Lixia Guo / BuzzFeed News The Prospect Park YMCA in Brooklyn, New York.

A couple weeks ago, I walked into the women’s locker room at the Prospect Park YMCA in Brooklyn. I’d joined the gym the day before, and planned to kick off my new membership by swimming laps. I had just started to take my gym equipment out of my bag when a woman walked up to me and asked if I knew that I was in the women’s locker room. At first, I thought she was confused about which locker room she was in — something that occasionally happens when someone sees me in the women’s restroom and briefly panics, thinking that they’ve walked into the men’s room. But the woman asked again — “You know this is the women’s locker room?” — and this time there was a hint of anger in her voice. I told her yes, I was aware of exactly where I was standing, and she walked away. I brushed off our awkward interaction as just one of many I’ve experienced as a transmasculine nonbinary person, and went back to changing. Ever since I began hormone replacement therapy, I wondered at what moment I would need to start using the men’s room. Every trans person is different, and not every trans person is required to or even wants to medically transition, but for me, top surgery and starting testosterone felt right. Every morning, I apply a topical gel called AndroGel that delivers a low dose of testosterone to my body. The effects of AndroGel are slower and more gradual than other types of hormone replacement therapy. Since I started AndroGel, I’ve noticed small changes in my body — the hair above my lip is getting thicker, my fat distributes a little differently, and my face has become more angular — but most of the time, I’m still read and gendered as female. On the off chance that someone genders me as male, they usually notice otherwise once they get a good look at me, or the moment I start speaking. When someone calls me “sir” or “he” I’m usually holding my breath throughout the interaction, waiting for them to realize their mistake and apologize profusely. For these reasons, I use the women’s restroom at work and in public, and I continue to use the women’s locker room at gyms.

Courtesy of Branson LB Branson LB

Many transgender people have been accused of being interlopers in public bathrooms — the myth of trans predators preying on little girls and women has managed to fuel anti-trans bathroom bills and general trans panic in the US for years now — but I wasn’t exactly expecting to be accused myself on a recent Friday after work. About five minutes after being asked if I knew I was in the women’s locker room, I was standing alone, wearing nothing but shorts — my chest was bare, revealing my top surgery scars — when a YMCA staff member approached me and told me that I needed to leave. I tried to explain that the women’s locker room was where I felt the most comfortable. “Listen, I’m trans, but I was assigned female,” I said. “I don’t know where else to go.” Suddenly, the locker room grew quiet. There were other women changing around us, but none of them said or did anything — except for the few who began poking their heads around the corner to get a look at me, as if to see what kind of trans I was. This YMCA, the same one that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio uses, is located in a legendarily progressive neighborhood, and I expected someone to speak up, but no one did.

The staff member told me again that I had to leave and use the men’s locker room. At this point I felt helpless, alone, and humiliated. I said I would be leaving soon to go swim, but again, she insisted on escorting me out. After I gathered my things and left, I asked if there was a gender-neutral or single-stall room I could change in, and she recommended I use the family locker room, where I was finally able to change without incident. A few days later, I called the YMCA’s New York City headquarters, but when no one answered, I followed up by directly contacting the YMCA in Park Slope, where I reached the executive director. I explained what had happened and she apologized, saying she would speak to her staff. But when I returned the next week, on August 24, and tried to use the family locker room again, a different staff member didn’t think I belonged there, either, and they asked me to leave because I was neither a parent nor a child. Since I felt I couldn’t go back into the women’s locker room after getting escorted out the week before, and I wasn’t comfortable going in the men’s locker room — because I don’t feel as though I “pass” as male either — I left. Even though it is a violation of the New York City Human Rights Law to prohibit “a transgender or gender non-conforming person from using the single-sex program or facility consistent with their gender identity or expression,” and even though I’d just paid the YMCA $138 for my new membership, I couldn’t use the facility I’d paid to use, and that New York City law says I can use. There are official channels for complaints like these, and I am pursuing them, but they are slow to resolve. The YMCA didn’t do anything after my initial complaint, and it’s unclear when my complaint to the Human Rights Commission will actually be adjudicated. In the meantime, I think it’s important for Americans to know that even in cities with strong laws in place, discrimination like this still happens — it happened to me, and it’s happened to countless trans and gender-nonconforming people I know.

After both incidents, I thought about just leaving the YMCA entirely, but swimming laps is a huge stress reliever for me, and has been for most of my life. From my first swimming lessons as a little kid to competitive swimming in high school to grabbing a few laps between classes in college, I’ve always loved the water. As soon as I jump into the pool, all of my stresses and worries that have built up throughout the day seem to melt away.



Courtesy of Branson LB

Since getting top surgery (otherwise known as a double mastectomy) last year, the visible scar that stretches just below my chest has become something that catches most people’s attention when I’m in and out of the pool. A lot of the time I can feel people’s stares from the locker room to the pool deck, and yet up until now, I’ve mostly been able to ignore them. I’m not the only trans person who has been questioned about their gender at a YMCA facility. In 2016, at a suburban YMCA near Chicago, a woman told employees she was concerned to find a teenage trans boy using the women’s locker room. This report, along with a few other similar instances, prompted the YMCA of Metro Chicago to issue guidelines for accommodating transgender members and guests. But unless staff and gym members are made aware of trans-affirmative policies at places like the YMCA and beyond, these policies can do little good. At times, not even local or state nondiscrimination laws are enough to deter employees at public and private accommodations from policing patrons’ genders and ejecting them from the premises if they’re picked out for not meeting arbitrary standards for what a man or a woman is “supposed” to look like. According to a survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality, nearly 60% of trans people say they have avoided using public restrooms for fear of confrontation, harassment, or assault. Earlier this month, parents invoked violence against a 12-year-old transgender girl in a series of Facebook posts, calling her an “it” and threatening her life: “If he wants to be a female, make him a female. A good sharp knife will do the job really quick.” The threats, which made national news and led the sheriff in the small town of Achille, Oklahoma, to order the school district temporarily closed, were all inspired by the fact that the 12-year-old, while at school, was using the girls’ restroom. Rumors had spread on a Facebook group for local parents that the girl was looking over the doors of bathroom stalls. Trans girls and trans women tend to inspire the most ire and suspicion when it comes to the national bathroom debate; only recently have trans men and trans boys started to become the center of a trans panic of their own. But that doesn’t mean transmasculine people like me exist in gendered spaces without being scrutinized, harassed, or sometimes ejected altogether — and not only in conservative, rural areas like Achille, Oklahoma, but in supposedly progressive safe havens like New York City.

Lixia Guo / BuzzFeed News The Prospect Park YMCA.