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.
