For years, women and girls in California who wanted to work out or relax at the spa have been forced to confront male genitalia. One lawmaker wants to change that.
Assemblywoman Leticia Castillo on Tuesday introduced a bill that would require facilities, including gyms and spas, to provide “sex-separated” bathrooms and locker rooms for men and women. Castillo says the bill is a common-sense measure that protects California women — and helps combat the state’s embrace of radical transgender ideology.
“Parents across California are asking for clarity and commonsense protections in intimate spaces where females deserve privacy and safety,” Castillo told The Daily Wire. “This measure simply requires that bathrooms, locker rooms, and changing areas in businesses be separated by sex, while still allowing single-occupancy gender-neutral options. Protecting civil rights and protecting females are not mutually exclusive, and this bill makes sure we do both.”
The legislation would require “sex-separated intimate spaces, except where a gender neutral facility is a single occupancy.” These intimate spaces include bathrooms, showers, changing rooms, locker rooms, dressing rooms, and “any other area in which an individual would have a reasonable expectation of privacy from the opposite sex.”
The proposal is backed by Erin Friday, the president of Our Duty USA, an advocacy organization dedicated to raising awareness about the dangers of transgender ideology.
“We need California to return to reality. It really shouldn’t be that hard to return to sex-based intimate spaces, because it was a foolish and dangerous idea to permit males to believe their way into the female category,” Friday told The Daily Wire. “You don’t need to be a genius to figure out the predictable outcome will be demented males terrorizing females.
The legislation cites reports of incidents that have rocked California gyms and private spaces. One incident took place in July 2021 at WiSpa in Los Angeles, where a registered sex offender named Darren Merager was accused of exposing his penis while on the woman’s side of the spa. He was later found not guilty of indecent exposure.
Using female pronouns, the lawyer who represented Merager told The Daily Wire that California law allowed people to use facilities in line with how they identified.
“Ms. Merager was put through a years-long process. Multiple felony criminal charges were lodged against her. Ultimately, she was prosecuted for doing what California law expressly allowed her to do: use facilities consistent with her gender identity. The jury soundly rejected this prosecution and found her not guilty on all counts,” lawyer Elliott Tiomkin told The Daily Wire.
Another incident involved a woman named Gracie Hutson, who said she witnessed a male masturbating inside the locker room of a San Francisco Planet Fitness. She shared a video on TikTok from inside the location showing the shadows of a person inside a stall appearing to engage in the act. That person was banned from Planet Fitness and had his membership canceled, according to an email viewed by The Daily Wire.
Hutson told The Daily Wire she was in “shock” when she noticed what was happening in the locker room. She said the man claimed to be transgender and wasn’t even “trying to play the part” of a woman.
“There’s way too much leeway for predators to go into these environments and do things like masturbate in the bathroom,” she told The Daily Wire. “I felt my space was violated, and I know many other women feel that the locker rooms and restrooms, places that are supposed to be safe, places for women, are no longer safe.”
In another case, a woman named Tish Hyman said she lost her membership at Gold’s Gym after saying that she was harassed by a transgender-identifying male in the locker room.
“In recent years, male individuals who have adopted nonbinary or transgender identities have been in women’s intimate spaces where female individuals of all ages are in various states of undress,” a copy of Castillo’s legislation shared with The Daily Wire says. “Some male individuals have also been naked with their male genitals exposed.”
Other patrons of San Francisco-area YMCA locations also told The Daily Wire that men have invaded their locker rooms.
“I felt violated. Nobody cared. I have never been in a domestic violence situation, but at that moment I felt the pain a woman must feel when violated — tears, shaking, loud, in disbelief, begging to be heard,” said Presidio YMCA member Nuchine Nobari. “I could tell from the ‘surprise’ look on the front desk staff member that he, too, was shocked.”
Susan Pete, a member of the Stonestown YMCA, said that a Muslim mother and daughter quit the gym after being exposed to a naked man in the shower.
“A Muslim mother was in the shower with her autistic daughter when the man appeared completely naked right outside the showers,” she told The Daily Wire. “The daughter became extremely distressed and was wailing, really screaming, loudly in the shower. The grandmother needed to bring clothes so they could dress in the shower, but she was terrified of walking past the naked guy because of her religious beliefs.”
Leftist groups in California, like the ACLU, argue that businesses like gyms and spas are not legally allowed to keep men out of women’s spaces if they identify as female under the state’s civil rights laws. Guidance from Democrat attorney general Rob Bonta says that entities cannot deny access to bathrooms based on so-called gender identity.
California Democrats have resisted even the most moderate restrictions of transgender ideology. Last year, lawmakers on the California Senate Public Safety Committee shot down a bill that would have kept male sex criminals out of female prisons.
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