I write a lot about Britain so here’s one from America. In short, a trans woman briefly used a women’s changing area in a gym in Michigan. Yvette Cormier, a cis woman who uses the gym, has completely lost her shit over it. She repeatedly talked to other women in the changing area, informing them that “a man” has been using it too.

This violates Planet Fitness’ ‘no judgement’ policy, and after repeated requests to stop; Yvette Cormier said she would continue. So Planet Fitness decided they would cancel her membership and tell her she isn’t welcome any more. Which has now resulted in her trying to sue Planet Fitness. A lawsuit I don’t think will go very far given America’s history of protecting businesses rights to choose who they sell to.

“I feel it’s kind of one sided,” Cormier said about the policy. “I feel like I am the one who is being punished.”

Yvette has also gone on record stating that the gym should provide third spaces for trans people. This is a very common ‘solution’ put forward by anti-trans people who want to pretend like they support us… as long as they don’t have to ever see us.

Every single time I hear this third space bull heck I say the same thing: Get back to me when we’ve managed to provide third spaces to disabled people adequately. Because it doesn’t take a lot of Google-Fu to find the horror stories of disability access, you can find pictures of disabled kids having to crawl around the piss stained floor just so they can drop a deuce. It’s honestly horrific that we allow this crap to continue, even despite decades of efforts to improve disability access.

Part of the problem, in my opinion at least, is that we don’t bake disability access into the foundations of our areas. It’s always an after thought. If we’re going to improve the situation for disabled people we’re going to have to start thinking about their access right from the get go, rather than always just patching it on at the end.

All of this just speaks of how privileged and self-centred the ideology of anti-trans people is.

So yeah — lets fix the third spaces we already have and make them actually worthwhile to the people they’re meant for. Then we can maybe discuss trans only spaces. Spoiler: I still won’t be a fan, prejudice and segregation are black marks on our history already.

And do you know what the best part of this entire story is? Ms Cormier has had this absolute breakdown over literally nothing. A woman who believes she’s the trans woman in the story has reached out to news outlets covering the story to give comment.

She said that she’s not a member and she only used the facilities twice, not to get changed — just to hang up her bag and coat. From reading her comments she seems super chill and down to earth about everything. Even going as far as to make some comments which I read as kind of jokey about how she does look a little masculine. Mad respect to you for being so chill tbh. ❤

So to summarise, a woman hung up her bag and coat in a women’s changing room twice, to which another woman noticed she looked a bit masculine and then started shitting on her to other members of the gym. When asked to stop because it violates the policy, she refused and was subsequently removed from the gym. And so she has decided to try and sue the gym for exercising their right to remove people who are breaking their policy?

Yvette…This is absolutely tragic. Stop it, get some help.