good business, too, based on the demographics.
7.6% of the U.S. population identifies as LGBTQ+, according to Gallup, and that number rises the younger consumers are. More than one in give members of Gen Z identify as LGBTQ+, along with nearly 10% of Millennials.
“What does that mean for your future consumer, your future workforce?” Rodriguez asked. “If you’re thinking ahead, those things should be part of the equation.”
Hyatt’s Pinkerton pointed out data from Booking.com that shows 69% of LGBTQ+ travelers say they choose airlines and other brands that practice inclusion.
“So not only is it the right decision, data shows that when you offer a place of acceptance and celebration, people will spend more,” Pinkerton said.
“If there are lessons to be learned from last year, it’s ‘what are your values?’ And how are you standing in your values to authentically engage?” Rodriguez at Edelman asked.
“Clients that I’m working with a lot, they’re focusing on local and making sure that their employees feel seen and heard. They’re showing up where they’ve shown before and understanding that allyship is more than just reading the chapter saying the words and changing your logo to a rainbow.”
Target Corp. won’t sell LGBTQ-themed merchandise in some stores during Pride Month in June, after a backlash dented revenue last year. Target faced threats from some customers last year over its Pride merchandise.
The Minneapolis-based retailer plans to offer the full assortment online but is considering store-level data to decide which physical locations will carry the products, people familiar with the matter said, declining to be identified discussing private information.
Target is likely to stock the products in about half of its nearly 2,000 stores in the US, the people said. The company has typically sold the Pride assortment in all of its stores in recent years.
While the ad is comical, online dating apps continue to provide an uneven experience for trans, nonbinary, and genderfluid users. Most dating websites and smartphone apps didn’t initially offer gender descriptions for these users to authentically present themselves to others. Even with expanded gender presentation options, non-cisgender users say that ignorance and transphobia continue to make online dating feel unsafe.
A brief (incomplete) history of LGBTQ+ online dating
The earliest days of LGBTQ+ online dating harken back to the late 80s and early 90s, when gay men used dial-up modems to connect through bulletin board systems (BBSs) like Backroom and Gay.net. Back then, some lesbians also used an e-mail listserv called Sappho and, later, the website lesbian.org, which contained personals, discussion forums, web links for lesbian-oriented non-profits, and even a lesbian literary journal called Sapphic Ink.
In the early to late 90s, web services like Compuserve and America Online (AOL) provided real-time M4M, W4W, and “transexual” chatrooms where queer love-seekers could connect, talk dirty, and spend hours uploading and downloading pixelated photographs of themselves via very-slow internet connections.
“I think LGBTQ+ people were always really early adopters to online dating,” Michael Kaye, the one-time director of brand marketing and communications for OkCupid told QSaltLake. “Speaking from experience, we are limited to the safe spaces that we have available.”
In the 2000s, some popular heterosexual dating sites like eHarmony didn’t allow gay and lesbian profiles, leaving queer users to look elsewhere like OkCupid, a personal ad site for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and cis-het people that appeared in 2004. OkCupid helped facilitate LGB dating by including a unique feature: It let users choose only to be visible to other queer folks, reducing the likelihood that gay men or lesbian women would receive messages from a bunch of eager and unwitting heterosexuals.
However, the biggest revolution in online dating occurred in 2009 with the advent of Grindr, one of the first third-party apps for Apple’s iPhone. While the app — and similar ones — facilitated countless quick hook-ups and longer-term relationships, the apps weren’t initially inclusive of trans, nonbinary, and gender-fluid users because they offered a limited range of self-identifying gender options and transphobic responses from other cisgender users.
Over time, trans-inclusive apps like Tser appeared. Tser specifically marketed itself as a place where trans people could find community and support, but trans users found that the app still contained transphobia: It categorized cis individuals as “men” and “women,” invalidating trans women and trans men as not “real” women and men. It also used the outdated term “transsexual.”
Expanding gender options is a good start, but not enough
In 2016, Tindr offered users the option of entering any term that best describes their gender identity for display on their profiles. Grindr and Hinge took similar paths by offering more gender description options — like “trans man,” “trans woman,” “non-binary,” “non-conforming” and “queer” — in 2017.
In 2023, eHarmony also began offering an expanded list of genders — including options like “agender,” “bigender,” “genderqueer,” “pangender,” “questioning,” “trans masculine/feminine nonbinary,” and “Two-Spirit.”
The app Bumble also expanded its options to be more inclusive of nonbinary users in 2022, but the app’s “women make the first move” feature — which was created to reduce creepy unwanted advances from men — didn’t allow nonbinary people to message others who identified as women.
“I applaud them for trying to be inclusive, but they’re just completely missing the point,” one user named Kay told NBC News. “I get that their whole shtick is women message first. But if that’s the case, don’t add the gender-inclusive options if you’re going to make nonbinary people feel like they are being squished into a woman or man category.”
Non-cisgender users of Tinder and Hinge also had another issue: after self-identifying as their preferred gender description, the sites would then reductively ask if they’d like to be paired with people who were looking for “men” or women,” the independent cultural site The Skinny reported.
Other users expressed frustration that dating sites often group people by gender rather than by sexuality, making it impossible for searchers to filter out heterosexual users. Others found that, even when apps and sites had inclusive gender options, they had very few non-cisgender users, making the dating “community” feel isolating.
Taking a stand against transphobia
In 2015, when the women’s dating app HER launched, founder Robyn Exton said, “All of the online platforms for women [before 2015] were just reskins of sites built for gay men but turned pink, asking you how much body hair you had, or straight sites that were filled with guys asking you [to have a three-way]. It felt crazy to me, at the time, that no one had truly made a dating product for women.”
