(LifeSiteNews) — When 80-year-old Julie Jaman headed to the public YMCA Mountain View pool in Port Townsend Washington last month, she had no reason to believe that it would be a disturbing experience. She had been visiting that same pool in her small town for 35 years, and it had been a pleasant community experience. But this time, she was stunned to see a man in a woman’s bathing suit in the women’s locker room—watching little girls change out of their bathing suits. She watched him through a shower curtain and then took action. She asked: “Do you have a penis?”
When the man wouldn’t answer her, Jaman asked him to leave. He refused, and Jaman sought out help. She asked the pool’s manager Rowen DeLuna to evict the male—and DeLuna informed the 80-year-old that she was acting “discriminatory” and told her that she was not only banned from the pool, but that she’d call the police. DeLuna even yelled at her, telling her that she was violating the values of the YMCA, and says staff attempted to stop her from leaving because the police were coming. But Jaman went to the police herself.
According to Reduxx Magazine, the man in the locker room was identified as Clementine Adam, a transgender YMCA employee who wasn’t displaying ID while watching the girls in the change room. A citizen journalist revealed that Adam began identifying as female last December and began his “transition” this April. Regardless, Jaman was still very worried for young girls using the local pool. She decided to hold a sign outside the pool on August 1 with several other women—most of them elderly—warning community members that there was a man using the women’s change room.
On social media, transgender activists organized a counter-protest, with people coming to harass the elderly women with Pride flags and berate them for their “bigotry.” “They told me males can be women,” Jaman told Reduxx. “I said I don’t agree with [your] ideology. I told them in all my 80 years I had never run into this.” When she reached out to the CEO of Olympic Peninsula YMCA to complain about what she’d seen, Wendy Bart told Jaman that she’d been told that the elderly woman had been “abusive” to the man and had accused him of planning sexual assault—a blatant falsehood.
According to Jaman, she asked Bart why women weren’t told men could be in the female-only facilities, and Bart replied, “We post Pride signs, and we assume that lets women know to expect.” In other words, the Pride sign means biological men in the women’s changerooms. When Jaman went to the Port Townsend City Council to protest the policy, detail her experience, and ask for female-only changerooms, she was supported by community members, who cheered her 3-minute speech—but opposed by a woman who had driven in to protest Jaman. A man called Jaman’s “bigotry deplorable.”
Citizens of Port Townsend supported Jaman, with one mother saying that if female-only facilities were not provided “little girls were just going to quit swimming.” In response, the YMCA pool released a statement: “We will not tolerate bias, hatred, or discrimination that leads to the oppression of individuals or communities. We will ensure sustained and meaningful progress toward equity and human dignity for all.” The statement also highlighted the fact that Washington State Law 162-32-060 states that all people must be permitted spaces “that are consistent with that individual’s gender expression or gender identity.”
Julie Jaman has now been permanently banned from the pool that she has frequented for four decades. Pool staff claimed she had been a repeat offender although they could not cite a single detail beyond what Jaman herself had related. 80-year-old Jaman, according to pool staff, was a threat to the safety of a man in the women’s changing room. This is despite the fact that Jaman was involved in setting up the first crisis shelter for endangered women and children. She has no social media and told Reduxx she is unaware of much of the current debate round gender. She is a long-time Democrat but bewildered by what is happening now.
“I think there is something very wrong with cancelling out what’s a male and what’s a female. There is absolutely no way that a person who is any form of XY can possibly be an XX. There’s just no way,” Jaman told Reduxx. “It’s darn-right confusing. I am from the old-school. I know what being discriminated is about. I know about human dignity. I marched against the Vietnam war. I know all about racial discrimination against people of color. I know about the need for tolerance … But I don’t get this… I have been a woman for all of my 80 years. I don’t intend on changing. But it erases me. Because if that’s a woman, what am I?”
In today’s strange new world, an 80-year-old long-time community member who has stood up for women in crisis and offered her own home as a safe space can be permanently banned from a pool she has used for forty years for objecting to a man watching little girls change in the female locker rooms. That is where the gender insanity has brought us.
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