The debate over the city’s long-standing anti-discrimination rules started with a Facebook post, the Sandpoint Reader reported. In October, a YMCA lifeguard posted that she had seen “a man semi-dressed … as a woman” using the facility’s women’s locker room. The YMCA and the Sandpoint police told the lifeguard that this was permitted because the city’s ordinance allowed people to “use the locker room that aligns with their gender identity.”

The post unleashed a “torrent” of responses from the community, the Reader reported, about whether the rule was treating all members, including transgender individuals, fairly — or whether it was endangering cisgender women in shared changing-room spaces like the YMCA’s.

During Wednesday’s meeting, Grimm argued that deliberations over such issues are “complex civil rights questions that, in my opinion, belong to the state or federal law.”

“I believe it’s inappropriate for the city of Sandpoint to insert itself into intimate spaces where privacy norms, safety expectation and long-standing social boundaries already exist,” he said.

Many of those who supported the repeal spoke about their desire to protect women from sexual harassment or assault. City Council Member Kyle Schreiber said he takes those concerns “very seriously” — but that the focus on transgender individuals’ use of one locker room or another is misplaced.

“It seems like every other day there’s another article in our local paper about a sexual predator,” he said Wednesday. “Here’s the thing, though. None of those incidents involved a man dressed as a woman in order to gain access to his victims. I couldn’t find a single one.”