HER eventually branded itself as a community and dating app for the FLINTA [female, lesbian, intersex, trans, and agender] community. In 2023, it used Lesbian Visibility Day to send out an announcement to all users reiterating its “no TERFs” policy against transphobes, something it felt was particularly important considering the rise of right-wing anti-trans laws and rhetoric.
“[Trans-exclusionary radical feminists’] harmful and transphobic mentality negates the experiences and identities of our trans and gender non-conforming community, fosters their marginalization, and contributes to discrimination and [harm],” the announcement declared. “Besides being sad, hateful clowns who spew out a lot of misinformation, TERFs are also a genuine threat to the LGBTQIA+ community. And that’s just not going to fly here.”
Despite the announcement, HER still found that its trans, nonbinary, and genderfluid users still faced challenges when using the app, including people expressing trans-exclusionary preferences, misgendering, invasive questions, different forms of fetishization, ignorance about the trans experience, and even other users maliciously reporting their profiles as somehow violating the app’s user policies.
Apps like Grindr, Scruff, and OkCupid have since expanded by allowing users to express the range of genders they’re attracted to, making their profiles easier for non-cis users to find.
Two other platforms, Taimi and Lex, take different approaches by centering non-cis users and not focusing solely on gender as a way of matching users. Taimi lets users say whether they’re looking for trans, intersex, or nonbinary users. Lex is a text-based app that’s primarily for “womxn, trans, genderqueer, intersex, two-spirit and non-binary ppl” where users can describe what kind of people and social interactions they’re craving.
As HER and other dating website and apps figure out how to be more welcoming for non-cis users, HER’s non-cis users said the app would feel safer if it provided more education about trans experiences, better profile filtering, more ways to self-identify one’s gender, better account verification methods, and better safety protocols to prevent and penalize transphobia.
“Even in spaces built for all queer folks, there is much work to be done,” Exton wrote.
Gay dating app Grindr is facing a mass data protection lawsuit in London from hundreds of users who allegedly had their private information, including HIV status, shared with third parties without consent, a law firm said on Monday.
Austen Hayes, which said the lawsuit is being filed at London’s High Court, said thousands of Grindr users in the United Kingdom may have been affected.
The firm alleges users’ highly sensitive information, including HIV status and the date of their latest HIV test, were provided to third parties for commercial purposes.
Grindr said in a statement provided to the Guardian that it planned to “respond vigorously to this claim, which appears to be based on a mischaracterisation of practices from more than four years ago”.
Austen Hayes said around 670 people had signed up to the lawsuit over breaches said to have taken place between 2018 and 2020, with potentially thousands more joining the case.
Austen Hays’ Managing Director Chaya Hanoomanjee said in a statement: “Grindr owes it to the LGBTQ+ community it serves to compensate those whose data has been compromised and have suffered distress as a result, and to ensure all its users are safe while using the app, wherever they are, without fear that their data might be shared with third parties.”
Grindr did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Guardian reported a Grindr spokesperson as stating: “We are committed to protecting our users data and complying with all applicable data privacy regulations, including in the UK.
“We are proud of our global privacy program and take privacy extremely seriously.”
Over a dozen Planet Fitness locations have been hit with bomb threats after the fitness chain reaffirmed its commitment to trans inclusion last month.
The gym franchise, which is primarily based in North America, has been the victim of at least 17 bomb hoaxes after it became the subject of right-wing backlash last month.
Planet Fitness found itself in the headlines in early March after the notorious anti-LGBTQ+ social media account, Libs of TikTok, shared a video of a customer complaining that a trans woman was using the women’s bathroom.
The customer then shared an email exchange with Planet Fitness regarding the complaint, which took place at a Wisconsin location, in which the company reaffirmed its commitment to inclusion.
The policy, which was shared with the customer, reads: “All members, including transgender members, may use Planet Fitness locker room facilities and programs based on their self-reported gender identity.
“These facilities include bathrooms, showers, and all other facilities separated by sex,” the policy continues. “Wherever possible, Planet Fitness clubs should maintain private changing areas in each locker room for the comfort of all members.”
The controversy has done little to stifle Planet Fitness’ value. (Getty)
Right-wing pundits called for a boycott against the chain after the Libs of TikTok post went viral, causing the company’s stock value to dip.
Various locations across North America have since received hoax bomb threats: At least four locations in Rhode Island, four in Mississippi, six in Michigan and several in Connecticut have been targeted.
The most recent set of threats occurred in Alabama after a string of chains were evacuated on Saturday (6 April) according to the FBI.
Fairhope Police shared in a statement that a threat was emailed to a news outlettargeting multiple locations, including two locations in Daphne and Mobile, Alabama.
Planet Fitness is still financially stable despite backlash, experts say
In a statement, Planet Fitness reiterated its commitment to an inclusive policy, telling staff to “address discomfort” and “foster a climate of understanding.”
It also clarified that the membership of the customer who shared the video was terminated for “taking photos of individuals in the locker room.”
Financial experts have estimated that the fallout from the controversy has not been enough to significantly affect the company as it continues to grow in value.
Stifel analyst, Chris O’Cull, told Athletech News that the dip was unlikely to disrupt Planet Fitness’ growing value, saying that “social media comments have a short shelf life.”
“Having positive earned media highlighting the brand’s ‘judgement free’ positioning can prevent search results with a shorter shelf life from continuing to impact the brand’s reputation.”