There was a time when gyms were about barbells, treadmills, and the quiet pretense of stretching while scrolling on your phone. But in contemporary California, the state that never tires of reinventing “progress,” even locker rooms have become ground zero in the battle over gender, privacy, and rights.

A Locker Room Flashpoint

Last month, Los Angeles-based EoS Fitness (formerly Gold’s Gym) banned a lesbian woman for daring to ask that the women’s locker room be reserved exclusively for something unfathomable: women! Her name is Tish Hyman. Her crime? Shouting “stay out of the women’s locker room!” at a trans-identified male who followed her inside, allegedly stared her down, and called her a b***h while she was naked.

Now, in any other era, that would have been considered harassment. But in California’s new moral hierarchy, the moment a man announces he’s a woman, all the usual rules disappear faster than the last dumbbell during peak time at Planet Fitness. So, of course, the gym banned her. Because as every California bureaucrat knows, the surest way to “promote safety and inclusion” is to punish the biological woman who complains about being intimidated by a biological man.

The New Math of Justice: When Policy Replaces Common Sense

This incident is part of what we might call The Sacramento Equation:

X = inclusion
Y = women’s rights

If X increases, Y must decrease, until women are either silent, canceled, or, in this case, expelled.

Apparently, the gym was just being proactive. Back in 2021, a Gold’s Gym franchise in California lost a lawsuit after a trans woman was denied entry to the women’s locker room. Naturally, corporate learned their lesson: never let the women win again. A new paradigm was established: if a biological woman complains, it’s discrimination. If a biological man complains, it’s a civil rights case. If both complain simultaneously, California holds a press conference about “equity in wellness spaces” so nobody can remember who’s naked anymore.

The Inclusive Dystopia

EoS Fitness, like most modern companies, likely boasts a “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” policy. Today, that largely means:

  • Diversity of opinion is banned.
  • Equity ensures everyone is equally uncomfortable.
  • Inclusion allows anyone in the locker room who threatens to post about it on social media.

The logic is seamless:

  • You don’t need a membership card if you have a gender identity.
  • You can be removed for “misgendering,” but not if you are a biological man leering at a biological woman in her formerly safe space while she’s undressed.
  • “Women’s safety” is now the punchline in state legislative humor.

Meanwhile, women (both straight and lesbian), are discovering that the feminist movement has quietly been hijacked by those who treat “female” as a lifestyle choice. For decades, women were told to “speak their truth.” Now, when they do, they’re told to shut up, accept the politically sanctioned injustice, or get out.

California: Where Science Takes a Backseat to Feelings

This isn’t just about one gym. It’s a microcosm of California’s entire political identity: the belief that laws of biology are negotiable if your feelings are strong enough. In Sacramento, feelings now determine facts.

Take UC Davis, where administrators recently announced the demolition of traditional men’s and women’s locker rooms in favor of an all-gender wellness space. The project is being sold as the future of “inclusive, accessible environments.” What nobody can explain is how a cash-strapped public university suddenly found millions to re-plumb the bathrooms of progress. Maybe the money came from the same magical budget that is building a bullet train to nowhere.

Meanwhile, the California legislature performs Olympic-level mental gymnastics. Earlier this year, Democratic lawmakers quietly blocked a bill requiring sex-specific locker rooms and sports teams in public schools. The proposal wasn’t controversial. It simply asked that girls’ spaces remain girls’ spaces. But this is Sacramento we are talking about, so common sense is now considered hate speech with better punctuation.

Unfortunately, as California leads other progressively liberal colleges in a game of Simon Says, they all are taking notes, filing grant proposals and dreaming of the day when every locker room becomes a taxpayer-funded social justice laboratory.

The irony, of course, is that all this “progress” is sold under the banner of feminism. Fifty years after Title IX, the movement that fought for women’s equality now finds itself defending the right to define what a woman is. The state that once exported Hollywood glamour and Silicon Valley innovation now exports a single lesson to the nation: feelings are fact, biology is bias, and anyone who objects will be banned, fined, or re-educated. California has turned compassion into a performance sport, and the judges deduct points for common sense.

California may be ground zero, but other states are quietly running the same experiment with the same variables: identity, policy, and women’s privacy.

