Olympus Spa says it has no record that Haven Wilvich ever walked through its doors. The spa can't find a visit or a membership application, and none of its employees remember the encounter.
That didn't stop Wilvich, a biological male who identifies as a woman and hadn't had genital surgery, from filing a discrimination complaint in 2020 with the Washington State Human Rights Commission. The target was a Korean, Christian, family-run bathhouse where women soak and scrub together completely nude.
The state took the complaint and ran with it.
Wilvich celebrated later on Facebook, in posts that have since been deleted. "I did it!" Wilvich wrote, bragging about forcing "the main naked lady spa in the area" to give "all self-identified women access regardless of surgery and genitals."
The commission ruled that the spa's policy violated the Washington Law Against Discrimination. It ordered the owners to scrub the words "biological women" off their website and put their staff through "inclusivity" training.
The spa already admitted trans-identified patrons who'd had surgery. The one thing it refused to do was let people with male anatomy into a room full of naked women.
Olympus sued in 2022, arguing that the state was trampling its religious freedom, free speech and freedom of association. A federal district court threw the case out. At oral arguments in November 2024, Ninth Circuit Judge Margaret McKeown compared the spa's women-only policy to racial segregation. In May 2025, a divided panel ruled against the spa, and in March 2026 the full Ninth Circuit refused to rehear it.
Judge Lawrence VanDyke dissented, and he opened with this: "This is a case about swinging dicks."
More than two dozen of his colleagues signed a statement scolding him for "vulgar bathroom talk." Judge Kenneth Lee wrote the main dissent, which walked through the history of Korean spa culture. Apparently the bathroom talk was what offended the court, while the naked men in the women's spa were fine.
In August, the Pacific Justice Institute and Alliance Defending Freedom took the case to the Supreme Court. Florida and 18 other states filed a brief urging the justices to hear it.
Washington asked for more time to respond, and then it asked again.
On October 22, the commission spent nearly an hour in a closed-door executive session on "matters of litigation." When the commissioners came back out, they rewrote the rule.
The new language in WAC 162-32-060 reads: "In the limited circumstance where a business requires nudity as a central purpose of the business, such business may maintain a rule that entry to spaces where nudity is required be based on genital characteristics."
It passed on a voice vote, and nobody objected.
Commissioner Han Tran called it "a narrow change to address pending litigation" and said the commission remains "very committed to protecting transgender rights." The commissioners never said Olympus Spa's name, but only one pending case fits.
The day after the vote, Washington asked the Supreme Court for its second 30-day extension. The request blamed the attorneys' workload and said nothing about the commission having just rewritten the rule at the center of the case. The justices granted it on October 26, which moved the state's deadline to December 4.
The rewrite also hands Washington an easy argument: the problem is fixed, so the justices should throw the case out as moot.
That trick has been tried before. In Idaho's girls' sports case, the ACLU argued the case was moot because its client, Lindsay Hecox, had permanently quit competing at Boise State. Hecox had won in the lower courts. The Supreme Court didn't buy the mootness argument and upheld Idaho's law.
The fix itself is thin. The spa was punished under the Washington Law Against Discrimination, and the commission admits it can't change that law. The new rule still has to go through the attorney general's office before it's official, and emergency rules in Washington expire after 120 days. Places where people undress together but nudity isn't the business's purpose still fall under the old gender-identity standard.
Kevin Snider of the Pacific Justice Institute, who represents Olympus, said his team is "weighing the legal effect" of the change. He said it's "unclear how much protection — if any — this rule change would give the Spa if a male sues."
Attorney General Nick Brown's office had nothing to say. "We do not speak to pending litigation regarding our clients outside of court. We defer to them," said Mike Faulk, his deputy communications director.
Lawyer Erin Friday found the hole in one sentence: "It's not enough [because] males without penises are still males."
Republican state Rep. Jim Walsh called the rewrite "damage control on the part of a bureaucratic agency created and controlled by the Seattle Left," even if it is "an improvement over the previous bureaucratic rule."
Julie Jaman has her own history with WAC 162-32-060. She's the 80-year-old whose local YMCA reportedly banned her and threatened to have her arrested under that rule in 2022, after she objected to a man in the women's changing area.
"How do they know, when a man comes into the pool and pays to swim and says, 'I'm a woman,'" she asked, that he's sincere? "Either you go in and change with men, or you don't get to go swimming."
The commission had an answer for her back in its 2016 FAQ. It said a business may ask "polite and nonconfrontational" questions.
After Tuesday, the fight over who gets into women's spaces is headed to the one branch of government the election didn't touch. Washington spent six years telling a Christian family their faith didn't count inside their own spa. Once the case reached the Supreme Court, with 19 states asking the justices to take it, the state found a "narrow change."
Washington's brief is due December 4.