24-hour fitness (gym)

I am an avid weight lifter, and the gym is my place of worship.

There is now a man who enters the woman's locker room (24 Hour Fitness, Arvada, CO) on a regular basis. I can make assumptions about this man, but I am no longer legally entitled to ask him to leave for my privacy despite my lack of consent to his presence where I remove my clothes.

This is state law. He enters regardless of how many women are using the facility or how we feel about being violated while we are naked by a person who is clearly a man.

#unitedstates #gym #24hour #safety #privacy #lockerrooms #changingrooms #SingleSexSpaces

the 'urinary leash' re-emerges for women who have suffered male violence

When I was about 11, I was seriously sexually assaulted by a man who pushed me into a phone box where I could not escape from him. When he let me out, I ran to the nearby railway station, where I hid in the women's toilets. He followed me and stood menacingly in front of the door, but other women chased him away. Since then I have suffered from intense stress and claustrophobia if I have to be in a confined space with men.

As Covid-19 is rampant in Britain, most people have had very little social life in the past year. I had a rare pub lunch with my husband last summer, during which I noticed that a person sitting nearby was a man dressed as a woman. I recently found out that our local council allows men to use women's facilities if the men claim to be transgender. My stomach knotted and I did not dare use the women's toilets in case he walked in. Instead I cut short our outing.

My future will be like that of women in the 19th century, before public toilets were available: they could not leave their homes for longer than they could go without urinating.

#unitedkingdom #england #bathrooms #sexualassault #trauma #safety

lesbian organizing & fear of being taken to court

Since two court cases in 1995 (in SA) and 2000 (Victoria) when trans activists working for trans organisations took lesbian organisers to court over a flyer/poster, inviting lesbians born and raised female to a festival, it has become increasingly distressing for me and many of my lesbian sisters, to attend any kind of lesbian activities for fear of being accused of 'discrimination' against trans-identified males demanding to have access to our same sex attracted lesbian spaces. After a lifetime of fighting to be out and accepted as a lesbian, I feel I have been pushed back into the closet! For me it is unacceptable to share the lesbian spaces I have felt safe in with male-bodied "lesbians". As a result, our same sex lesbian events have gone underground and were forced to be private by invitation only events. This is very stressful since new lesbian members now have to be vetted and vouched for by two existing members and secrecy of locations have to be kept at all times. This has caused a sense of paranoia for fear of being taken to court again. I know many other lesbians who've been traumatized by these legal threats in the past, and for being accused of discrimination. The same anti-discrimination laws we fought for for decades, against women, against lesbians, have been used against us by trans activists to force us to open up our same sex spaces to them. We have continued to operate underground but we can't promote our festivals, workshops, and meeting places to younger lesbians in the community. We have been forced to become invisible again, back to the dark ages of the last century.

#australia #lesbian #organizing #legalthreats #backinthecloset