A dispute over a Korean-style spa’s desired policy of not allowing persons with male anatomy into areas where women are nude could be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The case is Olympus Spa v. Armstrong1, in which the spa, its owners as well as a patron and three employees are seeking to overturn a determination by the Washington State Human Rights Commission. The commission says that such a policy violates the Washington Law Against Discrimination, which covers discrimination based sexual orientation, a term that has been defined by law to include gender expression or identity. The spa has claimed that that the desired policy would not discriminate against trans people because it would not deny admission to trans women who have had gender reassignment surgery. In other words, discrimination is based on anatomy, not identity.
According to court documents, the dispute began in 2020 when a trans woman2 who had not had surgery to remove her male genitalia filed a complaint with the commission about the spa’s policies that would keep her from entering the spa, which serves only women and has a women-only staff in accordance with the customs of the traditional Korean spa known as a jjimijilbang. Women at the spa are in the nude when they receive services such as body scrubs and use facilities such as hydrotherapy pools.
The commission ruled that the complainant should be allowed to become a spa client, and the plaintiffs filed their lawsuit to prevent Washington state from enforcing the law as interpreted. A federal trial court and the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Washington state, leading to the current appeal.
According to the lawsuit, the spa owners, Myoon Woon and Sun Lee, operate the spa the way they do both because they want to maintain Korean traditions and because of their Christian beliefs that men and women who are not married to each other should not be unclothed together.
The petition to the Supreme Court describes the jjimijilbang like this:
Korean spas are unfamiliar to Americans. But they are not new, predating Washington’s public-accommodation law by many centuries. Someone who seeks this experience steps into a venue, called a jjimijilbang, that incorporates hundreds of years of cultural tradition reaching back to the Choson dynasty (1392–1910). This traditional Korean-spa therapy focuses on rejuvenating the body and spirit through treatments, massages, and full-body scrubs called seshin.
Culturally, a jimjilbang is not an individual experience; it is shared with others. Following long-standing tradition, Korean spas require their patrons to be fully nude in communal saunas and bathhouses. Patrons undergo deep-tissue scrubbing of their entire bodies in an open area filled with other unclothed participants. Given this intimate environment, Korean spas separate patrons and employees by sex.3
According to the plaintiff’s petition, because of the state’s mandate there have been “numerous incidents where a male entered” the spa dressed as a woman, undressed in the locker room, leaving “customers in shock and with fear” and experiencing “humiliation, trauma, and rage.”
The petition to the high court asks it to consider two legal issues:
🟪 Whether Washington state’s interpretation of the law violates the free-exercise clause of the First Amendment, which provides for religious freedom; and the constitutional right to associational freedom.
🟪 Whether discrimination on the basis of anatomy constitutes discrimination on the basis of gender identity or transgender status.
The high court has set a deadline for November for Washington’s human rights commission to respond to the plaintiff’s appeal. If the Supreme Court decides not to hear the case, the Ninth Circuit’s ruling will remain in effect. If the court decides to hear the case, a hearing would most likely be held during the term that begins in October 2027.
Andreta Armstrong is the executive director of the Washington State Human Rights Commission.
For the purposes of this article in accordance with standard journalistic practice, the term “trans woman” refers to a person who was born with male anatomy but identifies a female. Some but far from all trans women have had surgery to replace male genitalia with female genitalia.
For ease of reading, citations to other legal cases have been omitted in this excerpt.