I’ve come up with a variation of your idea, where I can hide the lock icon selectively on just the categories which are accessible to TL_0 (manually).
As there isn’t a nice convenient CSS class for this, you must target the hover (title) and link (href) properties instead, and must also do this for each of the categories that you want to hide the lock icon for:
// hides lock icons for ux category
[title = "ux"], [href = "/c/ux/9"] {
.d-icon {
display: none;
}
}
It would of course clash with any icons from the Category Icons Component, but this can be mitigated by targeting .d-icon-lock (or whatever icon you are using) instead of .d-icon for that category.
I’ve just edited that CSS after discovering I was missing some of the icons. It works much better now, but will easily break if you change your category structure.