A Korean Christian immigrant family that has run a women-only nude spa in Washington state for more than two decades is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to block the state from forcing them to admit biological males, a fight that could set new boundaries on religious liberty and gender identity law nationwide.

Alliance Defending Freedom and Pacific Justice Institute filed a cert petition on August 10 on behalf of Olympus Spa, a traditional Korean spa that offers communal bathing areas where patrons are fully unclothed. The case, Olympus Spa v. Armstrong, asks the justices to decide whether Washington's enforcement of its gender identity anti-discrimination law against the spa violates the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause. The Washington Examiner reported the petition also poses a second question: whether a policy that distinguishes patrons based on anatomy amounts to discrimination "based on gender identity or transgender status."

The spa's owners are Korean immigrants who, according to the petition, left their home country seeking greater religious freedom. They hold sincere Christian convictions that men and women should not be unclothed together outside of marriage. For more than twenty years, Olympus Spa admitted only female patrons and hired only female employees, a practice rooted in both their faith and traditional Korean spa culture.

That changed in 2020, when a single complaint set Washington's enforcement apparatus in motion. The complainant, the petition states, had "no record of ever having visited the Spa."

One complaint from a non-customer upended a family business

The petition lays out a striking sequence. A person who apparently never patronized Olympus Spa filed a grievance, and Washington state responded by threatening to prosecute the owners if they continued turning away biological males. The state determined that its views on gender identity overrode both a centuries-old Korean cultural practice and the family's deeply held religious beliefs.

The spa lost at the federal district court level. A three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals then sided with Washington and dismissed the case. When the full Ninth Circuit considered whether to rehear the matter en banc, it declined in what was described as a bitterly divided decision.

The Supreme Court is now the spa's last recourse. The justices will begin closed-door conferences on September 28 to decide which cases to take up for the new term, which starts October 5. The court's upcoming docket already includes major disputes over religious liberty, parental rights, and election law, making this fall one of the most consequential in recent memory for constitutional questions.

Ninth Circuit dissent used blunt language to expose the stakes

Judge Lawrence VanDyke, a Trump appointee on the Ninth Circuit, wrote a dissent when the full court refused to reconsider the panel ruling. His language was deliberately crude, and he said that was the point.

VanDyke wrote in his dissent:

"This is a case about swinging d***s. 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."

He went further, defending the language as necessary to illustrate what the court's ruling actually means for the women and girls who use the spa:

"You may think that swinging d***s shouldn't appear in a judicial opinion. You're not wrong. 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."

VanDyke's dissent strips away the legal abstractions and forces the reader to confront the concrete reality: girls as young as thirteen, undressed in a communal bathing area, with no legal right to object if a biological male walks in. That is the policy Washington state chose to enforce, and two layers of federal courts chose to uphold.

Kevin Snider calls the state's position an 'abuse' of public accommodation law

Kevin Snider, chief counsel for Pacific Justice Institute, framed the dispute as a fundamental question about women's safety and bodily privacy. The Supreme Court has weighed related questions in recent terms, it upheld state bans on transgender athletes in women's sports in a 6-3 ruling, but the Olympus Spa case raises the stakes by placing the conflict inside a setting where patrons are fully nude.

Snider stated:

"It is an abuse and perversion of the public accommodation laws to give biological males access to the intimate spaces of unconsenting females in a state of full or partial undress. No woman or girl should have to give up her right to bodily privacy and safety to avoid offending a man. That's wrong, and it puts women and girls in harm's way."

His argument cuts to a contradiction that gender identity mandates have struggled to resolve: public accommodation law was designed to protect vulnerable people from exclusion, but in this application, it strips privacy protections from women and girls in the most physically exposed setting imaginable.

Petition frames the case as a collision between faith and state power

The cert petition itself paints the dispute as a test of how far a state can push religious believers before the Free Exercise Clause intervenes. ADF and PJI argue that the spa's female-only policy is not a pretext for discrimination but a direct expression of its owners' faith, the same faith that brought them to the United States in the first place.

From the petition:

"A family of Christian immigrants, who fled Korea hoping for greater religious freedom, now stand to lose their livelihood or the ability to practice their faith because the State of Washington insists on dictating that males who identify as women be admitted into a female-only nude spa."

The petition also notes that Olympus Spa's policy protected "the privacy of women and girls for more than 20 years" before the state intervened. The high court has shown increased willingness to take up cases at the intersection of religious liberty and state regulation in recent terms. It has also accepted cases involving sweeping state bans that test the boundaries of individual rights against government mandates.

Whether the justices grant cert will likely become clear this fall. If they take the case, Olympus Spa v. Armstrong would force the court to draw a line that lower courts have refused to draw: where does a state's authority to enforce gender identity policy end, and where does a citizen's right to live by her faith begin?

The court has also turned away other First Amendment challenges in recent months, making the question of which cases it chooses to hear, and which it lets die, all the more significant for religious liberty advocates watching the docket.

Washington chose ideology over the safety of women and girls

Strip away the legal jargon and the case comes down to a simple set of facts. A Korean immigrant family ran a women-only spa for two decades. Nobody complained. Then one person, who never visited the spa, filed a grievance, and the state mobilized its enforcement power to demand that biological males be granted access to spaces where women and girls are naked. Two federal courts agreed.

The state did not weigh the privacy interests of the women who actually use the spa. It did not consider the religious convictions of the family that built the business. It decided that gender identity ideology outranked both, and it threatened to destroy a small business to prove the point.

If Washington's position holds, no faith-based institution that serves the public can maintain sex-specific spaces, no matter how intimate the setting. A nude spa becomes legally indistinguishable from a lunch counter. That is not progress. It is a government choosing to impose its preferred ideology on the people least equipped to fight back, a small immigrant family running a business on faith, tradition, and common sense.

The Supreme Court now has a chance to say what every woman who has ever used that spa already knows: some spaces belong to women, and no bureaucrat's checklist should override that.