This week brought a rare moment of clarity from a prominent liberal voice when Joy Reid acknowledged on her podcast that she would be “alarmed” and would “freak out” if she saw male genitalia in a women’s locker room. The comment, made while discussing a viral incident at a Los Angeles gym, punctures the convenient narrative that concerns about privacy and safety are simply bigotry in disguise. It is telling that even those once reflexively defending every progressive policy are now admitting what ordinary people have been saying for years.
Conservatives should not sneer at this admission; we should recognize it as vindication of commonsense instincts the Left has tried to erase. For too long, activists and many in the media have insisted that ideology must trump biology, and that any hesitation about mixing private spaces is inherently hateful. Reid’s straightforward reaction exposes how detached that posture has been from real-world experience and basic human decency.
This is about women’s privacy and safety, plain and simple. Locker rooms, bathrooms, and other intimate spaces exist for a reason — to allow people to dress, undress, and shower without fear of exposure to the opposite sex. When policy and corporate directives prioritize ideology over those basic boundaries, they manufacture risk and humiliation for countless women and girls who simply want to be left alone.
The political class and corporate HR departments have been slow to admit mistakes, but admissions like Reid’s make clear that the woke experiment has limits. Laws and rules should reinstate clear protections for sex-segregated spaces while offering reasonable accommodations, such as private stalls or gender-neutral facilities for those who prefer them. This is a practical compromise that respects dignity without indulging radical ideology.
Media elites bear much of the blame for normalizing these dangerous policies while gaslighting anyone who raised objections. They praised theatrical declarations of inclusion while ignoring the messy, invasive consequences that real people face every day. When a mainstream liberal voice finally acknowledges the obvious, it should prompt a reckoning about how out of touch those outlets have become.
Policymakers must listen to lived reality rather than slogans. Legislatures and local officials can craft narrowly tailored protections that keep women’s spaces for women while ensuring no one is subjected to harassment. That approach defuses conflict by recognizing both privacy and the need for reasonable accommodations, rather than forcing a false binary.
If anything positive comes from this episode, it is that the debate is moving away from reflexive ideology and toward practical solutions grounded in human dignity. Advocates on all sides should seize that opening to restore common sense, protect vulnerable people, and stop treating everyday privacy as a sacrificial lamb for the altar of performative progressivism.
