Crybaby Trump Judge Rants About “swinging D**ks” In Anti-trans Opinion

A group of 27 active and senior judges signed a statement denouncing a “vulgar” and transphobic dissent of Lawrence VanDyke — a Trump-appointed judge on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals who cried during his 2019 Senate hearing when faced with evidence of his anti-LGBTQ+ past. VanDyke issued his dissent in Olympus Spa v. Armstrong, a case involving a women’s-only Korean-style spa that violated Washington state’s anti-discrimination law by refusing entry to pre-operative transgender women.

“This is a case about swinging d**ks,” VanDyke wrote in his dissent, against the court’s ruling in favor of the state anti-discrimination law. “The Christian owners of Olympus Spa — a traditional Korean, women-only, nude spa — understandably don’t want them in their spa. Their female employees and female clients don’t want them in their spa either. But Washington State insists on them. And now so does the Ninth Circuit.”

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“You may think that swinging d**ks shouldn’t appear in a judicial opinion. You’re not wrong,” VanDyke added. “But 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 — some as young as thirteen — to be visually assaulted by the real thing.”

In 2020, Haven Wilvich, a trans woman who has not had bottom surgery, filed a complaint with the Washington Human Rights Commission (WHRC) after the spa denied her service because she has a penis. (The spa claims it welcomes trans women after they get bottom surgery.) In 2021, the WHRC reached a settlement with the spa in which the business agreed to change its policies both online and in its physical location.

In 2022, the spa legally challenged the WHRC’s settlement, arguing that it violated the spa owners’ rights to free speech, association, and religious exercise under the First Amendment. In 2023, a federal judge dismissed the case, saying that the law applied to all businesses and didn’t violate the spa owners’ First Amendment rights. The spa owners appealed, and a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-1 not to hear the case, essentially upholding the lower court’s ruling against the spa.

VanDyke’s dissent called the court’s liberal majority “woke judges” who had “collectively lost their minds” and sought to impose “Frankenstein social experiments … on real women and young girls,” The Los Angeles Times reported.

More than two dozen Ninth Circuit judges — out of the circuit’s 51 active judges — issued a statement rebuking VanDyke’s dissent as “vulgar bathroom talk.” Judge M. Margaret McKeown added, “That language makes us sound like juveniles, not judges, and it undermines public trust in the courts,” and wrote that courts are meant to address legal disagreements “in a dignified and civil manner.”

However, in his dissent, VanDyke dismissed such criticisms, writing, “My distressed colleagues appear to have the fastidious sensibilities of a Victorian nun when it comes to mere unpleasant words.”

The progressive legal website Balls and Strikes noted that dozens of civil rights organizations opposed VanDyke’s lifetime judicial nomination in late 2019, arguing that he spent his whole career “disparaging and opposing LGBT protections at every turn.” VanDyke has previously done pro-bono work for the anti-LGBTQ+ Christian Nationalist legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom.

The American Bar Association rated VanDyke as “not qualified” after interviewing 60 of his former co-workers, who questioned his ability to be fair to LGBTQ+ litigants and called him an “arrogant,” “lazy,” and “ideologue” who didn’t prepare for cases if he didn’t have “a particular personal or political interest” in it.

When presented with that evaluation during his Senate confirmation hearing, he began crying.

Olympus Spa’s lead attorney, Kevin Snider of the Pacific Justice Institute  — a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ+ hate group — told Axios that the case will be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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