We Get Email

We get email, if you know what I mean. There's one lady who writes us regularly, in particular. She seems nice enough, just wants to point out different ways that gay and transgender people are disgusting and dangerous, because we seem not to have noticed this obvious fact.

Like the other night, we got an email... Here's the whole thing:

Kids in the locker room: Y not?

I got a note last week from a friend in the neighborhood who swims with her two young daughters at the downtown YMCA. Finding the family changing rooms occupied, she decided to use the regular women's locker room, only to be told that children between the ages of four and fifteen can't enter the locker rooms of the Y, even accompanied by their parents. She and her two children waited in vain for ten minutes for one of the two family restrooms to open up

An email exchange with Bryan Huffman, executive director of the Durham YMCAs, revealed the following thinking:

Our primary goal is to prevent any potential of sexual abuse or misconduct from occurring to children. Protecting our youngest members is our utmost importance. While no known misconduct has occurred at the Downtown YMCA, we are not willing to take that chance. Statistics show that locker rooms, specifically shower areas, are one of the leading public locations that child sex abuse occurs. By allowing children and adults to shower side by side is inviting predatory behavior to occur. The YMCA cannot tolerate that risk. We care too much about children to allow it.

The first thing you notice is the pure irrelevance of this item. TTF supports a new county law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity. A small group of radicals has redefined the issue, saying the bill is about predatory men claiming to be women and lurking in ladies locker-rooms.

This tidbit does not have anything to do with our county's new law at all. Some person in Durham, North Carolina (where I lived for a few years, by the way), has said that he doesn't think kids should shower with adults at the YMCA. There is nothing about transgender people or discrimination in the story, and it doesn't even assume that men will go into the ladies shower-room. It's like, now that they've connected shower-rooms to the new law, anything scary about shower-rooms supports their point of view.

The next thing you notice is the "statistics show" wording. What statistics? Child sex abuse makes the news pretty often, and I can't remember a case -- ever -- where a child was molested in a public shower. I know somebody will dig up a story about that, but really, it doesn't seem like a "leading location" for that sort of thing. For one thing, there are usually other people around.

But this gets funny. You know there's this new thing out there, it's called a "Google," and it knows everything. You can ask it any question, just about, and it's so dad-gum smart it can find you the answer, just like that. So I asked the Google to tell me where this little story came from, and it said: RIGHT HERE. It's a story in a web site about Durham called Bull City Rising. It turns out there is a bit of a problem there in the heart of the South, because the director of the YMCA won't let kids use the public showers.

The problem is that families want their kids to use the public shower at the pool.

Read some more:

Apparently, this new policy -- about ten months old -- has raised a hue and cry from a number of downtown Y members who've brought their kids to the YMCA for years and taken them into the regular locker rooms to get changed. Four new temporary changing stations have been added on the pool deck, too, but none of these contain showers or other bath facilities.

Our correspondent suspects the policy may be in place due to concerns from older, childless members who don't want to hear young children being, well, young children in close proximity to them. And she points out that her children would always be accompanied in the locker room, not left on their own.

This blog has links to two stories, one was an incident where a guy with a camera phone was arrested taking pictures of a boy in a shower-room, the other is a link that doesn't work, apparently another YMCA had some sort of incident.

So the story is, really, a paranoid YMCA director won't let kids from four to fifteen use the showers because he's afraid of sexual predators. Real parents, real families, are unhappy with the decision and some are leaving the Y, because of this rule. A kid comes to the Y with their parents and can't use the showers, even with their parents right there, because of the possibility that something bad will happen.

Do you know why somebody sent us this? There is nothing about gender identity, nothing at all, except that the CRW wants to associate transgender people with locker-room perverts. The good people of Durham, NC, think this guy's off his rocker, they're going to swim somewhere else, that's the story here, it has nothing to do with anything we're involved in.

There are criminals out there, even sexual criminals, and it is not impossible that one tries to do something in a shower-room. None of it has anything to do with controversy over a nondiscrimination bill. None of it has anything to do with gender identity, transgender people, or anything else that has happened or will happen in our county.

There is simply no overlap between the story described in this email and the controversy over a new bill in Montgomery County, Maryland. None.