An 80-year-old woman in Washington state was reportedly banned from a community pool run by her local YMCA after demanding a biological male employee leave the women’s facilities.
Julie Jaman, 80, went to Port Townsend’s Mountain View Pool for more than 35 years, she told Seattle radio host Dori Monson on Friday.
Jaman explained that on July 26, she was showering in the women’s restroom at the pool when she heard a man’s voice near her.
“I looked over and saw a man in a woman’s bathing suit watching maybe four or five little girls pulling down their suits in order to use the toilets,” Jaman said. “And I told that man to get out right now.”
Another employee was in the women’s restroom at the time. Jaman asked that particular employee to remove the man from the room.
“She immediately said to me, ‘you’re being discriminatory, and you’re banned from the pool forever, and I’m calling the cops,’” Jaman said.
“I was taken aback. She didn’t ask me what the problem was, if I was okay, nothing about me,” Jaman added. “It’s as if she was just waiting to pounce on me. It was just stunning.”
The Port Townsend Police Department told Fox News Digital that no official police report was filed but provided an incident report. It stated that Jaman “had an emotional response to a strange male being in the bathroom.”
Erin Hawkins, the marking and communications manager for the Olympic Peninsula YMCA, told Fox that Jaman’s permanent ban from the pool came after a “build-up” of incidents.
Earlier this year, Matt covered how biological male transgender swimmer Will “Lia” Thomas competed on the women’s swim team at the University of Pennsylvania after competing on the men’s team in previous seasons. In an interview with Daily Mail, one of Thomas’ female teammates said that Thomas used the women’s locker room.
“It’s [the locker room] definitely awkward because Lia still has male body parts and is still attracted to women,” the swimmer told Daily Mail. She added that the swimmers raised concerns over the situation to their coaches.
“Multiple swimmers have raised it, multiple different times,” she said. “But we were basically told that we could not ostracize Lia by not having her in the locker room and that there’s nothing we can do about it, that we basically have to roll over and accept it, or we cannot use our own locker room.”