WASHINGTON – For more than two decades, Olympus Spa has operated in the San Fernando Valley style of immigrant-built entrepreneurship, offering patrons a taste of centuries-old Korean cultural tradition. Centered on communal steam rooms, soaking pools, and traditional full-body scrubs known as seshin, the facility requires absolute nudity in its communal areas. From its opening, the family-owned business maintained a straightforward rule: entry was limited to biological women and postoperative transgender women, a policy designed to safeguard the privacy and comfort of female patrons and minor girls.
Today, that policy has placed the spa at the center of a high-stakes legal battle over the limits of state anti-discrimination laws, religious liberty, and bodily privacy. Following the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit’s refusal to rehear the case en banc, attorneys with the Pacific Justice Institute and Alliance Defending Freedom have officially filed a petition for a writ of certiorari, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case.
The legal confrontation began in 2020, when the Washington State Human Rights Commission received a complaint from a preoperative transgender woman who was denied entry. The state agency asserted that the spa’s policy violated the Washington Law Against Discrimination (WLAD), which bans discrimination based on sexual orientation—a term defined under state law to include gender expression or identity. Threatened with formal prosecution, the spa entered into a pre-finding settlement while preserving its right to challenge the statute’s constitutionality in federal court.
In subsequent litigation, the spa’s owners, traditional Korean Christians, argued that forcing them to admit individuals with intact male anatomy into an all-nude, female-only environment violates their First Amendment rights to free speech, free exercise of religion, and freedom of association. They contend that their policy is based strictly on genitalia, not gender identity, and is necessary to maintain a safe and modest space in accordance with their faith and cultural heritage.
A federal district court dismissed the lawsuit, and a divided Ninth Circuit panel affirmed that decision. The majority concluded that WLAD’s prohibition of discrimination based on gender identity applied directly to the spa’s admissions practice, that the law is neutral and generally applicable, and that it easily satisfies rational basis review under the First Amendment.
When the full Ninth Circuit declined to review the panel’s ruling, it prompted sharp divisions among the judges. While the majority defended WLAD as an unexceptional public accommodations statute designed to prevent invidious discrimination, several dissenting judges mounted vigorous objections. Dissenting opinions argued that the statutory text does not cover standalone transgender status, that the law lacks general applicability due to broad exemptions for secular private clubs and certain religious institutions, and that the state’s aggressive enforcement creates an untenable conflict with basic expectations of privacy and safety for women and girls.
Legal scholars note that the petition presents the Supreme Court with a critical opportunity to clarify the constitutional boundaries of state public accommodations laws when they intersect with intimate, sex-segregated spaces. As the high court has increasingly scrutinized how administrative bodies apply anti-discrimination mandates to religious and expressive actors, Olympus Spa v. Armstrong offers a test of whether state regulations can compel businesses to abandon long-standing practices of bodily privacy without triggering strict constitutional scrutiny.
The Supreme Court has not yet indicated whether it will grant review. In the meantime, the case remains a focal point for nationwide debates over the harmonization of civil rights protections, religious freedom, and the preservation of sex-segregated environments.