Since its founding in 1844, the YMCA has long earned a reputation for safety and reliability—providing youth sports, summer camps, and neighborhood facilities where children thrive. Yet recent policies implemented by the organization have fundamentally undermined this trust, prioritizing gender ideology over the physical and emotional safety of minors.
American Parents Coalition recently exposed how YMCAs nationwide are eliminating separate boys’ and girls’ private spaces. Men and boys now routinely access girls’ locker rooms, bathrooms, and sleeping areas at summer camps—a practice that has expanded to include counselors. In many locations, older teen and adult biological male counselors are permitted to sleep in girls’ cabins if they “identify” as girls.
Michigan’s Sherman Lake YMCA explicitly states that counselors may choose gender-segregated cabins based on their perceived comfort, regardless of biological sex. The camp offers “all-gender” cabins for children and counselors “of any gender.” Similarly, McGaw YMCA Camp Echo in Michigan promotes “all-gender cabins with multiple counselors who have different gender identities,” while admitting that staff assigned to gender-separated cabins “most often” share the same gender identity as campers.
Colorado’s Camp Shady Brook requires both campers and staff to be assigned to cabin groups based on “gender identity.” Minnesota’s YMCA Camp Olson states that some children “don’t fit in the boxes of ‘boy’ or ‘girl’” and offers special cabins for those identifying outside the gender binary, while allowing trans individuals to select either restroom. In New York, Camp Gorham describes “Girl+” cabins as spaces for girls, trans, and nonbinary campers.
The crisis deepens as staff are instructed to withhold information from parents if a child identifies as LGBTQ+ unless the child provides “express consent.” Sherman Lake YMCA further states that staff are “trained” to “regularly” ask children to share their preferred names and pronouns.
South Mountain YMCA in Pennsylvania now offers a dedicated “Pride Camp” for children as young as seven, marketed as a “safe-space, non-gendered village” with programming centered on LGBTQ+ identity and “social justice conversations.”
This shift directly contradicts the YMCA’s foundational promise of child safety. The organization has made clear it prioritizes gender ideology over protecting girls’ innocence or physical security—a reality that has eroded decades of trust among American families. Nearly every camp cited has received millions in federal funding through taxpayer-supported programs, yet continues to operate under policies that place ideological agendas above the well-being of children and parental rights.
Alleigh Marré, executive director of American Parents Coalition and a mother of four, underscores this disconnect: “The YMCA has become yet another activist institution obsessed with appeasing a radical fringe that demands everyone around them, including children, embrace the lie that biological sex is meaningless.”
