A St. Louis-area fitness center has terminated the membership of a transgender client after being alerted to social-media posts by the former member that company leaders deemed a threat to the health club’s “safety and security.”
Eris Montano, 52, a male who identifies as a female, was escorted out of the Life Time fitness gym in Ellisville on Monday after spending the morning there using the sauna and sunbathing, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Life Time received complaints last week about Montano’s use of the women’s locker room. One Republican lawmaker charged that Montano was using the “guise of transgenderism” to “expose himself” to women and girls in the lock room, an allegation that Montano denied.
Montano’s membership was terminated after “Life Time was presented with multiple, publicly available statements which could affect the safety and security at one of our clubs,” spokeswoman Natalie Bushaw said, clarifying in an email that the statements she referred to were Montano’s social-media posts. “We swiftly took action and this individual is no longer a member of Life Time.”
Montano, who also goes by the name Eris Discordia, responded on X, writing that “Lifetime Fitness just decided to solve their trans girl in the locker room problem by misreading my remarks today as threats of violence rather than threats of law suits and terminating my membership, and having the police walk me out.”
Montano’s X and Facebook accounts are filled with strange musings, mostly on transitioning and being trans, but also about coding, religion, and politics. It’s unclear exactly which posts Life Time found troubling. Montano’s X account is now private.
“Is the slight inconvenience of asking someone to give you space worth taking a chance of killing them instead?” Montano wrote prior to having his Life Time membership terminated. He also wrote that “ultimately the question becomes what % of society would like to build a community with people who would choose their inconvenience over someone’s life.”
In recent days, Montano has written about his “complete and permanent exit from the market,” suggested that there isn’t “anything tantalizing about locker rooms,” mused about the possibility of making “a device that can passively detect if a human brain has seen more than iota of child porn” and called for “a single stall transphobe bathroom for the 3 bigots making noise so they can leave the rest of us women alone.”
Montano has also written about taking legal action against his “harassers.”
“I want to get my harassers’ web histories into evidence in at least one court case,” Montano wrote. In another post he said he is “still going to demand justice from anyone who defamed me or misused their government position to deny my rights as a citizen.”
Montano previously denied accusations that he was using the women’s locker room to expose himself to women. He told the Post-Dispatch last week that he only changes clothes in single-person dressing room stalls, and drapes a towel over the door to shower.
“I’m not there to see anybody else,” Montano told the paper. “I am there to change clothes, and get the heck out of there.”
However, Montano also said that when he was confronted by a member in the women’s room sauna who said he shouldn’t be there, he tugged at his bikini top to show the woman part of his breast to prove “that I am a real woman.”
In addition to terminating Montano’s membership, Life Time is also defending itself from charges by Republican attorney general Andrew Bailey, who wrote a letter to the company’s CEO last week that said Life Time’s policies of allowing a biological man in the women’s locker room “are enabling potentially criminal behavior.”
“While it might be considered fashionable in certain corporate boardrooms to pretend that biology is irrelevant, the American heartland still lives in reality,” Bailey wrote.
In a letter to Bailey on Monday, Erik Lindseth, Life Time’s senior vice president and general counsel, insisted that the company “operates in scrupulous compliance with the law in every jurisdiction it operates.” In states and areas that are silent on gender identity, members and guests must use the locker room and bathroom on their driver’s license or birth certificate. Likewise, in states that permit use based on gender identity, members and guests may use the facilities that correspond with their gender identity, Lindseth’s letter says.
The company’s policies also dictate the members and guests “err on the side of modesty and cover up with a towel or appropriate clothing” in the locker room.
In Missouri, Lindseth’s letter says, the company must abide by the Missouri Human Rights Act, which bars sex discrimination in bathrooms and locker rooms.
“Recently, a prospective member presented a Driver’s License issued by the Missouri Department of Revenue,” the letter states. “That Missouri-issued ID advised us (and the public) that they prospective member’s sex was female. Under Missouri Law, this individual’s legal sex is female.”
“Life Time’s policy is to rely on the state-assigned gender,” the letter states. “To do otherwise would put us in violation of the Missouri Human Rights Act.”
Missouri state representative Justin Sparks, the first lawmaker to express concerns about Life Time allowing Montano in the women’s locker room, has said he wants an investigation to determine if the state of Missouri issued Montano an ID based on nonfactual information.
Life Time is a posh fitness chain based in Minnesota that calls itself “a place for everyone” on its website. “We embrace our commitment to recognize, elevate and empower women and the BIPOC, disabled and LGBTQIA+ communities to ensure all are equally heard, accepted, respected, supported and valued to fully participate,” its website says.
This incident at Life Time is just the latest involving concerns about biological men using women’s locker rooms.
Earlier this year, a woman in Alaska made headlines after she had her Planet Fitness membership revoked for calling out and photographing a man shaving in the women’s locker room. Last year, a teenage girl was banned from a YMCA in Illinois after she encountered a man in the women’s locker room and protested.