Joy Reid speaks out against men in women's locker rooms

Former MSNBC host Joy Reid on admitted in a recent podcast that if she were faced with a biological male in a locker room, she would be "disturbed" and "alarmed." The comments came as Reid discussed an incident that took place earlier in November at a Los Angeles gym in Beverly Hills. Singer Tish Hyman went viral on social media for complaining about a man in the women's locker room. She was kicked out of the gym for doing so.

"I would be disturbed. I’m telling you, I would be alarmed. I’m alarmed enough when I see a woman with her dangling boobies. If I saw a penis in the ladies’ locker room, I would freak out too," Reid said in the Reid This Reid That podcast.

"This is nothing against trans, anybody. What it’s saying is—I turn around and I see a pee pee, a penis in front of me inside of the room, I would probably go to management and say wait a minute, why is there somebody, a naked man, in this room, because just the world we live in, just from a safety standpoint, and just from a privacy standpoint, I would—so I can see why she would have gone and reported to management…"

Reid added that management should take Hyman’s concerns seriously, even if the person is transgender, and questioned, "does she [Tish Hyman] not have the right to be at least uncomfortable with the situation is what I’m saying."

Footage from a Los Angeles gym went viral in early November after Hyman said she had her gym membership revoked when she took issue with a biological male being in the locker room while she was naked. "Yo, like how you gonna say you want to be a woman, or that you are a woman, but you don't give a f*ck how women feel. Today, I was naked in the locker room. I turned around and there's a man there in boy shoes, like boy clothes, lip gloss, standing there looking at me. I'm butt naked," she said.

Video was taken of Hyman in the lobby of the gym angrily calling out, "At Gold's Gym men, grown men, with big d*cks, in the women's locker room! And that's why I'm getting kicked out. And I wanna make sure the girls to know. The f*ck! Everybody saw that man in the f*cking locker room, no one's saying sh*t and I'm f*cking done with it. It's f*cking stupid and it's dangerous. Me, naked in front of a man without my permission, but I'm the one who gets kicked out of the gym y'all, and I'm terminated for not wanting men in the locker room!"

It was later revealed that the man, identified as Alexis Black, formerly known as Grant Freeman, had pleaded guilty in 2022 in Ohio to beating Alexis Freeman, his now ex-wife. The woman received a compound fracture to her jaw and other injuries in the attack, and Black was charged with a 3rd degree felony and sentenced to one year in prison. Black took his ex-wife's name for his own when he transitioned.

Hyman confronted current California state senator and US congressional candidate Scott Wiener over the matter, telling the Democrat lawmaker, "Millions of women in America are being harassed and sexually assaulted in locker rooms. I'm a lesbian, black woman, I'm not transphobic, I'm not homophobic, and I do respect a lot of the things you've done, but I do see a lot of these bills that you've passed that are dangerous for women and young children, and I understand that you're trying to be on a level playing field, and I'm here to represent my community, because I hear a lot of things about my community in these bills."

"And I'm telling you as a woman, first and foremost, that this is dangerous and we need your help, because you're in the office, you're going to go into Pelosi's spot, I want to support you. I have millions of people behind me watching this right now.

"We want to know, are you going to protect women? Not trans women, women. Women and trans women are different things. Women," Hyman said.

Wiener told Hyman, "I think we need to protect the safety of all women. Obviously, that's incredibly important. I also know that trans women are also brutalized in this country, so women and cisgender women are brutalized in this country."