Republicans Attacked This Issue All Year — And 2024 Could Be A Tipping Point

This year was marked by rising anti-trans rhetoric, a record number of anti-LGBTQ bills filed in statehouses across the country, and even violence.

Almost every morning, Christynne Lili Wrene Wood goes to her water aerobics class at the YMCA. The ritual isn’t just about exercise. Over the last decade, the routine has given her a welcoming community of fellow retired women, whom she affectionately refers to as her “aqua sisters” in the conservative suburb of Santee, California.

Wood and her friends often go out for breakfast after class and, on occasion, spend weekends floating along a lazy river. When a teenage girl complained about Wood to the YMCA staff in early January ― and later asked the Santee city council why Wood, who is a transgender woman, was allowed to use the women’s locker room ― those same friends had her back.

Seemingly overnight the teen’s testimony gained traction in the far-right pockets of the internet, and far beyond southern California. Tucker Carlson brought the teen onto his now-canceled show, and various national conservative outlets ran stories stoking fears about trans women in bathrooms.

When Wood heard that some people were gathering to protest her and the YMCA’s trans-inclusive policies, she asked one friend if she should leave the gym altogether. “Don’t you fucking dare,” Wood recalls her saying. “We don’t run from bigots here.”

Wood is no stranger to discrimination. As a child, she saw Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign march in Washington and later battled racism as a Black naval officer. In 2021, with the help of the ACLU, she received a settlement from a Crunch Fitness gym which had tried to bar her from using the women’s locker room even after she provided legal documents proving her name and gender marker change, and gender-affirming surgeries.