Recently there’s been an uproar about a gym that kicked a woman out who complained about a transgendered woman being allowed to use the women’s locker room — because she said that the person looked like a man.
Transgendered issues aren’t uncommon, and we need to address them if we’re ever to make our society more inclusive.
The woman who complained, Yvette Cormier, first complained at the front desk about a man in the women’s locker room.
The person at the front desk told her that the gym’s official policy allowed people to choose which locker room they used according to “their sincere, self-reported gender identity.”
Appalled, Cormier called the Planet Fitness corporate office and was told the same thing after complaining again.
Planet Fitness canceled Cormier’s membership, not because of her complaint, but because she chose to take matters into her own hands and start telling everyone she could that the gym allowed men into the women’s locker room.
The gym has stated that her actions caused disturbances that violated her membership policy. Who knows if that’s true. It’s possible they were simply annoyed with her.
It’s hard to gage if the response by the gym was called for unless we were there to see what was happening.
If she was out there in stereotypical protest mode with a megaphone shouting about injustice, then the gym was probably right to cancel her membership. If she was respectfully telling people with whom she was in the locker room, then the gym was in the wrong.
It was probably somewhere in between. But this incident brings equality and gender issues back into national spotlight.
Right now we’re incapable of seeing what the right answer is — much like our parents had trouble coming to terms with gay and lesbian issues.
It might take a generation to fix, but we shouldn’t wait a generation to begin addressing the issue of integrating transgendered people into a society that hasn’t quite figured how to handle them.
Even Cormier said she didn’t know how to react.
Cormier told CNN, “This is all new to me. I didn’t go out to specifically bash a transgender person that day. I was taken aback by the situation.”
It’s a completely honest and fair response to a situation that there isn’t a clear solution for.
What Cormier saw was a man in the women’s locker room and couldn’t believe that she was told that it was official policy to allow it. Then she became too vocal for the company’s liking and they booted her, which is fair for a company trying to run a business.
We need to be focusing on the institutional segregation of genders as a whole to start dealing with this issue.
It’s not just going to go away, and the only way I can see to begin tackling this problem is doing away with the time-honored divide between men and women.
How would a business react if straight men caused a scene about allowing gay men into the men’s locker room? The fact that they’re gay doesn’t change the fact that they’re men. So how is this situation different?
It really isn’t. Why should anyone have to be labeled and categorized into comfortable groups — even if what’s labeling you is that you were born with a penis? It shouldn’t. You should be allowed to be who you were born inside.
Our society is accustomed to two ways of doing things. And really, human beings are far more complicated than just seeing things in black and white.
We shouldn’t conform. We should be who we choose, or who we were born to be — inside and out.
But this doesn’t help how we deal with it in businesses or even in public restrooms.
The way we can start addressing the problems of tomorrow is by making changes today. We need to change the way we look at gender, even though changes won’t be popular or easy.
And these aren’t even problems we should shovel off onto our children, we should address it now so our kids will have it figured out.
We need to do away with a type of segregation our society has accepted; our children and grandchildren will be the ones appalled by how backward our ways were. We need to desegregate bathrooms and locker rooms, even if that means we’re designing the buildings differently.
Honestly, locker rooms should have partitions or private rooms anyway — rather than a group of people standing as a group under a hose coming out of the wall, or changing in front of each other.
When we have private spaces for individual use, instead of gender separations, these issues will become a thing of the past.
If we didn’t have “men’s” and “women’s” distinctions for facilities, Cormier wouldn’t have been shocked to see a woman she thought was a man in her locker room in the first place.