Juxtaposition of Trends

I ran across an article in early March marveling at how at-home fitness/workout series like those sold by Beachbody are not only surviving, but thriving. The author was somewhat baffled by how that continues to happen, despite national low-cost gym chains, movements like Crossfit, and our society's seeming ubiquitous need to be outgoing and social in everything we do.

Shortly thereafter, it hit the news that gym chain Planet Fitness revoked a woman's membership after she complained about a transgender man in the women's locker room. Apparently, the company's policy is for members to decide which gender they most identify with, and then use the corresponding locker room. Not surprisingly, not only was the woman involved in the incident horrified, but many other women using that gym that she talked to were equally upset. This irritated the gym, who chose to kick her out in hopes of making the issue go away.

According to an opinion piece written elsewhere online, the whole incident is a perfect example of why, as a society:

We need to be focusing on the institutional segregation of genders as a whole to start dealing with this issue.

It’s not just going to go away, and the only way I can see to begin tackling this problem is doing away with the time-honored divide between men and women.

The author goes on to say that we should just "desegregate bathrooms and locker rooms", and then no one has to be offended. Now, to his credit the author seems to think that completely individualized (i.e. single person use/sized) locker rooms are the perfect answer. I don't know where this person gets his concept of reality, because its should take about two seconds to do the math on that and figure out how completely unrealistic that is in terms of space and money, but at least he wasn't suggesting (as many are) that locker rooms should retain their current format and be desegregated, and that all of us prudes who don't want the opposite sex to see us naked (it's just a body as the logic goes) should get over our old fashioned selves.

Still, I couldn't help but think that with policies like this one becoming the norm, it really shouldn't be any surprise that people are choosing to work out in the safety of their own homes!