Naked Men Are Exposing Themselves to Young Girls in the YMCA Locker Room. Are We Ready to Talk About This Yet?

In 2015, when the YMCA of Pierce and Kitsap Counties decided to allow grown men and their penises to use the girls’ open (mostly curtainless) locker room showers, “transgender” was not even a popular Google search term.

I know this because I went home and Googled it the minute my boss handed me papers from our legal counsel and informed me I would be drafting the talking points to support this new policy. I had never really heard the term “transgender,” much less “gender identity.” So I Googled. What turned up were a series of articles about transvestitism and some obscure (but shockingly prescient) radical feminist research papers by Sheila Jeffreys and Germaine Greer, essentially predicting the sordid mess in which I was about to find myself.

I didn’t know then that our YMCA leadership was attempting to position itself as the tip of the spear of what they foolishly believed to be the new civil rights frontier. I said not only “no,” but “hell no,” and ultimately got fired for it. (Maybe I’ll blog on the nitty gritty details of this situation, but they’re not important here; I’m just laying the framework.)

I stood my ground, said my piece, fought as hard and as loudly as I could, and, somewhere in the past few years, kind of concluded that I had done my part and that it was time to pass the baton to some of the other, fresher, more relevant voices emerging to find the transborg. But I keep encountering new headlines about women and girls being traumatized by naked men in their YMCA locker rooms, and it pisses me the hell off every time. Because it’s wrong. And it didn’t have to happen.

And each time these headlines emerge, the surrounding community is dumbfounded, horrified, and genuinely surprised that a “Christian” organization could do something like this. So I’m writing this blog to cover a few of the basics that people should know about how this went down at the Y and what you’re up against if you feel inclined to fight it:

1. It was a solution without a problem. When this nonsense hit our YMCA, it’s not because a member was demanding it. It’s because a powerful state legislator was on some of our advisory councils, and she was in cahoots with the state’s Human Rights Campaign. This was their new crusade, and they identified the Y as the perfect place to test the waters, so they put a bug in the ear of the head honchos, who, in turn, consulted our very liberal legal counsel, and they decided it would be a move in the right direction.

This is really heady, but it matters, so bear with me for a moment: At that time, there was no state law requiring anyone to grant access on the basis of gender identity. And they knew that even in liberal WA, no one would actually vote for such a law. So they circumvented the legislative process entirely by finding a loophole. In WA, if there’s any ambiguity about how a certain law is written, they defer to the HRC (an unelected group of bureaucrats) to interpret the law. In this case, the HRC decided that anywhere the law granted protections based on sex, these protections also applied to gender identity. They were actively working toward making this new rule interpretation official (via WAC 162-32-040) at exactly the same time the Y decided to adopt this policy. That way, if anyone got mad at the Y for doing this, the Y could just say, “Sorry. We didn’t have a choice. We were just following the HRC’s guidelines.”

Like I said, we weren’t being swarmed with members desperate to use the wrong sex locker room at the time. I saved some of the internal communications from our safety and risk manager specifically about this. As you can see, this was an issue that presented MAYBE once or twice every couple of years

2. From what I gather, most YMCA’s that have adopted similar policies have done so without alerting their members or educating the majority of their staff members. Did you catch that language in the image above? “The plan to go as a response rather than public awareness is appropriate”

Let me translate: “We aren’t going to tell anyone until we have to, until it’s already too late and someone has been exposed.” Our Y ultimately chose NOT to alert the public, which means they set countless women and girls up for the possibility of encountering a naked man in their private spaces without warning. Don’t even get me started about how unspeakably cruel this is, ESPECIALLY to survivors of sexual trauma. It’s textbook rape culture, and it makes me really, really angry.

In the absence of this awareness or training, we’ve seen it happen in multiple Y’s now- a poor, unsuspecting woman will find herself in a completely vulnerable state exposed to a bepenised man. And when she complains, the Y will essentially tell her she’s being a bigot. It happened at our Y. (I was told that a potentially erect man in the shower next to me would be no cause for alarm because sometimes warm water has that effect.) It happened to Julie Jaman in Port Townsend. It happened to Rebecca Phillips in San Diego. It happened to a number of women and girls in Ohio.

It’s the height of misogyny to demand that women share our showers with men, but it’s a new level of cowardice to lack the spine to even communicate the demand so that people can make informed decisions about how best to proceed.

3. The Diversity and Inclusion team of the YMCA of the USA cares more and fought harder than the Mission team did.

I keep reading horrified responses to these stories that say something to the effect of, “How could the Y do this? They’re supposed to be a Christian organization.”

I have a lot of thoughts about this. Yes, the first YMCA was a Bible study. The Y was founded on Christian principles, and, even up until the day I was fired, they still employed an official Mission team, tasked with advancing the “C” in the Y’s work. But I personally reached out the the National YMCA Mission Director when this was all going down, and I asked for his help in intervening. Here’s the response I received:

“While we are not in a position to lead in the effort regionally or nationally to combat this issue…”

That says it all, doesn’t it? It’s someone else’s job. As I stood within my organization, there was not one single solitary Christian man in the company who was willing to stand alongside me and say, “This is wrong. I stand with you, let the chips fall where they may.”

Not a one.

Compare this to the response my boss received from the National Diversity and Inclusion team:

Did you catch all that? Not only glowing support, but resources, leads, links to other people to help divide the workload.

The people who cared more got their way in the end. My Y was the guinea pig they used to set the gold standard for the rest of the YMCAs across the nation. Back then, very few people within the Y even knew what the term “transgender” even meant. (It’s still a bogus word with absolutely nothing resembling a concrete definition), but now they have entire formalized guides directing staff in how to successfully kowtow to the trans lobby’s misogynistic demands.

That’s kind of a lesson for all of us, isn’t it? Whoever cares more seems to win? I don’t know about you, but I’m really tired of reading about naked fetishistic men performing their deviant fantasies in women’s spaces. I’m tired of reading about the cowards who shame women for protesting. I was hired by the Y at age 15 as a locker room monitor (how’s that for irony?) and worked my way up the ladder until I was the Communications Director overseeing 7 branch locations comprised of 120,000 members. When I took the job, I signed a contract promising to always act in the best interests of the members. It’s a promise I kept. People should know this is happening.