By In Washington, Democrats believe that women should be forced to see male genitalia. Now a women-only Korean spa is begging the U.S. Supreme Court for help after the state ordered the business to admit a preoperative transgender woman into spaces where female customers are fully nude.
The dispute over Olympus Spa might sound like an unusually extreme culture-war hypothetical. Instead, it is a real consequence of gender-identity policies adopted in one of the country’s deepest-blue states — and a striking example of how far Democratic-controlled states have moved on an issue where distinctions based on biological sex were considered unremarkable only a decade ago.
Olympus Spa petitioned the Supreme Court after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected its First Amendment challenge to Washington’s enforcement of state anti-discrimination law.
The case began in 2020 when Haven Wilvich, who has identified as a “nonbinary trans woman,” filed a complaint with the Washington State Human Rights Commission after being denied admission to the spa’s Lynnwood location because Wilvich has male genitalia.
Olympus Spa operates according to the traditional Korean communal-bathing model, with nude pools and bathing areas separated by sex. The business has said it accepts transgender women who have undergone sex-reassignment surgery.
Washington officials nevertheless found that the policy violated the state’s Law Against Discrimination, which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and defines the term to include “gender expression or identity.”
That distinction matters because Washington’s policy goes considerably further than merely prohibiting discrimination against transgender customers. State regulations governing gender-segregated facilities require covered businesses to allow people into facilities corresponding to their gender identity even when “undressing in the presence of others occurs.” The regulations further provide that when another customer is uncomfortable, it is the objecting customer who should be directed toward a separate or gender-neutral facility, if one is available.
In other words, Washington has taken what was once the conventional understanding of a women’s nude facility — that women could expect not to encounter male genitalia — and effectively reversed it. The state now treats the exclusion of a biological male from that space as the discriminatory act.
Olympus Spa reached a settlement with the Washington State Human Rights Commission in October 2021 before filing a federal lawsuit arguing that the government’s actions violated the owners’ First Amendment rights.
A three-judge 9th Circuit panel rejected the challenge in May 2025.
“We are not unmindful of the concerns and beliefs raised by the Spa,” Judge M. Margaret McKeown wrote. “Indeed, the Spa may have other avenues to challenge the enforcement action. But whatever recourse it may have, that relief cannot come from the First Amendment.”
The majority concluded that Washington was targeting conduct prohibited by its anti-discrimination law rather than any particular message expressed by the spa. It also noted that Olympus Spa had not challenged the statutory definition of sexual orientation or argued that its policy fell outside the statute.
The full 9th Circuit declined to reconsider the case in March, prompting a blistering dissent from Judge Lawrence VanDyke.
“This is a case about swinging dicks,” VanDyke wrote. “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.”
The language was deliberately jarring, but VanDyke’s point cuts to what makes the case politically significant: The controversy is not about pronouns, employment paperwork or how someone dresses. It concerns whether women and girls in an explicitly nude, women-only environment may be required by law to share that space with someone who has male genitalia.
Olympus Spa, represented by Alliance Defending Freedom and the Pacific Justice Institute, has now taken that question to the Supreme Court. The Court’s docket confirms that the case has reached the justices following proceedings in the 9th Circuit.
The petition describes Olympus Spa as “a cultural institution…founded to transmit and preserve centuries-old Korean communal bathing traditions in an intimate, sex-separated setting, consistent with its owners’ cultural and religious heritage.”
Its attorneys argue that “forced inclusion of nude males impairs the association’s mission” and say the Christian owners “hold the religious conviction that men and women should not be unclothed together unless married to each other.”
The spa is also pointing to an awkward feature of Washington law: The state exempts bona fide private clubs from its public-accommodation requirements. Washington law specifically excludes a “bona fide club” or accommodation that is “by its nature distinctly private” from the definition of a public accommodation.
Olympus Spa argues that the distinction raises constitutional problems under the Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in Tandon v. Newsom, which held that government cannot generally burden religious exercise while treating comparable secular conduct more favorably.
If Olympus Spa “operated as a private club or as part of an Asian-interest sorority rather than as a public business,” its petition argues, it “would be free to exclude male patrons, no questions asked.”
The spa nevertheless faces a difficult Supreme Court fight.
Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment scholar and UCLA law professor emeritus, has noted that the Supreme Court “has been reluctant to allow businesses to say, ‘We get to associate with whomever we please.’”
Recognizing such a broad constitutional right, he said, could produce “very broad challenges to anti-discrimination law.”
The religious argument is also complicated because Washington’s private-club exception is based on whether an organization is genuinely private rather than whether it is religious.
Volokh identified another problem with resolving the case solely on religious-liberty grounds: It could protect religious proprietors while leaving secular businesses unable to maintain exactly the same sex-separated spaces.
“There are going to be lots of other spas that say, ‘Honestly, we have no religious beliefs here, but we do believe that women and men should be naked separately. We’re just not religious.’”
That may ultimately expose the larger issue underlying the case.
The 9th Circuit majority said Olympus Spa “may have other avenues to challenge the enforcement action.” Washington lawmakers could, for example, amend state law to permit certain intimate facilities to distinguish between customers based on anatomical sex.
But that would require the state’s political leadership to acknowledge something that was once almost universally taken for granted: There are circumstances — particularly where people are naked — in which biological sex matters.
That such a proposition now requires a trip to the Supreme Court illustrates just how radicalized gender policy has become in some blue states. Washington is no longer merely demanding tolerance or equal access to ordinary public accommodations. Its rules now allow the government to tell women in a women-only facility that their objection to male genitalia is the problem. They, not the person with male anatomy, are the ones expected to go elsewhere.
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