For 4 many years, Julie Jaman was an everyday on the YMCA’s Mountain View Pool, however she was slapped with a lifetime ban in 2022 after confronting a transgender staffer within the girls’s locker room.

Now, the 82-year-old resident of Port Townsend, Washington, needs to swim once more — and he or she’s keen to play authorized hardball to make it occur.

Her legal professional, Middle for American Liberty CEO Harmeet Dhillon, fired off a requirement letter threatening authorized motion until town and YMCA raise the ban, problem a proper apology to Ms. Jaman and pay her $350,000 in damages for “emotional misery arising out of the incident.”

“We name on the Metropolis and the YMCA to reverse their unlawful choice, appropriate this injustice, and prioritize public security over woke ideology,” stated Ms. Dhillon in a press release.

She accused town and YMCA of violating Ms. Jaman’s First and 14th Modification rights, arguing that their conduct was “not solely illegal however shameful.”

“When an 80-year-old lady fairly believes she is witnessing a criminal offense towards minors in a girls’s showering space, the federal government’s response ought to be to collect all the information and be taught what occurred, not take sides in an ideologically charged debate,” Ms. Dhillon stated within the Tuesday letter.

Ms. Jaman turned a trigger celebre for ladies’s privateness rights — and persona non grata on the Olympic Peninsula YMCA — after accosting in July 2022 “a person carrying a lady’s swimsuit” within the girls’s locker room with two younger women.

She requested the grownup, “Do you will have a penis?” The person replied, “None of your online business.” Ms. Jaman yelled again, “Get out of right here!”

The “man carrying a lady’s swimsuit” turned out to be a transgender YMCA staffer who was escorting the ladies to the toilet. The YMCA kicked Ms. Jaman out, saying she violated its code of conduct on disrespectful conduct.

Ms. Jaman swung again by standing exterior the YMCA with an indication saying, “Males who establish as girls are utilizing the ladies’s dressing rooms.” She spoke at a metropolis council assembly and held an August 2022 #LetJulieSwim rally that was swarmed by transgender rights activists.

The day after the rally, Port Townsend Mayor David Faber issued a proclamation saying that “discrimination and prejudice, in any kind, significantly towards transgender individuals, are unwelcome and don’t have any place within the Metropolis of Port Townsend.”

He additionally took jabs on social media at TERFs, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists, a derogatory time period for ladies who oppose organic males who establish as feminine in girls’s areas.

“Trans and cis-allies alike spoke love & help, and the one TERF speaker was from out of city. Tonight jogged my memory why Port Townsend is house,” Mr. Faber stated in a tweet on Aug. 16, 2022.

The Olympic Peninsula YMCA adopted up with a letter telling Ms. Jaman that she was banned for all times because of a “sample of code of conduct violations,” which she denies.

Julie Jaman merely needs to return to the pool she’s used for nearly forty years. She needs her life again. Study extra and donate to Julie’s struggle for all girls to really feel secure and safe in non-public areas: https://t.co/mj3YVyH6AA

— Middle for American Liberty (@Liberty_Ctr) March 19, 2024

Ms. Dhillon stated emails and different inside data present that metropolis and YMCA officers “engaged in a classy and coordinated public relations marketing campaign to smear Jaman and make her seem like bigoted and harmful to transgender people.”

“This couldn’t be farther from the reality,” the legal professional stated. “It’s true that Jaman helps holding girls’s areas reserved for organic girls. However she doesn’t harbor hate in direction of anybody primarily based on their gender id, nor has she ever engaged in harassment on the Pool or elsewhere. But that’s precisely what the Metropolis and the YMCA have led the general public to consider via their false and deceptive statements.”

Ms. Jaman stated she hopes “my credibility is restored.”

“I used to be showering within the girls’s dressing room once I noticed a person carrying a lady’s swimsuit watching little women undress. I used to be obligated to talk up and ask for assist,” she stated in a press release. “Since that second, I’ve suffered mob-like assaults, public humiliation and widespread mendacious reporting.”

The Washington Instances has reached out to Port Townsend and YMCA officers for remark.

Ms. Dhillon referred to as on town and YMCA to reply by March 27, warning that in the event that they miss the deadline, “all choices will likely be on the desk, together with the establishment of authorized proceedings in court docket.”