A Palm Springs, CA swim center is having to make some adjustments to its locker room shower policy after three teen female water polo players saw a naked man showering and reported the incident to their coaches:

“They were mortified, scared, and traumatized quite honestly. These girls don’t have experience with the male physique,” said Christine Foster, a mother of one of the players.

Foster says her daughter, Ashley, a 17-year-old senior, and two teammates, encountered the person taking a shower, when they entered the locker room, during a team practice session at the city pool.

“I think this individual is a predator, a predatory nature and found a loophole in the law with transgender issues,’ said Foster.

Foster said water polo coaches confronted the person, who they said told them they could be in women’s shower, because they identified as “female.”

The article goes on to state that police were called but ultimately no charges were filed. The police were content with the man’s story that he was transitioning into a woman.

The Palm Springs Desert Sun detailed the changes the swim center and the city say they are going to make to be more accommodating to transgender persons:

City Manager David Ready said [a new unisex] shower will only be a short-term solution while city staff develops “a formal policy and protocol for these situations” at the pool.

“This should not occur again with those immediate steps,” Ready said. “We’re going to be able to accommodate everyone at the pool.”

A unisex shower will be installed by adding portable walls around an existing shower outside the building. It will cost $1,000 to $3,000.

Ready added the showers are about 30 years old and anyone using them has no privacy, so curtains and dividers will be added.

Assuming the authorities are right and the naked male showering in the locker room is indeed transitioning into a woman, these are a good first steps towards correcting the privacy issue for the teenage girls and the transgender woman. But they really need to do much more.

I’m from North Carolina, the home of the the HB2 “bathroom bill” that sparked a national debate back in 2016, and I was smack in the middle of the controversy surrounding it.

Proponents of maintaining a woman’s right to safe spaces and privacy in places like bathrooms would have been ok if “progressive” cities like Charlotte had passed a compromise ordinance that allowed for government-run offices to add unisex/family type facilities in addition to keeping their existing male and female rooms.

They also wanted the city, instead of mandating it, to allow private businesses to make their own decisions as to whether or not to add a unisex facilities. But the LGBTQ activist groups said that wasn’t good enough, and that men who identified as women and women who identified as men should be allowed to use the restroom that corresponded to their gender identity.

Furthermore, these activist left groups have maintained that in the event unisex facilities are made available to transgender persons for privacy reasons (as is the case with the swim center), that they should not be required to use those facilities, that they should be optional – for fear of transgender persons being made to feel ostracized or like second class citizens.

In other words, women and girls who are concerned about seeing a naked male in places that used to be off limits to men should not have a choice in the matter. And that’s where the power struggle and pull and tug really ramps up.

Women who want to maintain the standard of privacy they’ve grown accustomed to in bathrooms and the like understand the concerns of the transgender community. They have repeatedly tried to meet halfway with them so both sides could feel that element of safety when they use such places. But left wing LGBT groups aren’t interested.

Their “you’re with us or you’re a homophobic bigot” shame strategy has only led to predators taking advantage of “gender neutral”-style laws in order to victimize women and children.

And even in cases where the person is legitimately transitioning, women and girls should not be made to feel obligated to endure going to the bathroom, changing, or showering next to a naked (or partially naked) man if it makes them feel uncomfortable, unsafe, or triggered.

There’s long been a middle ground solution to this issue that in an ideal world should please all sides, but “progressive” LGBT organizations and their Democratic party allies have taken an all or nothing approach. Concerned women and men alike on the opposite side of those groups must continue the push to ensure that their voices are heard and respected, and to never give up on solutions that would benefit all parties.

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