Meanwhile, in the Real World: Schools as Testing Grounds

Outside the California bubble, most people still operate under the simple assumption that locker rooms are sex-segregated for privacy and safety. Surprisingly, this notion is now considered radical in a state that increasingly refuses to recognize the biological realities of female anatomy. What is radical is the idea that some girls want to change clothes without fear, and some women want showers that aren’t staring contests.

Despite the moral grandstanding, progressives have inadvertently resurrected the oldest stereotype in the book: that women who speak up are hysterical and need to be silenced. Only now, it’s packaged as progress. It’s almost poetic.  The same movement that spent decades preaching “believe women” now believes everyone except women.

As the liberal playbook continues to prioritize identity over biology, schools and gyms nationwide are taking notes:

  • New Mexico middle schools adopted trans-inclusive bathrooms despite multiple reported assaults.
  • An Oklahoma school district faces a lawsuit after a girl was allegedly beaten in a school bathroom by a transgender student.
  • Virginia high schools have become ground zero for Title IX absurdities related to trans-inclusive locker rooms. In Loudoun County, Virginia, a trans teen sexually assaulted a female classmate in an empty classroom, while wearing an ankle monitor for a prior assault in a girl’s bathroom at another Loudon County school.  In another incident, two male students were suspended after expressing discomfort when a biologically female classmate, identifying as male, was changing in the boys’ locker room and recording video of the boys. Despite the fact that the transgender student committed the infraction (recording a video in the boys’ locker room), the boys were suspended, given a no-contact order, and required to comply with a correction action plan.
    • The U.S. Department of Education later ruled that the district violated Title IX and had retaliated against the boys. Translation: the students who felt uncomfortable were punished, not protected, by their school.
    • Virginia’s Attorney General called it a “retaliatory Title IX investigation,” arguing that the school weaponized an anti-discrimination law to silence students. A federal judge has since paused the suspensions while lawsuits proceed, and the Department of Education threatens to withhold millions in funding unless the district complies.

The message is clear: in modern America, it is not the act that matters, it is the narrative. What once could be handled by a vice-principal and a phone call home now requires federal litigation, press conferences, and a Title IX flowchart thicker than War and Peace.

While it would be a disservice to paint all trans youth with the brush of a relative minority of troubled offenders, it is equally a disservice to frame events like those described above as just a few isolated one-offs with no impact beyond the victims themselves (when such incidents are begrudgingly acknowledged at all).  Yet this is exactly the pretense that is being doggedly foisted upon us. In an attempt to minimize outrage, the mainstream media and progressive school administrators label each case as “isolated.” Meanwhile, bureaucrats assure parents that policies are “inclusive,” yet the only guaranteed outcome is that women and girls are pushed to the margins of spaces that once existed to protect them. It should come as no surprise then, that the same mindset that treats female-only spaces as negotiable, also supports a medical system that is willing to gamble with children’s bodies.

The Medical Landscape

Here’s the inconvenient truth no one mentions at cocktail parties: gender-affirming care isn’t a temporary lifestyle option like a haircut or a tattoo. It’s a permanent change, involving lifelong care, with costs and consequences that ripple far beyond the turbulent, impressionable years of adolescence. While some adults report deriving genuine relief from transition, the critical question remains whether it is responsible, or even scientifically justifiable, to fast-track children, whose brains are still developing, into irreversible, lifelong medical interventions. Hormone therapy, surgeries, and follow-up treatments create chronic medical conditions requiring ongoing monitoring. This includes, but is not limited to, fertility preservation, cardiovascular monitoring, liver panels, bone density scans, and neuropsychological assessments and support.

The medical profession prides itself on the Latin phrase “primum non nocere.” It means “first, do no harm.” Yet nearly 72% of parents interviewed by Reuters, who sought gender affirming care for their children from care providers at U.S. gender clinics, reported feeling “pressured or rushed to proceed with treatment.” Moreover, some states, like Oregon, allow teens as young as 15 to make life altering gender affirming care decisions without parental consent. Worse, an analysis of insurance claims found that 56 minors aged 13 to 17 underwent genital surgery between 2019-2021. When one rushes irreversible interventions on minors, whose brains are still developing and whose life trajectories remain uncertain, medical professionals risk violating their fundamental oath. And while many clinicians are well-meaning, the infrastructure, incentives, and scientific gaps in youth gender medicine demand real scrutiny, not just affirmation.

