Yesterday, the American Parents Coalition sent a warning about YMCA summer camps: They’ve embraced the transgender agenda, so you have no idea who will be sharing your daughter’s shower or her cabin. This trajectory perfectly illustrates O’Sullivan’s First Law, which predicts the inevitable decline of Western institutions.

Although few remember this anymore, the YMCA started life in 1844 as the “Young Men’s Christian Association.” The primary founder was George Williams, a London draper (i.e., a working man), who was disturbed that young men who came to London had no wholesome, moral way to spend time when their workday ended. Instead, they were to be found in taverns drinking and gaming, and in brothels.

Williams was a Christian who regularly had prayer and Bible-study meetings with his friends. He realized that young men, strangers in a strange land, needed to have a place where these options were available. So, on June 6, 1844, joined by 11 friends, he had an inaugural meeting that saw them found the Young Men’s Christian Association. They identified its purpose as “improving...the spiritual condition of young men engaged in the drapery, embroidery, and other trades.”

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The Victorian world quickly recognized that the Y.M.C.A. was a perfect antidote to the corruption that follows lonely young men in a big city, and chapters began to spring up across the Western world. Within a decade, there were world conferences...and the Young Women’s Christian Association was born, too.

In keeping with the notion of “muscular Christianity,” which was the Victorian version of the old Latin dictum “mens sana in corpore sano” (a healthy mind in a healthy body), Y.M.C.A.s opened gymnasiums and safe lodging places. Generations of young men found healthy sports camaraderie at “the Y,” playing basketball, swimming, or working out with dumb bells and weight machines.

The Y was wholesome. Sure, unwholesome people worked and went there, because we live in an imperfect world, but its ethos was moral. Even when the Village People came out with their disco anthem, “Y.M.C.A.,” with all that homosexual innuendo, the Y itself did not embrace the gay identity. (The “cop” lead singer, Victor Willis, insists that he truly wrote the song to celebrate the Y’s wholesome virtues for black urban youth.)

Things are different at the Y now, because it’s gone woke...very, very woke, as in “you don’t want your children to be there” woke:

The American Parents Coalition on Wednesday urged parents to “beware” that the YMCA determines access to overnight cabins, locker rooms, and showers on the basis of gender identity. The coalition says that many YMCA facilities may not inform parents that boys could be bunking or showering with female campers, raising safety and privacy concerns.

[snip]

Nationally, the YMCA recommends that “all campers and staff have access to the facilities aligned with their gender identity and comfort within facility and resource limitations.” The recommendations also suggest including transgender-identifying individuals in camp marketing.

YMCA camps and facilities across the country have adopted these guidelines, allowing females to be exposed to males in bathrooms or bunk with a person of the opposite sex. For example, Camp Olson in Longville, Minnesota, says access to facilities is based on gender identity, not sex.

“Access to gendered spaces (e.g. restrooms, overnight accommodations) should be based on gender identity. Sex assigned at birth, physical characteristics, or presentation should not dictate the use of gendered space. Trans individuals may select either restroom,” the camp’s guidelines say. “Requiring someone to use a bathroom or other gendered space of the gender they do not identify can be detrimental to an individual’s well-being and safety and puts Camp Olson at risk for discrimination complaints.”

The policy adds that if a female is uncomfortable using the same facility as a male identifying as female, then the female should use an alternate space, saying that “no one should be required to use an alternative restroom because they are trans.”

Moreover, the Minnesota camp says that the camp has no obligation to let parents know what’s going on.

All of this, of course, gets us to John O’Sullivan’s first law: “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.”

In America, the reason is almost invariably the requirement that employees, especially at the management level, have college degrees, whether the job requires them or not. Since WWII (and with accelerating fury beginning in the 1960s), college has been Ground Zero for spreading leftism throughout American society. This leftist indoctrination has become more concentrated, extreme, and toxic with every generation, as some percentage of college grads return to their old stomping grounds as professors to reinforce and expand upon their generation’s Marxist message.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the Young Men’s Christian Association would turn into the Young Trans Affirmation Association, but it’s still sad to see leftists destroy another Western institution (as they did Disney), parading the name around even as the body of the institution is eaten away by Marxist rot.