When Seattle dad Michael Lee* walked his 11-year-old daughter into her new gymnastics studio, the first thing he noticed was a two-story-tall pride flag hanging from the ceiling.

“It’s a very reputable gym, and the competition is impressive,” Lee told Independent Women’s Forum. “If you go on their website, they make it very clear that the owners are gay, but that doesn’t affect me making a decision for my daughter’s future.”

According to Lee, Seattle businesses often make a point to say they are LGBTQ-owned, so the fact that his daughter’s new gym proudly advertised their “LGBTQ pride” wasn’t surprising. What was surprising, however, was the fact that his daughter’s new girls’ team included a male athlete.

“Being a guy, I can easily recognize another male, especially in a sea of 10- to 13-year-old females,” Lee said. “I immediately saw that the frame is different, the hair is different, the clothing is different, the gait is different. We’ve been in competitive gymnastics for three years now, and I’ve never seen this before.”

Lee said that the “most frustrating part of the situation” was that it forced him to have a conversation with his daughter that he didn’t think she was ready to have.

“It was sickening,” he said. “I didn’t want to broach that topic, but she’s getting exposed to it from other avenues.”

According to Lee, high-level gymnastics teams like this one often participate in travel competitions that require athletes to be in close quarters. Due to the male athlete’s presence, “I just didn’t know how that would play out,” he said.

Following the gym’s policy to go directly to staff with any issues, Lee said he immediately reached out to his daughter’s coach to raise his concerns about the male athlete’s presence on her team.

“I got the silent treatment,” he said. “A couple weeks went by, so I said, ‘Well, I guess I need to talk to the owners about this.’”

Lee said that in a meeting with one of the team’s owners, he made sure to ask two crucial questions: “Is there a biological male on the team, and, if that’s the case, have you made any accommodations at the team level regarding bathrooms?”

Transgender-identifying males entering females’ private spaces, such as bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams, has become a widespread issue in recent years.

In a horrifying case from 2023, a male student sexually assaulted girls in the women’s restroom at two separate Virginia high schools. With stories like these becoming more common, Lee had serious concerns for his daughter’s safety as she used the gym’s restroom.

The gym’s owner, however, told Lee that he didn’t share those concerns. According to Lee, the owner—“who was supposed to be a business-savvy owner of a successful gymnasium”—responded by asking him what he meant by “biological sex.” When Lee explained that sex is an immutable trait, the owner tried to claim that disclosing the athlete’s sex would be a HIPAA violation.

“HIPAA has nothing to do with this,” Lee said. “I had to politely push back on that.”

According to Lee, the owner eventually lost his patience and said, “We don’t care to know if a biological male is on the team, and as members of the LGBT community, we’d never ask such a question.”

Realizing that the team’s coach and owners were willfully turning a blind eye to the vulnerable situation in which they were leaving his daughter and other female gymnasts, Lee made the difficult decision to pull his daughter from the team.

“I’m really looking for a good place for my daughter to flourish,” he said. “I just have to do my due diligence, because I’ll probably encounter this type of situation in this region again.”

*To protect the identity of the storyteller and his daughter, a pseudonym has been used throughout.