The medical risks associated with these procedures are far from trivial. Take bone health, for instance. Puberty blockers, designed to pause development, also pause bone accrual during a critical window. Studies show that even after introducing hormones later in adolescence, bone mineral density may never fully recover in some skeletal regions, leaving trans adolescents with a lifetime vulnerability to fractures.

Cardiovascular risks are no laughing matter either. Estrogen therapy, particularly in feminizing regimens, has been linked to thromboembolic events, changes in cholesterol, and other vascular complications. The kicker? Most long-term studies end in participants’ 20s or early 30s. No one knows what cumulative exposure to these hormones will look like at 50, 60, or beyond. In other words, the clinic’s profit today might translate into cardiac ICU bills decades later.

Liver health and metabolism also get caught in the crossfire. Oral estrogens and high-dose testosterone can affect liver enzymes, sometimes significantly. And while clinicians promise monitoring, labs, and adjustments, nobody’s running lifetime simulations on organ stress decades out.

Surgical interventions carry the risk of complications. Even “routine” procedures like top surgery, vaginoplasty or phalloplasty carry risks of infection, bleeding, and functional issues that sometimes requires multiple revisions. Imagine stacking these risks on top of decades of hormone therapy, imaging, labs, potential revisions, and lifelong follow-up. Who foots the bill? More than half the states via Medicaid. In other words, taxpayers are signing up for an open-ended subscription to youth-driven medical adventures.

Then there’s fertility; often a footnote in glossy marketing materials. Hormone therapy and surgeries can permanently reduce or eliminate fertility, leaving options like cryopreservation, if offered, as expensive afterthoughts. Many minors don’t fully grasp this, yet they are making decisions that may preclude having biological children entirely.

The fact remains, the evidence base behind much transgender affirming medical treatment is not rock-solid. A recent review warns that studies on regret and quality of life suffer from very high loss to follow-up; meaning the most adversely affected kids may drop out of research, skewing the numbers. Meanwhile, other guidelines (such as those for adolescents with both autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and gender dysphoria) emphasize how much more complex and uncertain treatment decisions become when neurodevelopmental differences are in play.

Possible Link Between Autism and Gender Dysphoria

Speaking of ASD: research shows that autism is overrepresented among adolescents with gender dysphoria. One study of gender‑dysphoric kids found elevated autistic traits across multiple behavioral domains.  On top of that, mentalising ability (how well someone reads others’ mental states) seems to moderate the link: folks with more autistic traits and lower mentalising ability report more gender dysphoria.

These comorbidities matter. According to clinical guidelines co-authored by leading gender clinicians, adolescents with both ASD and gender dysphoria require far more cautious, tailored evaluation because their decision-making processes, social understanding, and long-term capacity can differ significantly from neurotypical youth.

It would be morbidly funny if it were not so transparently manipulative. While European health systems are reevaluating these interventions after studies found the supporting evidence to be “weak and uncertain,” the American approach is to create euphemisms (gender-affirming journey, dynamic interventions) that conveniently obscure the possibility of medically induced harm.

Once one accepts how extensive, invasive and lifelong these interventions often are, one issue becomes unavoidable: the gap between what teenagers can consent to on paper, and what they can truly understand in practice.

The Maturity Paradox in Medical Ethics

Ask yourself the obvious question: in a country that struggles to fund basic healthcare, does it make sense to institutionalize non-congenital, elective, lifelong medical care that begins in childhood and requires permanent follow-up? Notably, care that may be later regretted? When ideology is running the show, caution is often ignored.

The lifelong nature of gender-affirming care is not just a financial boon for clinics; it is a reality that some come to regret. While the industry celebrates access and affirmation, a growing chorus of detransitioners raise questions about the long-term physical, psychological and social consequences of early interventions. Their stories expose a critical gap: children and teens are being steered toward irreversible medical decisions before they possess the neurological maturity to provide truly informed consent. And when these individuals later speak up, their voices are often minimized or dismissed. This reveals the human cost of profit-driven medicine and ideology, consequences that detransitioners are forced to live with long after the institutions that guided them there have walked away.

So, here’s the question that keeps bioethicists, parents, and skeptical gym-goers up at night: if a 15-year-old is mature enough to consent to life-altering surgery or start lifelong hormones, shouldn’t they also be able to vote, drive, or be tried as adults in court? Where do we draw the line between bodily autonomy, neurological maturity, and long-term risk? And more importantly, who exactly is responsible when decades of medical intervention collide with the natural march of aging?

If we want to know whether our ethical safeguards are working, we should look first at the people for whom they failed: detransitioners.

The Human Cost: Detransition and Oversight

And now we come to the uncomfortable reality: detransition. It’s the topic nobody brings up at Pride parades or diversity panels, but one that quietly underscores the stakes of early interventions. While gender-affirming care is often marketed as a clear, affirming path, reality is messier. Studies suggest that detransition rates, while relatively low, are not zero, and the reasons are complex: evolving gender identity, surgical complications, social pressures, or regret over irreversible changes

Gender‑affirming chest and genital surgeries carry meaningful rates of complications such as infection, wound problems, scarring, and functional issues, and a subset of patients require one or more revision procedures. These aren’t small tweaks. Revision operations after gender-affirming surgery can be technically complex and physically and emotionally burdensome for patients.

Psychological and social fallout often follows. Anxiety, depression, and social isolation can spike, particularly when support networks collapse or detransitioners face hostility from the same communities that encouraged their initial transition. Meanwhile, insurance coverage for follow-up care is inconsistent; once again leaving taxpayers and families to cover the long-term consequences.

Far from being a clear path, the lifelong medical and social consequences experienced by some who later detransition reveal a more complicated reality. Many detransitioners report regret, social ostracization, and psychological trauma, and some describe feeling pressured by clinicians, social workers, or peers to undergo irreversible interventions.

Detransitioners often encounter hostility from activist communities they once considered supportive, making it difficult to share their stories publicly. This silence masks a critical gap: lifelong medical care that begins in childhood can have lasting consequences, yet the potential for regret is often downplayed in public discourse.

Recent cases illustrate these stakes. One UCLA student claimed she was fast-tracked for gender transition at age 12, raising questions about informed consent and oversight. Other reports highlight physical complications, ongoing mental health challenges, and social reintegration difficulties. Even when the U.S. Department of Education and other institutions host meetings with detransitioners to address legal or policy concerns, and support, the medical and social consequences for the individuals remain largely personal and long-term.

Neurodevelopment and Decision-Making

Ultimately, while advocates focus on access and affirmation, detransitioners’ experiences underscore the urgent need for truly informed consent, thorough counseling, and careful consideration of lifelong medical and social impacts before initiating irreversible interventions in minors. Empirical work on adolescent neurocognitive development shows that many teenagers can demonstrate adult‑like reasoning in structured, low‑stress settings, yet remain particularly vulnerable to short‑term rewards, peer pressure, and emotionally charged decision contexts. In juvenile justice and related legal scholarship, these findings are routinely invoked to argue that adolescents lack the mature judgment required for adult criminal sentencing, precisely because their decisions are often made in “hot” conditions of arousal, social influence, and limited timeframe, rather than “cold,” deliberative reflection.

Proponents of early gender interventions often lean on research suggesting that adolescents can reason “like adults” in calm, low‑pressure, “cold” decision environments. But detransitioners routinely describe pathways to treatment shaped by intense social validation, activist rhetoric, and perceived expectations from clinicians: classic “hot” conditions, where developmental science predicts poorer judgment, not fully informed consent. Similarly, when gender‑related medical decisions are shaped by fear of rejection, intense community norms, or perceived expectations from clinicians and peers, they likewise fit the profile of “hot” decision‑making that developmental neuroscience identifies as especially susceptible to short‑term social and emotional pressures.

The aforementioned human stories are troubling enough on their own. But they also reveal an asymmetry in how adolescent immaturity is interpreted: in criminal law and research ethics, neurodevelopmental evidence is used to justify stronger protections and limits on youth autonomy, whereas in parts of gender‑affirming care it is cited to support early, often irreversible interventions for the same age group.

If the law treats adolescent brains as too immature for adult criminal liability precisely because they are vulnerable to “hot” pressures, it cannot simultaneously treat them as fully competent to consent to irreversible medical interventions made in equally “hot” contexts without explaining the difference. Legal analysis of adolescent culpability emphasizes that the very features highlighted by neuroscience; heightened responsiveness to peers, reward sensitivity, and incomplete development of self‑regulatory control, undermine the fairness of treating juveniles as fully responsible adults, and therefore warrant a more protective stance. When detransitioners describe feeling pressured to transition and are later ostracized for detransitioning, their accounts suggest that some clinical pathways function less as neutral, “cold” deliberation and more as socially charged environments where dissent is costly. This pattern raises the possibility that ideological commitments to affirmation and identity politics, rather than a consistent application of developmental science, are shaping where the line between autonomy and protection is drawn.

Put bluntly, the same neurodevelopmental evidence that justifies shielding adolescents from the full force of criminal law is, in parts of gender medicine, repurposed to justify granting them adult‑level authority over irreversible procedures undertaken in highly ‘hot,’ socially charged conditions. That is not a neutral application of science; it is an ideological choice

The Billion-Dollar Rainbow

For all the talk about compassion, identity, and “following the science,” it’s remarkable how rarely we discuss the part of gender medicine that quietly links them all together: money. Not feelings, not sociology, not politics, just basic economics. And once you follow the money (as the shadowy informant Deep Throat recommended in All the President’s Men), a clearer picture emerges: gender-affirming care in the United States is not just a medical field, it is a burgeoning industry, and a very lucrative one.

Market-research firms, not think tanks and not advocacy groups, estimate that the U.S. transition-care market (surgeries, hormones, puberty blockers, and clinical services) is now a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. According to the American Principles Project’s 2023 report, the total gender-medicine sector was valued at $4.4 billion in 2023, projected to reach $7.8 billion by 2030. Grand View Research places U.S. sex-reassignment surgeries alone at $2.1 billion in 2022, and NovaOne estimates the U.S. hormone-therapy market at $1.7 billion in 2024. Put together, this is not a cottage industry. This is big business. And business, inevitably, comes with incentives.

A clinic performing routine hormone therapy, follow-up visits, psychological evaluations, and a steady pipeline of referrals for surgeries isn’t just practicing medicine, it is operating within a highly lucrative market with recurring revenue. Hormone therapy is, by design, lifelong. Patients return every three months, every year, indefinitely. Puberty blockers, once initiated, require continuous monitoring and replacement. Surgeries, top or bottom, generate far more income than counseling ever will.

You don’t need a CFO to connect the dots: a high-volume gender clinic likely easily reaches a seven- or eight-figure annual revenue. Not because clinicians are villains, but because that is how the economics work when a specialty combines chronic therapy + surgery + insurance coverage + rapidly rising demand. And demand is rising.

Medicaid, the largest public insurer in the country, now covers gender-affirming care in more than half of U.S. states, according to Reuters. Private insurers have followed suit. When both government and commercial payers reimburse a service category, the market does what markets always do: it grows. It innovates. It recruits patients. It expands its footprint.

Critics often frame concern about minors receiving gender-affirming care as moral panic or reactionary discomfort with social change. But you don’t need a cultural theory to ask whether a fast-expanding, highly profitable medical sector might be influenced, even subtly, by the same forces that shape every other part of American healthcare: financial incentives, institutional momentum, and industry growth targets.

Europe, notably, has begun to notice this divergence. Countries that pioneered gender medicine (Sweden, Finland, the UK) have slowed or revised pediatric protocols, citing insufficient evidence, rising detransition rates, and mental-health complexities. Meanwhile, the U.S. is trending in the opposite direction, accelerating access, expanding clinics, and treating gender care as a growth market.

Call me cynical, but when an area of medicine becomes a multi-billion-dollar industry, it tends not to get smaller. It tends to grow; sometimes faster than the evidence can keep up. This is not an accusation, it is an observation. It is simply acknowledging that even the most earnest moral efforts can be shaped, quietly and structurally, by the economics wrapped around them. And in the U.S., the economics of gender medicine aren’t just colorful. They’re a rainbow with a pot of gold attached, reinforced by an activism style that treats any call for caution as heresy. Isn’t it only natural then, that profit-hungry Big Medicine smells opportunity?

