Woman, 80, Banned From the City Pool for Refusing to Shower or Change in Front of a Man
Woman, 80, Banned From the City Pool for Refusing to Shower or Change in Front of a Man
Forced teaming in Port Townsend, WA
She was startled by the voice of a man while she was in the shower.
Rinsing off after her usual laps at the Port Townsend, Washington community pool, Julie Jaman, a pillar of her community and mother of two adult daughters, heard a man talking.
Poking her head out of the plastic sheet between herself and the man, she saw him wearing a women’s swimsuit, supervising little girls as they stripped off their own swimsuits to pee.
“Do you have a penis?” She asked him.
Naive, unassuming, unversed in the new religion of Genderism, unaware that wokeness has quietly abolished all privacy rights for women and girls in Washington, Julie had unwittingly invoked the righteous wrath of a new American priest class. “None of your business,” the man replied. His name, she would later learn, is Clementine.
“You need to leave,” she said, thinking of herself as well as the girls.
Rowen DeLuna, a young female staffer, was nearby. Instead of defusing the situation, however, she immediately escalated it, accusing Julie of disrespecting YMCA values.
Moments later in the lobby, Julie was informed that that police were on the way to arrest her, presumably for proper reeducation in the new politics of “gender identity.”
She left instead, stopping at the town’s tiny police station next door to check in. It was only when she talked to the regional YMCA director on the phone later that day that Julie learned the staff had put words in her mouth: “You are going to use your penis to fuck those little girls.”
“I am an 80 year-old woman and I do not talk like that,” Julie responded. In retrospect, she says “there was something amiss in the integrity of the staff.” No charges have been filed against her.
A story in the Port Townsend Free Press reports that Julie observed the man “touching” the girls. Julie says she did not make this allegation to police as reported.
Nevertheless, CEO Wendy Bart found the charge of blasphemy credible and permanently banned Julie from the pool.
Apparently, YMCA values now require staff to help men access women and girls in vulnerable states of undress and have elderly women arrested for resisting.
The change took place without notice. As Bart now informed Julie, however, signage about “pride” and “inclusion” was fair warning she should not ask a man to remove himself from the shower area while she got dressed. Tut tut!
Julie had heard about controversies involving “gender identity” before this all happened last Tuesday, but paid them no mind. Now she is laser-focused on the administrative abolition of normal safeguarding practices at her local YMCA.
After 35 years as a member, yesterday she picketed the pool alongside a few supportive friends. “This is what I’m doing instead of swimming,” she says.
Her petition makes a reasonable, moderate demand that was of course immediately deemed transphobic hate speech.
We, the undersigned, object to men (identifying as women) being allowed to use the traditional women’s shower/dressing room area at Mountain View Pool. The YMCA is discriminating against women and girls who need privacy and safety essential for dignity and well being in the womens changing/showering area. The Y needs to provide a third dressing area designated as gender free.
Speaking at the city council meeting later that day, a friend of Julie objected to the word “discrimination” being used against women protecting themselves in a world full of male violence.
In a development that will surprise no one familiar with the TERF wars, Allison described the opposition outside the YMCA that day as “full of rancor and personal accusations and insults.”
We are accused of hating trans people, of being ‘Christians’ at the Young Men’s Christian Association, and when we laughed, that we must be cultists and then that we must be pedophiles. But what about our needs as women? Do men transitioning to be women understand that discrimination and violence are part of being a woman, and that we need protection from predators?
“In an effort by the City and the YMCA to apply the neo-cultural gender rules at the Mt. View Pool dressing/shower room facilities, women and children are being put at risk,” Julie told the city council Monday evening.
The staff seems to have received little training on how to handle reactions to such radical cultural changes, particularly for the most vulnerable - older female patrons and children who may be exposed to inappropriate behavior; the dignity and safety of unsuspecting women, who have trusted to use these facilities for many years. This is not right.
Julie’s three minute statement is embedded above. Several speakers followed with varying opinions. (You can watch the entire meeting here.) Anyone who has kept their eye on this issue space will know what happened next, as if by clockwork.
By the time Julie spoke at city hall, someone had driven three hours round trip from Sequim to complain that Julie was being hateful when she, you know, recognized reality.
[Clementine] is not a man identifying as a woman, this individual is a woman. I think that we need to have respect and inclusivity and we need to respect this person. It is inappropriate for this day and age in 2022 not to recognize what transgender means.
Of course, if this was an actual debate instead of a city council comment session, someone might ask this person for a non-circular definition of “trans.” None would be forthcoming. That might be an educational moment for people.
What is the difference between a man watching little girls get naked to pee and a man named Clementine watching little girls get naked to pee? Can anyone name a single material difference? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
The same goes for the “nonbinary” nine year-old child who got driven in from out of town to complain that sometimes adults “use my pronouns but I can tell they are not really respecting me,” which is important for everyone to know because paranoid narcissism should always be cultivated in the young.
Ask that child ‘what is non-binary?’ and get circular answers, and the expectation to simply accept them, because “I know what gender I am.” So: what is a gender? Again, any answers will only confuse, and that is on purpose.
