The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals just forced a Christian-owned Korean women's spa to admit naked men.
That ruling sat on the books while the court's left-wing majority hid behind legal jargon and euphemism.
Then Judge Lawrence Van Dyke opened his dissent with three words that broke everything wide open – and now the left can't stop screaming.
Ninth Circuit's Olympus Spa Ruling Forces Women and Girls to Face Male Nudity
The case is Olympus Spa v. Armstrong, and the facts are not complicated.
A Christian family runs a traditional Korean spa in Washington state.
Women only.
Nude.
Some clients are as young as thirteen.
Washington State told them they must admit biological men who identify as women – pre-operative, meaning anatomically male – or face civil rights enforcement.
The spa fought back, arguing the mandate violated their First Amendment religious liberty rights.
They lost at the district level.
They lost at the three-judge panel level.
Then the full Ninth Circuit refused to take the case for full review – leaving the ruling in place and the mandate in force.
The judge who wrote that panel ruling was Senior Judge M. Margaret McKeown.
And when Van Dyke wrote his dissent, he wasn't polite about what she and her colleagues had done.
Judge Lawrence VanDyke Refuses to Let McKeown Hide Behind Legal Euphemism
Van Dyke graduated from Harvard Law School magna cum laude.
He served as Solicitor General in both Nevada and Montana.
He clerked for Judge Janice Rogers Brown on the D.C. Circuit – one of the most respected conservative jurists of her generation.
The American Bar Association called him "not qualified."
The Trump administration banned the ABA from the judicial nomination process in response.
Every other judge on that court knew how to play the game: dress up your objections in neutral-sounding legalese, let McKeown's mandate stand, and move on.
Van Dyke refused.
He opened his dissent by stating in plain English exactly what the ruling required – that the spa's female clients, some as young as thirteen, had no choice but to encounter male anatomy in a nude space because McKeown's court said Washington State could force it on them.
Twenty-six of McKeown's colleagues signed onto her written rebuke of his language, calling it "vulgar barroom talk" that threatened to damage public confidence in the judiciary.
An Obama appointee filed a separate one-liner: "We are better than this."
Van Dyke fired back that his colleagues displayed the "fastidious sensibilities of a Victorian nun" over a blunt phrase in a legal opinion – while showing zero concern about the government forcing women and girls to share intimate nude spaces with biological males.
He called it selective outrage.
He was right.
VanDyke Won't Let the Ninth Circuit Bury Its Transgender Rulings
This is what McKeown and the Ninth Circuit's majority depend on.
They depend on the assumption that conservative judges will play the game – write measured dissents, use dignified language, and let the underlying legal atrocity slip past the public wrapped in procedural jargon.
Van Dyke has been blowing up that playbook since the day he was confirmed.
When the Ninth Circuit adopted a policy of automatically staying immigration deportation orders upon any habeas corpus petition – handing illegal aliens months or years of delay without any individual review of their claim – Van Dyke called it out in terms that made his colleagues' reaction entirely predictable.
Every time he names what is actually happening, the pearl-clutching follows.
Every time, it proves his point.
Alito Retirement Rumors and the SCOTUS Seat That Changes Everything
Samuel Alito has served on the Supreme Court for twenty years.
He turns seventy-six in April.
His forthcoming memoir – So Ordered: An Originalist's View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country – drops October 6, one day after the Supreme Court's next term begins.
Legal observers across the political spectrum have noted the same thing: sitting justices don't schedule book releases at the start of oral argument season unless they expect to be somewhere else when it comes out.
If Alito steps down this summer, President Trump gets a fourth Supreme Court pick.
The left knows this.
McKeown's court knows this.
And so does Van Dyke.
His dissent in Olympus Spa wasn't just a legal filing.
It was a declaration of exactly what kind of justice America needs if that seat opens – one willing to say in plain language what a ruling actually does, rather than what the majority pretends it does.
Van Dyke is fifty-three years old.
He is on Trump's SCOTUS shortlist.
He just showed every conservative in America exactly who he is.
The left's response – twenty-seven Ninth Circuit judges writing about word choice while leaving the ruling against those thirteen-year-old girls untouched – made his case better than he ever could.
America needs a Supreme Court justice who calls it what it is.
Now you know his name.
Sources:
- Kurt Schlichter, "Dirty Words Trump Dirty Deeds for the Next SCOTUS Pick," Townhall, March 16, 2026.
- Joy Pullmann, "Media, 29 Federal Judges Freak Out Over Rude Words in Dissent Attacking Trans Child Abuse," The Federalist, March 16, 2026.
- Eugene Volokh, "Judge VanDyke: 'This is a case about swinging dicks,'" Reason, March 12, 2026.
- Ballotpedia, "Lawrence VanDyke," ballotpedia.org.
- Wikipedia, "Lawrence VanDyke," wikipedia.org, updated March 2026.
- ABA Journal, "Who may be on Trump's Supreme Court short list?" ABA Journal, abajournal.com.
