CPRC Asks Supreme Court to Protect Girls’ Privacy in Olympus Spa v. Armstrong

A women’s spa. Girls as young as 13. A state order to admit a male.

Olympus Spa is a traditional Korean women’s spa, known as a jjimjilbang, in Washington. Patrons, including girls 13 and older, are nude for bathing, steam room, sauna, and full-body scrub services. The Korean Christian family which owns the Spa maintains the cultural requirement that patrons and staff are female. A male who identifies as a woman was turned away as a patron and filed a complaint with the Washington State Human Rights Commission, which cited the spa and ordered it to change its policy.

Spa owners filed a federal lawsuit that was dismissed by the district court. The dismissal was upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The case, Olympus Spa v. Armstrong, is now before the Supreme Court for its consideration.

What CPRC Filed

On October 5, CPRC filed an amicus brief asking the Court to grant review. Counsel of Record is Mary E. McAlister, with Vernadette R. Broyles and C. Erin Friday. We filed on behalf of Our Duty–USA, Women Are Real, and Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender.

The brief supports granting the petition. It agrees that a single-sex nude women’s spa may lawfully exclude males. It also tells the Court something the spa’s own policy does not: surgery does not change sex. A rule that admits males after genital surgery still puts females in an intimate space with males. The line has to be sex.

Why this matters for girls and women

Washington’s Law Against Discrimination treats “gender identity” as part of sexual orientation and places it on the same footing as sex. In intimate facilities, that rule subordinates women’s privacy to a self-declared identity.

The brief documents what that looks like in practice. In Washington, an 80-year-old woman was banned for life from her YMCA after she objected to a male employee in the women’s locker room. At a Lynnwood pool, a mother reported a male showering in the women’s locker room during a children’s swim meet. Staff said the center follows state law. Similar accounts from California gyms, school locker rooms, and other states show the same pattern: women and girls are told to leave, cover up, or seek counseling, while the male who says “I am trans” stays.

A ruling that forces Olympus Spa to admit males would not stay inside one business. It would confirm that states may erase sex-based privacy in the places where women and girls are most exposed, including spaces used by minors.

What the Brief Asks the Court to Decide

The brief makes three points:

• Females have already lost privacy and sex-based rights in locker rooms, shelters, prisons, and schools because public-accommodation laws elevate gender identity over sex.
• “Gender identity” is not an immutable characteristic comparable to sex. The brief explains the clinical evidence that a large share of the males who assert a female identity are driven by autogynephilia, a paraphilic sexual interest, and that related patterns of exposure and voyeurism show up again and again in female spaces.
• When a statute protects both sex and gender identity, the two conflict in intimate facilities. Recent decisions, including West Virginia v. B.P.J. and United States v. Skrmetti, point toward resolving that conflict in favor of sex.

Read the Brief

The full amicus brief is here: Read the full brief (PDF)

Sponsor this work

Amicus briefs at the Supreme Court are expensive. Research, drafting, and filing take real money and real attorney time. This one was written to give the Court the record it will not get from the parties alone: what these laws do to women and girls, and why sex has to win when it collides with gender identity.

If you want CPRC in cases like this, sponsor the brief.