This is a brutal variation of a scene you may recall if you spend any amount of time online. It’s where some conservative or Christian parent stands up at a microphone at a school board meeting and starts to read from a book that the school’s administration has approved for a library or classroom. Immediately, the school board shuts the parent down and perhaps cuts the parent’s mic, all because the parent dared to read the words in public from the book the school approved for children.
Usually, the book in question is one that includes pornographic content or language, all in the name of advancing “equity.” So, we get to see in real life how the same school board members and administrators can be fine with letting your children consume such content, but will shut you down within seconds if you dare expose the same content to the voting public and the media.
That’s the dynamic. Now let’s take a look at it through the prism of a court case that takes all of this to a new level. More specifically, let’s go to the federal Ninth Circuit court, which decided on a case called Olympus Spa v. Armstrong.
Do women and girls have rights anymore?
In May 2025, the Ninth Circuit decided that the government was in the right when it told the owners of a Washington state health spa that it could not “discriminate” against a man who thinks he’s a woman – on religious grounds — by denying him access to women’s locker rooms and restrooms, and other female-only spaces.
The owners of the spa had made the claim that giving the man access to these private spaces was not consistent with their religious beliefs. The court disagreed and said that if the state’s Human Rights Commission said they had to give people like this access, then the spa has to comply regardless.
That commission, which seems to care about human rights, but apparently not the rights of women and young girls, told the spa it had to change its admissions policy to be more “inclusive” and to be in compliance with the Washington Law Against Discrimination (WLAD).
The spa’s common-sense policy was to restrict admission to biological women only. The owners of the spa went out of their way to say that by “biological women,” they could include individuals who had “bottom surgery” prior to trying to gain admission. In other words, if you’re a man and you’re so committed to the delusion that you’re a woman and you get yourself castrated, the spa will let you in. That is far more generous than I could be.
In the spa’s 2023 complaint against the commission, it says, “The family run business is owned by Korean Christians who hold sincere faith-based convictions against allowing persons whose genitals are external (males) to be present with persons whose genitals are internal (females) while in a state of partial or full undress if such persons are not married to one another.”
In fairness to the spa owners, they played nice, and it got them nowhere. The Ninth Circuit pretty much told them their rights don’t matter. The only person whose rights mattered in this case was the man who lives a lie by pretending to be a woman. That means he has the right to parade naked around women and girls, and they have no right to say a thing.
Judge takes the gloves off
Judge Lawrence VanDyke of the Ninth Circuit decided that if playing nice didn’t call attention to the serious lack of humanity in the Human Rights Commission’s policies, then it’s time for some brutal honesty. As a result, he angered well more than half of his colleagues and peers, and a huge chunk of the legal profession, along with the entire woke ecosphere. I’d call that a good day.
Brace yourself for the vulgarity here, but it’s not only “part of the plot” of this story – it’s the whole story. VanDyke’s dissent starts:
This is a case about swinging d**ks. The Christian owners of Olympus Spa — a traditional Korean, women-only, nude spa — understandably don’t want them in their spa. Their female employees and female clients don’t want them in their spa either. But Washington State insists on them. And now so does the Ninth Circuit. You may think that swinging d**ks 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.
Justice Van Dyke’s bombshell 9th circuit dissent does precisely what he wants it to- shocks the reader no less than being at a women’s spa and seeing, well… It’s a brilliant psychological chess move that anyone criticizing it isn’t evolved enough to understand it…. More of this… pic.twitter.com/652v5eXQbs
— Sigal Chattah (@Chattah4Nevada) March 13, 2026
I can’t read VanDyke’s mind, but I suspect the judge’s dissent achieved his objectives. A reasoned and polite dissent would have been filed away and forgotten, accomplishing nothing. But his dissent in this case garnered massive media attention on the issue, though a good bit of it only illustrated his points. The media focused only on his words, but not on the injustice of women being forced by the government to be subjected to seeing male genitalia in private female spaces.
A quick internet search will illustrate the news media’s reaction, which was predictable. But let’s take a closer look at VanDyke’s colleagues’ reaction.
Judge Margaret McKeown, also of the Ninth Circuit, wrote a response to VanDyke’s dissent. This was co-signed by 28 of the 51 members of the court:
The American legal system has long been regarded as a place to resolve disputes in a dignified and civil manner or, as Justice O’Connor put it, to “disagree without being disagreeable.”1 It is not a place for vulgar barroom talk. Nor is it a place to suggest that fellow judges have “collectively lost their minds,” or that they are “woke judges[]” “complicit” in a scheme to harm ordinary Americans. That language makes us sound like juveniles, not judges, and it undermines public trust in the courts. The lead dissent’s use of such coarse language and invective may make for publicity or entertainment value, but it has no place in a judicial opinion. The lead dissent ignores ordinary principles of dignity and civility and demeans this court. Neither the parties nor the panel dissent found it necessary to invoke such crude and vitriolic language. Decorum and collegiality demand more.
Do these woke judges lack the self-awareness to notice that they are proving VanDyke’s point? You can clip just about any segment of McKeown’s statement and use those very words to argue against her own flawed position that allows for the presence of exposed male genitalia in women’s private spaces.
VanDyke did not let McKeown and the others have the last word on this, responding:
My distressed colleagues appear to have the fastidious sensibilities of a Victorian nun when it comes to mere unpleasant words in my opinion, yet exhibit the scruples of our dearly departed colleague Judge Reinhardt when it comes to the government trampling on religious liberties and exposing women and girls to male genitalia. That kind of selective outrage speaks for itself… Male genitalia is precisely (and only) what the Spa, for religious reasons, objects to admitting into its female-only space. The fact that so many on our court want to pretend that this case is about anything other than swinging d**ks is the very reason the shocking language is necessary.
He later added, “Squirm as we might, I think it’s only fair for our court to have a small taste of its own medicine.”
It’s hard to argue with that. The biggest crime you can commit today is to notice what the left is doing, and that’s exactly what VanDyke has done here, and it’s why the left is not done with him. He seems fully capable of taking care of himself on this, and perhaps more. Just maybe he’ll embolden other common-sense judges to quit playing the charade that requires them to adhere to standards of decorum that only seem to work in favor of the left and against both conservatives and the public.
This judge is shaking things up, and it’s quite refreshing to see.
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