Rantz: Judge forces women’s nude spa to accept biological men

A Seattle judge and the state of Washington are forcing a local women-only, nude spa to admit biological men. The state has effectively declared that women’s and religious rights are no longer valid and biology no longer exists.

Olympus Spa is a traditional Korean spa with locations in Tacoma and Lynnwood. According to court documents, it operates under a “female-only policy” restricting transgender women unless they have “gone through post-operative sex confirmation surgery.” The spa cites the rule as “essential for the safety, legal protection, and well-being of our customers” and is based on the owner’s Christian values that demand “modesty as between the sexes” and that “a male and female should not ordinarily be in each other’s presence while in the nude unless married to each other.” As such, the spa attracts employees and customers who are deeply religious, with employees who “refuse to perform massages or body scrubs on naked men.”

Transgender activist Haven Wilvich didn’t care about the owner’s religious values. While identifying as a woman, Wilvich is a biological man, and being nude at this spa is a violation of the rules. After a phone call confirmed the rule barred attendance, Wilvich filed a complaint with the Washington State Human Rights Commission (WSHRC) in February 2020.

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Washington state redefines gender

Wilvich’s complaint alleged discrimination, prompting an investigation by the WSHRC. 

Civil Rights Investigator Madison Imiola redefined what it means to be a woman in order to conclude that the spa discriminated against Wilvich’s gender identity. She criticized the policy because it “denies services to transgender women who have not had surgery … because their physical appearance is not ‘consistent’ with the traditional understanding of biological women.”

She said that the state “does not use genitals to define gender identity and … recognizes that a person’s gender identity can be different from the biological sex assigned to that person at birth.”

Imiola threatened the spa’s owner with costly prosecution if it did not change the policy. While the policy was scrubbed from the Olympus Spa website, the owner sued. The claim was that the state’s discrimination law violates the owner’s First Amendment rights to free exercise of religion, speech, and association.

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Seattle judge agrees: gender no longer exists

Seattle’s U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Jacobs Rothstein rejected the spa owner’s claims, allowing the WSHRC’s findings of gender identity discrimination to stand. 

“I’m more woman than any TERF will ever be because I am an intentional woman whereas they are only incidental,” Wilvich wrote on Facebook, according to the Post, after the victory.

TERF is an insult that means Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. It pretends it’s radical to understand men have penises.

But Wilvich rejects this notion, telling the Post, “If you reduce women to their genitals, then you are no better than the patriarchal culture that you are pretending to critique.” One might argue a biological man taking over a women-only space is the so-called “patriarchal culture” at its most destructive.

Radical Left is aggressively weakening women’s rights

By siding with the WSHRC, the court effectively codifies gender as moot — that one may pick their gender and force others to accept it. And if gender isn’t real, merely a social construct determined by an individual, women’s rights no longer exist.

Wilvich claims to have “‘chosen’ womanhood,” a uniquely privileged position now afforded to biological men. 

If a biological man can claim discrimination as a self-identified woman, then there’s no way to differentiate between the two genders. How can you discriminate against someone on the basis of gender if gender no longer exists? There’s no legal standard mandating one prove they identify as what they claim. It’s merely accepted as fact. And if gender can change based on one’s mood, who’s to say someone is lying to exploit the law? You can’t enforce discrimination protections under such nonsense. 

It can’t just be that gender is fluid. So, too, must age and race or height and weight. If Wilvich identified as a senior citizen, does that come with social security checks? What about if Wilvich identified as black? Can a race-based claim of discrimination be filed, too? We’re likely soon to find out. But in the meantime, women lose and biological men come out on top — precisely what feminists used to be interested in preventing.

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Listen to the Jason Rantz Show on weekday afternoons from 3:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3). He is the author of the book What’s Killing America: Inside the Radical Left’s Tragic Destruction of Our Cities. Subscribe to the podcast. Follow @JasonRantz on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Check back frequently for more news and analysis.

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