An appraisal of judicial vulgarity
If you follow the courts, you will certainly have come across Olympus Spa v. Armstrong. On March 12, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied rehearing en banc in this case, which began in 2020 when a transgender woman in Washington State alleged that a traditional Korean spa, which requires patrons to be entirely naked, refused her (or is it him?) entry because she (he?) had not yet undergone so-called gender-affirming surgery. Cases about the rights of transgender people are increasingly on courts’ dockets, with tricky legal issues far from sorted out, but what brought Olympus Spa to wide attention is the explosive and deliberately vulgar dissent by Judge Lawrence VanDyke and the formal castigation of the judge by a very large number of his colleagues.