Understanding is not really the point. Obedience is. A helpful ‘trans man’ — that is, a woman identifying as a man — attended the meeting through an online portal to remind everyone that "trans people have extremely high rates of suicide,” because threatening suicide if you don’t get whatever you demand is a sure-fire way to convince everyone that you are completely sane and not in a cult or anything.
Unaware that they were committing yet more acts of transphobic bigotry, some speakers encouraged the city to provide a third facility space for the specially-gendered.
Otherwise, girls are “just gonna quit swimming because it doesn’t make sense to them,” one woman said.
Of course, this triggered another speaker to praise the trans people they personally know and declare the complainants are “bigots.”
Helpfully, the ‘trans man’ pointed out that a public-use facility in Washington state “cannot require [shower room] use inconsistent with gender expression or identity,” and that “trans people cannot be required” to use third spaces.
State regulations were quietly changed in 2015 so that it is now bigotry to suggest that any trans person might not belong somewhere. Instead, the person experiencing “discomfort” is expected to make their own accommodations, or better yet, just drop dead.
After all, “trans women are women, trans men are men,” and transplants are plants. Speakers repeated the cant as if saying things makes them true. That is the demand here. Everyone should just believe the men when they say they are women, and trust them, and not think too hard about it.
Social gaslighting is necessary to the gender identity project because human beings are instinctive creatures. Defending her own actions, Julie told the city council that her awareness was a “message from our ancestors.”
She was not wrong. Contrary to tiresome activist assertions that the science of sex has somehow changed, evolution produced a keen awareness of binary sex in humans. For women, sensitivity to the presence of strange men means survival in a world full of violent men.
Normal social movements do not demand that people suppress their instincts. Normal civil rights movements do not abolish all safeguarding on a man’s word. Normal kindness does not threaten self-harm. Those are things that dangerous cults do.
Normally, a man helping little girls out of their swimsuits to pee is a scandal. Normally, telling a man to get out of the shower area while an elderly woman gets dressed is a reasonable and courteous action.
But normality has been uprooted by the cult of gender. Once the lipstick and magic pronouns are applied, “Clementine” becomes a stunning and brave woman, and his penis is female — because he says so.
It is exactly like transubstantiation, you see, but with a penis.
Port Townsend is small and full of retirees who think of themselves as normal, reasonable people. They did not realize how wrong they are. They are now the weird ones.
As residents spoke to the actual issue at hand — an 80 year-old woman being punished with a permanent ban from a public pool for not wanting to be naked in the presence of a man — they had not come to grips with the reality that they are dealing with a species of New Age cult demanding total submission.
People argued for reasonable accommodations. They were moderate in tone and language. For this, they are “disgusting.” Why, they had hurt someone’s feelings!
As one local resident pointed out, ‘gender identity’ has only been a thing for five seconds, historically speaking. Normally, “the onus is on the innovators to make a case and not simply bring in some assumptions and make changes.”
“An innovation should not be introduced without a very rigorous process of change,” he said, not understanding that to ask for any evidence at all is to do real, actual harm to transgender people. Like Tinkerbell, they literally die of unbelief.
This problem clearly outweighs whatever concerns any female might ever have.
At the YMCA pool “there is absolutely no privacy” for women, complained one local. “we shouldn’t have to be acrobats with towels” to avoid the eyes of men.
Moreover, letting men supervise grammar school girls as they undress and pee can be “confusing for children” who are learning sexual boundaries, she worried, not realizing that standard child development practices are now considered hate speech.
“Bigots,” one respondent spat from home to prove the point. “I am a feminist,” she declared, centering the feelings of a man over the needs of women and girls as she did so. Julie and her supporters “should start now to educate themselves.”
After all, that’s why the YMCA employee called the police on Julie. She needed to be taught a lesson, didn’t she?
In an email, Julie Jaman says that she picketed the YMCA again on Tuesday despite a small crowd of rainbow counter-protesters celebrating the exclusion of elderly people who know what a man is.
She will almost certainly outlast them. More to the point, she is right in her fight, and the residents of the town know it. Even the ones who oppose her know it. That’s why she makes them so angry.
Her statement to the city council was followed by thunderous applause. Speakers denouncing her received little to no applause, or worse, forced applause.
Not that the people in charge seemed to notice. “The mayor and the city manager are tone deaf, accused me and others of being bigots and apparently see no need to review the policies,” Julie writes in an email. There will be no “professional training for employees in order to handle the potential consequences of providing no choice for women who need privacy.”
Of course not. That sort of thing takes political courage, which is always in short supply. Better leave it to future administrations to deal with the lawsuits after the inevitable happens — and it will happen, because men don’t really stop being men when they identify as something else.
What the good people of Port Townsend must learn, and quickly, is that no middle ground will ever be possible with this Maoist cultural revolution. It demands total obedience, so the best practice is to give up on attempts at politesse, reject the new language of magical thinking outright, and be direct.
“If you’ve got a dick, you’re a male. I don’t want to see a naked male in the women’s locker,” one female resident said. If everything you say will be called a hate crime, then just speak your mind.
Watch the full city council video here:
