Kaeley Triller Haver is a 33 year old mother of two young children. She is also a survivor of sexual trauma. Her abuse — at the hands of a man close to her family — began when she was still in diapers and lasted the first 10 years of her life, so she is aware of the need to protect women and girls from the types of men who would prey on them.
Last year, she found herself on the politically incorrect side of the issue of transgender access to bathrooms and locker rooms in Washington State. And what she found is that her feelings, her fears, her experiences — like those of so many women and girls — do not matter where this issue is concerned. Everyone is equal; some are just more equal than others. Before it was over, she was fired from her job for not going along with the agenda of the transgender lobby.
Kaeley began working at the YMCA as a locker room monitor when she was 15. Over the past 17 years, she had continued working for the organization while going to high school and then college and beyond. In her last position there — communications director — her job was to oversee all communications for nine branch locations covering 120,000 members. Then the YMCA decided to open up its locker rooms and showers on the basis of gender identity. Men would be allowed to use the women’s facilities and no one could stop them or even question them about it.
She told The New American that she could not go along with that policy and tried — unsuccessfully — to convince the organization of the dangers:
Before this even became a matter of law in Washington, I was working at the YMCA here as a communications director and my boss came to me one day and said, “We’re doing this new policy and it might be controversial and I need you to take this stuff home and go over it and start helping me with the talking points.” What she was talking about was transgender locker room access. And so, I pushed back and I got fired.
We asked Kaeley how she “pushed back” and she explained:
I said this is not something I can do in good conscience, and here’s why. And for the first time in my life — because it’s not something you talk about at work — I expressed my experience as a survivor of sexual trauma. My abuser liked to watch me in the shower and laugh, and so I was keenly aware of what happens in our locker rooms, and wanting to protect our members. And because of my past experiences, I was hyper-vigilant at the Y. I would regularly conduct sex offender screening — on my own time — to make sure that someone wasn’t getting through that shouldn’t. And every time I would run one of these screenings, I would catch somebody — in November I found three sex offenders who were actively using our YMCA facilities. One of them had a free shower pass, actually. I have sat with parents after their children have been harmed, so I know [how] predators work, so this policy was just not something I could get behind. And I told them all of this stuff and said, “This is why we can’t do this.”
One would expect the feelings, experiences, and reasonable observations of a woman who had survived the ordeal of having her most formative years marked by sexual abuse to be taken into account. But this is not how the YMCA responded, according to Kaeley. “My boss looked at me and told me, ‘You know Kaeley, any time I find myself feeling the way that you’re feeling right now, I convince myself that I am being closed-minded,’” she told The New American.
Ignoring her warnings, Kaeley recounted, the YMCA decided to instate the policy — without informing members of the change. “That’s when I really began to struggle,” she said, “because I realized that I have friends and family who use those locker rooms and showers and they could end up being confined with a naked male. So I ended up writing a blog post about the transgeneder bathroom issue and I got it published in The Federalist.” The blog post — which has seen nearly viral distribution — was not about the policy at the YMCA. It was about Kaeley’s own traumatic experiences as a child. But it did address the transgender bathroom issue. “I didn’t use the YMCA’s name, but I was fired a week later for inappropriate communication with members,” she told The New American. While no one at the YMCA mentioned the blog post directly, Kaeley said, the timing of her termination made the point clear.
What she did not realize at first was that she was caught up in a larger battle. The Human Rights Commission was planning to push through a rule that would essentially open all “public accommodations” across the state on the basis of gender identity. It didn’t take her long to put the pieces together once the new rule was announced. She told The New American:
I realized the reason the YMCA was doing this was because they had been clued into the fact that the Human Rights Commission here in Washington — which is a group of five unelected bureaucrats — was going to instate this state-wide mandate — basically a rule functioning as law for the entire state of Washington — and they did this on December 26, 2015 — they quietly enacted a new rule that would require all places with public accommodations in the entire state to open their bathrooms and locker rooms on the basis of gender identity. They didn’t tell anyone about this [ahead of time]. Five people decided for seven million.
With the implementation of the new “rule functioning as law” — formally known as Washington Administrative Code 16232 — Kaeley saw things quickly go from bad to worse. “It’s so bad here in Washington that it’s actually forbidden to ask any unwelcome questions about gender identity,” she said, adding, “So you can’t even ask for clarity or clarification. So any man who wants to walk into any bathroom anywhere doesn’t have to dress like a woman. He can say he has a right to be there. And you can’t ask him anything to clarify.”
While reeling from being fired, Kaeley did what she’s been doing all her life: She survived and decided to fight. She is now communications director for Just Want Privacy, an organization formed to combat the transgender bathroom issue in Washington. Just Want Privacy tried to fight the Human Rights Commission’s open bathroom policy legislatively, but in the short session, there was not enough time to gain the necessary traction. So, the initiative was launched to give people the chance to vote on this issue, rather than have it dictated to them by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats. The campaign has been gathering signatures since late April and has about 150,000 of the needed 246,000 signatures to bring the issue to a vote. However, the deadline of July 8 is coming up quickly, so the campaigners have their work cut out for them. They have petitions available for pickup all across the state and are hopeful they will meet the goal.
They are fighting as if their lives depend on it because the stakes in this battle are high. Kaeley, who, recall, says her former employer considered her “closed-minded” for feeling the way any survivor of sex abuse would feel, also says the parallel between the messages of the transgender lobby and her former abuser is unsettling:
My abuser used to cry literal tears and say, “You don’t love me anymore” if I didn’t fill-in-the-blank — if I didn’t meet his demands. And this feels like the exact same message to me when they say, “If you don’t violate your personal boundaries and let me shower next to you at the gym, then you’re hateful — you’re not loving.” And that is abusive. That is the definition of a rape-culture. Why have people so readily accepted this narrative? It’s just nonsense. How can [feminists] say ‘My body, my choice’ [a mantra of the abortion lobby] — which I don’t subscribe to — if I can’t even choose who sees my body in the shower? So, basically, I have to get over it. How many women have they told to just get over it?
Because of her experience of having been sexually abused at such a young age, Kaeley says one of her chief goals in life is to protect her young daughter from ever experiencing anything like that. “It is incredibly important to me that my own five-year-old-daughter has a choice about when she sees a naked man,” she said, and then — skipping a beat — added, “I didn’t have a choice.”
But the Human Rights Commission — a misnomer if ever there was one — and the rest of the transgender lobby would take that choice away from Kaeley’s daughter. There is no doubt that policies such as this do indeed create, as Kaeley so aptly put it, a “rape-culture.” In the name of “equality,” women and children are being victimized.
And how many more victims will there have to be before enough is enough? The safety and peace of mind of women and children — especially those who daily live with the scars of sexual abuse — have to matter more than this ungodly agenda. More than the feelings of the poor souls who suffer from a mental disorder which causes them to be confused about their external plumbing. The one group is being used as an excuse to strip the rights away from the other group, all for the benefit of what Kaeley describes as “social engineering.”
It’s time to bring this madness to an end. And the Kaeley Triller Havers of the world are working diligently to do just that.
If you live in Washington and would like to get a paper petition to sign, please visit Just Want Privacy’s website for information.
Related article:
Transgender Transformation: Hope and Change, One Locker Room at a Time?
