Speaking of nasty instances
The Stranger also sneers at feminist women.
On Monday night, the Port Townsend City Council and Mayor David Faber delivered a message loud and clear: transphobia is not welcome in Port Townsend.
It isn’t a phobia for women to want to take their clothes off without male strangers present.
After a nasty instance of transphobic bullying at the Port Townsend YMCA made national headlines across conservative media, the quiet town refused to cede an inch to transphobic outrage culture. In a much-appreciated symbolic gesture, the Mayor proclaimed the town a welcoming place for transgender people and an unwelcoming place for discrimination of any kind.
But it wasn’t transphobic bullying, and it wasn’t nasty. Women need spaces away from men, and they’re not the bullies in this scenario. It’s not “discrimination” in the pejorative sense for a woman to object to a man in the women’s locker room.
Earlier this month, then-YMCA member Julie Jaman took a keen interest in the genitalia of an 18-year-old employee who was helping girls use the bathroom in accordance with the YMCA’s summer camp policy.
No she didn’t. What a stupid, and obscene, and malicious lie. What a trashy thing to say.
At the council meeting, Faber read aloud: “I, David J. Faber, Mayor of the City of Port Townsend, do hereby proclaim that the City of Port Townsend values our transgender residents and visitors and urges all residents and visitors to be respectful, welcoming, and kind to everyone regardless of gender identity.”
Everyone except women, that is.
He continued, “I further proclaim that discrimination and prejudice, in any form, particularly against transgender people, are unwelcome and have no place in the City of Port Townsend.”
Why particularly against transgender people? Really: why? Why are they at the top of the list?
The widespread myth that paints trans people, particularly transgender women, as secret predators liberates vigilante bathroom cops to interrogate strangers about their genitals and to make demands that they leave the toilet. As Port Townsend resident George Marie said during the council meeting, people often use cis women’s trauma as a thinly veiled attempt to justify transphobia.
I’m bowled over by the empathy for women’s trauma.
You know…it occurs to me that even I have some of that trauma. I suppose all women do. Even I have fought off a few sexual assaults. (Why “even”? Just because I’m not all that gregarious.) If I have I suppose all women have. I don’t consider them trauma in the sense that they haunt me, but when I pause to think about it I realize they don’t have to. They still count.
“I can sympathize with anyone who lives with the daily fears that unresolved trauma can cause… but my sympathy ends when those fears are used to target other vulnerable people,” said Marie.
Meaning men who identify as women. But men are less vulnerable than women – much less. It’s absurd to claim that the notional “vulnerability” of a man who identifies as a woman should cancel the trauma of a woman. Marie is a Quisling.
The claimed fear for trans ID males is that they are in danger in men’s private spaces, is that not a fear used to target vulnerable people? Marie doesn’t seem to think that women nor girls really matter all that much when men are in some sort of danger.
I’m in the same position as you–I’ve been remarkably lucky with regard to sexual assault and trauma, compared to pretty much all the women I know. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t experienced any at all, and every now and then I realise it’s important for me to acknowledge that, rather than just thinking how much worse it could have been, or how much worse most other women have experienced. No woman gets through living in this culture without any sexual trauma at all.
And it’s not just sexual assault. There are a lot of us who have also been assaulted without the violence being sexual. I’ve suffered both kinds, and if I saw a male bodied person coming into the woman’s room, I’d leave. At which case, I would probably be branded a transphobe. Apparently just taking care of ourselves is transphobia these days.
And that is listed under “news” on the website. The Stranger used to do actual journalism, even up until a few years ago. Now they have an icon that says “Fuck Terfs” right on the front page, and this stuff is called “news”. I gave them money at the start of the pandemic when their ad revenue plummeted, but I can’t support what they’ve become since.
I didn’t know they’d fallen off a cliff like this.
To think The Stranger published K. Herzog’s well-researched and sourced (and double sensitivity read) article on detransitioners in 2017, and this is them five years later…
Of course, people gleefully burned copies of the paper and did all the usual vileness and lying (Ijeoma Oluo was really a let-down on that one), which continues to this day, but that article would get nowhere close to publication now.
You mean TRANS bullying of women at the YMCA. FIFY.
Since when do girls need escorts, much less male escorts, to use the women’s bathroom at the YMCA. I, too, would very much like to know what f*ing “policy” requires that? Seems to me that taking the girls through the common areas of the building, and pointing out the sign for the entrance to the women’s area would be as much escorting as any girl would need. The male “transgender” employee sounds more and more like an “escort” all the time. Who is pruriently interested in the sex characteristics of whom, in this scenario? It’s not the traumatized woman who is naked in the shower.
I will NEVER understand it.
From another professional news source in Port Townsend, WA is this report (with photos) of what transpired at the protest as well as at the city council meeting:
https://www.ptleader.com/stories/anti-trans-press-conference-swarmed-by-protesters,85433
I am dismayed to read about anonymous threats being made to YMCA staff, but not surprised. It would be good for everyone to simply sit down and discuss the issue calmly, rather than resort to intimidation. Also, I’d like know know what, if anything, the YMCA did to log the incidents of Jaman violating their code of conduct that they claim happened. I’m not keen on false allegations.
it’s always “unresolved” trauma. We just have to work on ourselves, blah, blah, blah. Unmitigated bullshit.