80-Year-Old Woman Banned from YMCA Pool for Complaining About Cross-Dressing YMCA Employee in the Locker Room

Mountain View Pool Punishes Woman For Her Gender Expression and Identity

By Jim Scarantino | 2 August 2022

PORT TOWNSEND FREE PRESS — An 80-year old woman who expressed extreme discomfort and fear about a male in the women’s shower area of the Mountain View Pool was permanently banned from using the facility.

For 35 years the Mountain View pool — a City of Port Townsend facility now operated in partnership with the Olympic Peninsula YMCA — and its women’s showers had been a safe place for her. But not that day. The woman had to stand naked in the presence of the male, a YMCA employee, despite her pleas and demands that he leave. She was also very concerned that this male was watching little girls as they peeled off their swimsuits. Another YMCA employee called the police on the woman. The woman was initially instructed by a Y employee to leave, but then prohibited from exiting the building by two YMCA employees. She exclaimed, “Bullshit! I need the police!” and left to report the incident immediately to the Port Townsend Police Department.

Julie Jaman has been in Port Townsend for about 40 years. She has been swimming at the Mountain View pool for most of those years. She raised children in Jefferson County. She has been a Democratic voter. She describes her gender identity and expression as rooted in her biological sex. “I am an XX woman,” she says, referring to the chromosomal characteristics that make women women and distinguish them from men. Her gender identity and expression, she says, have been shaped by eight decades of womanhood and life experiences that implanted feelings, reactions, intuition and wisdom, strengths, vulnerabilities and preferences.  Jaman is a woman whose gender expression and identity recoil at being naked against her will in the presence of strange males and whose mothering instincts (“the momma bear in me,” she says) surfaced when she saw a man in a woman’s bathing suit looking at nearly naked little girls. […]