A 'Let Julie Swim' Sing-Along Event Is Scheduled For September 18 In Port Townsend
A 'Let Julie Swim' Sing-Along Event Is Scheduled For September 18 In Port Townsend
Because women won't wheesht
A fair warning to her enemies: Amy Sousa is never going to stop fighting for women’s rights to single-sex spaces.
Nothing will stop her.
Every time people around Port Townsend, Washington try to make her stop, “they just tell on themselves,” she says.
As we reported here at The Distance during August, Sousa’s community became a flashpoint in the gender identity wars when Julie Jaman, an 80 year-old woman, was banned from the city pool for refusing to shower in front of a man.
Sousa then organized a public press conference outside the city hall, which was mobbed and assaulted while police, acting under their mayor’s instructions, stood by and failed to intervene.
As a result of that violent scene, the “typical strategy of villainizing the opposition” as violent right wing lunatics has not worked on her, Sousa says.
Although there have been painful remarks from supposed friends shunning her as a “TERF,” her enemies in town remain “confused about who they are dealing with.”
A former education director and drama teacher in the area, Sousa has organized a Sing-in for Women’s Swimmin’ on 18 September inside the Cotton Building, located right next to the place where she got mobbed on 15 August.
The 90-minute musical program will include gender critical hits by Mr. Menno, Vanessa Vokey, and Francis Aaron as performed by volunteers. Admission to the “uplifting songs and poems and prose” will be free.
This is “a playful invitation to all to stand up for women’s rights to free speech and free assembly,” Sousa says.
Although she expects that some people will come to glare silently, or otherwise disrupt the event, Sousa isn’t worried.
“They can’t stop the music,” she says. Just as they cannot stop her.
They have been trying their best ever since she first voiced her concerns about the erosion of single-sex spaces in a Facebook post in 2020.
They have smeared her, shunned her, and even unleashed a violent mob, but it was not enough. It will never be enough to make her stop.
“We will raise our voices for safeguarding, sex based rights, and single sex spaces,” she says. “We will not be silenced.”
Plans are to stream the event live, in which case we will cover it here at The Distance.
Here are some links to our previous reporting on the situation in Port Townsend:
