Judges in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals recently decided not to rehear a case from Washington state, but conversation about their ruling \u2014 which protects transgender people\u2019s right to patronize sex-segregated facilities \u2014 has been dominated by a dissenting opinion that members of the bench called \u201cvulgar barroom talk.\u201d <\/p>\n
The dissent by Judge Lawrence VanDyke argued it was unconstitutional to force a Korean spa to remove language from its website limiting admission to \u201cbiological women.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a case about swinging d\u2014,\u201d VanDyke wrote. \u201cThe Christian owners of Olympus Spa \u2014 a traditional Korean, women-only, nude spa \u2014 understandably don\u2019t want them in their spa. Their female employees and female clients don\u2019t want them in their spa either. But Washington State insists on them. And now so does the Ninth Circuit.\u201d <\/p>\n
VanDyke went on to denounce the court\u2019s liberal majority as \u201cwoke judges\u201d who had \u201ccollectively lost their minds\u201d and now sought to impose \u201cFrankenstein social experiments … on real women and young girls.\u201d (The spa also permitted trans women who had undergone vaginoplasty, while barring those with penises, court records show.) <\/p>\n
The response was swift and fierce. <\/p>\n
The court \u201cis not a place for vulgar barroom talk,\u201d Judge M. Margaret McKeown clapped back in a concurrence joined by 25 fellow judges. \u201cThat language makes us sound like juveniles, not judges, and it undermines public trust in the courts.\u201d <\/p>\n
Judge John B. Owens was more succinct. <\/p>\n
\u201cRegarding the dissenting opinion of Judge VanDyke: We are better than this,\u201d he wrote. <\/p>\n
VanDyke is among President Trump\u2019s most outspoken judicial appointees, courting controversy from the moment he was nominated to the 9th Circuit in 2019.<\/p>\n
Last spring, he posted a \u201cvideo dissent\u201d in a 2nd Amendment case in which he loaded several guns on camera. He has previously ruled that Idaho doctors cannot prioritize the treatment of pregnant women and girls over their fetuses except in narrow extenuating circumstances, and also found that trans women can be barred from beauty pageants. <\/p>\n
In the spa case, VanDyke argued that the law\u2019s power to protect cisgender women and girls had been perverted to privilege a small subset of trans women, writing that Washington\u2019s statute and the 9th Circuit\u2019s decision upholding it \u201cemasculate\u201d and \u201cneuter\u201d those protections. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt is a tragedy that state governments like Washington\u2019s have decided to privilege recently discovered, woke \u2018rights\u2019 over natural rights that have been recognized and protected since before our Nation\u2019s Founding, \u201d he wrote. <\/p>\n
He said his \u201ccoarse\u201d language was necessary to drive home the point. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou may think that swinging d\u2014 shouldn\u2019t appear in a judicial opinion. You\u2019re not wrong,\u201d VanDyke allowed in his response. <\/p>\n
\u201cBut 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 \u2014 some as young as thirteen \u2014 to be visually assaulted by the real thing,\u201d the judge wrote. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Judges in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals recently decided not to rehear a case from Washington…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":118288,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[102489,1436,3622,46949,16047,102485,48,52,51,14034,47,50,49,975,15157,102487,102486,102484,102488,6305,57267],"class_list":["post-224928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-biological-woman","tag-case","tag-court","tag-dissent","tag-judge","tag-korean-spa","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-language","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-opinion","tag-right","tag-trans-woman","tag-u-s-9th-circuit-court","tag-vandyke","tag-vulgar-barroom-talk","tag-washington-state","tag-young-girl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224928\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/118288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}