In 2020, Olympus Spa, a traditional Korean women-only, nude spa in Washington State, denied entrance to a man, claiming to be a woman. According to court records, the family that owns and operates the spa is Christians who hold religious convictions about unmarried men and women being unclothed together.
Haven Wilvich, the man who was unhappy being prevented from being nude with nude women who had sought out a single sex spa, responded by filing a complaint with the Washington State Human Rights Commission (WSHRC).
[Haven Wilvich, a man who successfully claimed it is discriminatory under Washington State law to prevent him from entering a women-only, nude spa (Image via YouTube Video)]
Washington State’s anti-discrimination laws provide that “’Sex’ means gender” and “’sexual orientation’ means heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, and gender expression or identity.” It also provides protection under “gender identity” regardless of whether or not someone’s appearance “is different from that traditionally associated with the sex assigned to that person at birth.”
Meaning, any man – even one with a penis, a full beard, dressed in what is generally considered men’s attire and sporting a men’s haircut – can declare himself a “woman” and he legally must be treated as such. This includes having the “full enjoyment of any of the accommodations, advantages, facilities or privileges of any place of public resort, [or] accommodation.”
The complaint filed with WSHRC resulted in a settlement agreement in 2021, which required the Spa to comply with the State law and to remove the phrase “biological women” from its entrance policy. The agreement preserved the Spa’s right to bring a constitutional challenge to the agreement, which it did.
As Legal Insurrection wrote about at the time, the Spa’s complaint resulted in a ruling by a district court judge upholding the state law and dismissing the Spa’s complaint that its First Amendment rights were violated.
That decision was appealed to a three-judge appellate panel, which also dismissed the Spa’s First Amendment challenge to the law. The Spa claimed the law violated its rights to freedom of speech, religion and association. The 2025 decision denied this claim, determining the Spa had no recourse under the First Amendment.
This week, the Ninth Circuit denied a request for the full Circuit to hear an appeal. [Full Opinion at bottom of post.]
In dissenting from this denial, Trump-appointed Judge Lawrence VanDyke went straight to the heart of the issue. “This is a case about swinging dicks,” he wrote. He continued:
You may think that swinging dicks shouldn’t appear in a judicial opinion. You’re not wrong. But as much as you might understandably be shocked and displeased to merely encounter that phrase in this opinion, I hope we all can agree that it is far more jarring for the unsuspecting and exposed women at Olympus Spa— some as young as thirteen—to be visually assaulted by the real thing.
Sometimes, it feels like the supposed adults in the room have collectively lost their minds. Woke regulators and complicit judges seem entirely willing, even eager, to ignore the consequences that their Frankenstein social experiments impose on real women and young girls.
The response of many of Judge VanDyke’s colleagues was to grasp their pearls at his dissent while shrugging at the impact on women and girls and businesses in Washington State and other states in the Ninth Circuit with similar laws. (This would include California, for example.) These judges refer to the public accommodation law, which elevates self-declared “gender identity” over immutable biological “sex” as “entirely unexceptional.”
The Judges complain about the dissent’s language, referring to it as “vulgar barroom talk” “coarse” “ignoring ordinary principles of dignity and civility [which] demeans this court” “crude and vitriolic” and “crass.” They sniff, “Decorum and collegiality demand more” and “We are better than this.”
These judges may feel as though they had a “swinging dick” wagged in their faces on paper, but they expect unclothed women and girls to accept the real thing in what are supposed to be single-sex spaces.
It is the residents of Washington State and the Ninth Circuit who deserve better than this.
Amanda Stulman is a Senior Researcher and Attorney at the Legal Insurrection Foundation
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