Historical Activism vs. Current Transgender Activism

Look at the history of American social movements. Successful campaigns, like the Civil Rights Movement and Women’s Suffrage, coalesced around clear goals: constitutional rights, protection from harm, and justice for victims. They faced internal and external dissent, yet leaders prioritized strategic, measurable change.

Contrast this with much of modern transgender activism:

  • There is no unified plan for social good; victories often focus on silencing dissent, reshaping curricula, or enforcing ideological conformity in private spaces.
  • Opposition is labeled “bigotry” or “transphobia,” sometimes regardless of the merit of the argument.
  • Real-world consequences are largely ignored: women losing safe spaces, and children are being pressured into irreversible decisions.

In short, while historical activism sought to expand rights responsibly, current transgender activism too often seeks to impose diminished rights on the community at large while claiming moral superiority. This is activism that rewards outrage, punishes caution, and treats biological reality as an inconvenience rather than a safeguard for safety and privacy.

The Final Frontier: Common Sense vs. Ideology

We arrive at the inevitable question: where do we draw the line?

  • Locker rooms, showers, and gyms are becoming ideological battlegrounds.
  • Schools have become a minefield of policies that prioritize identity over safety.
  • Children are expected to make life-altering medical and social decisions before their brains have fully matured.

Progressive orthodoxy demands compliance. If you value women’s safe spaces, you’re bigoted. If you question hormone therapy for minors, you’re cruel. If you suggest biology matters in a locker room, you’re intolerant.

Meanwhile, universities and school districts spend millions retrofitting facilities or defending policies that compromise privacy. Parents are reduced to compliance, students to experiments, and detransitioners to cautionary tales that rarely make headlines.

The result is simple. Women’s rights and children’s safety are increasingly treated as afterthoughts, optional, sacrificed on the altar of inclusion ideology. All for what? A handful of policies that benefit a minority at the potential cost of the majority’s physical safety, privacy, and lifelong wellbeing.

The Inevitable Future

If California continues this trajectory, expect gyms to introduce new “Equity Locker Rooms.” Mixed-gender spaces where everyone can undress in utopian peace, so long as they sign a waiver agreeing not to voice any opinions about what’s happening around them. The state will likely fund it with a grant called The Intersectional Hygiene Initiative.

Meanwhile, Tish Hyman, reportedly a lesbian who has spent her life advocating for tolerance and inclusion, found herself cast as the villain in a Bluesky morality play. California’s message to her was unmistakable: “We support women, unless you are one.”

Final Thought

In recent years, California has prided itself on leading the nation: in homelessness, higher taxes, gasoline prices, business regulations, unemployment and now, in social engineering so advanced that Orwell would’ve called it a bit much.

California once protected women’s rights. Now it protects men’s rights to call themselves women and use their spaces. It is “progress” by subtraction; the fewer rights women have, the more inclusive it somehow all becomes.

But fear not America. California is exporting its moral curriculum nationwide. If women and girls are uncomfortable with a male-bodied person in their locker room, gym, or dorm bathroom, they are not progressive enough. Feminism, once a shield for women’s rights, has been rebranded as cooperation in silence.

Meanwhile, universities like UC Davis are spending millions to create all-gender spaces, and school boards across the country are passing policies that, intentionally or not, weaken or eliminate women’s safe spaces.

The new progressive mantra is simple.  Feelings trump biology, and every space is now fair game. Parents and women who protest are told to re-enroll in a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Enlightenment Program.

The question we face is straightforward. At what point do we say enough is enough? When do we assert that women, not the state, not political influencers, and not MS NOW personalities, deserve spaces that protect their dignity and safety?

Because if locker rooms, showers, and gyms can be taken away under the banner of inclusion, what’s next? Bathrooms? Prisons? A rhetorical question, of course, as those too have already been repurposed in the name of progress. The final frontier may be where common sense, privacy, and biology are quietly erased in favor of ideology.

Welcome to the newly “enlightened” United States. A nation where even gyms and locker rooms now reflect the politics of identity more than the principles of privacy. In a rush to redefine inclusion, women are not liberated but quietly rendered invisible.