Transgender woman shocked by outcry over her presence at San Diego-area YMCA

The transgender girl on the middle of an issue at a YMCA outdoors San Diego mentioned she was “thunderstruck” by the outcry spurred by a teenage woman’s criticism.

Christynne Wooden, 66, mentioned she didn’t even know the youthful YMCA member had spoken out about her to the Santee Metropolis Council till a good friend referred to as to supply assist and sympathy after the videotaped feedback went viral, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported.

“I went, ‘What video?’” Wooden mentioned. The good friend despatched her an Instagram hyperlink to a clip of the council assembly.

“I watched it and simply began crying,” Wooden mentioned Thursday. “Twice that is occurring to me? I simply couldn’t consider it.”

Rebecca Philips, 17, mentioned she was altering after swimming one-day final month on the Santee YMCA when she noticed a unadorned trans girl within the altering rooms. Philips, whose feedback have since sparked protests on the YMCA, thought the individual she noticed was a person.

“As I used to be showering after my exercise I noticed a unadorned male within the girls’s locker room,’ she later advised the Santee Metropolis Council. “I instantly went again into the bathe, terrified, and hid behind their flimsy excuse for a curtain till he was gone.”

The Santee YMCA closed early final Wednesday after a rally that included lots of of protesters — together with teams that supported Wooden and others that had been pro-Philips — and transient scuffles. The YMCA is about to shut once more this weekend.

YMCA officers mentioned services across the county had been receiving threatening messages, the Union-Tribune reported.

Wooden and Phillips didn’t work together on the YMCA, however Phillips later advised Tucker Carlson she’d seen the individual’s “bottom.”

“I’m in one of the vital weak positions {that a} woman might be in,” she mentioned on Fox Information, including the scenario made her really feel unsafe.

It’s not the primary time Wooden has confronted an issue being a trans girl.

She advised the Union-Tribune that in 2018, a health club in close by El Cajon refused her entry to its girls’s locker room, prompting the state to sue the health club on her behalf.

“The true factor that makes me joyously glad is that the phrase is on the market now that you could’t pull this with the transgender neighborhood,” Wooden advised The San Diego Union-Tribune on the time.