Bathhouses are culturally foreign to me. My first experience of a traditional bathhouse was in Tokyo at age 19. I wouldn’t have gone if I hadn’t known that two of the Japanese exchange students I had recently met were there. Communal nudity was a rather intimidating concept to face alone; we didnt grow up with shared showers in schools and camps and I am naturally prudish. The one I went to was female segregated and had quite a set of rules to be observed. However it was only disconcerting for the first few minutes and the diverse range of female bodies – mostly sagging bits- was oddly comforting and created a warm cocoon of femaleness. Travelling in Morocco after 9-11, hammams were a wonderful respite from aggressively male dominated streets and public spaces. Kind-hearted and motherly strangers lent me pails and scoops and vigourously scrubbed my back while warning me of the scams and dangers that foreign women faced. The intimacy of these bathhouses reminded me of the care of my most beloved female relatives. I am not into spas at all but I love traditional bathhouses.
I haven’t been to a Korean jjimjilbang apart from seeing them depicted in k-dramas. Again like most traditional bathhouses, they are sex-segregated, nudity is not optional and a certain etiquette has to be observed. These days Korean spas in the US have a way of getting on the news. There was the notorious Wi Spa incident in June 2021 where a trans identified male flashed his penis at women and minors. The women were shamed for complaining and legacy media had its moment of glory denying, backtracking and airbrushing the incident even when it emerged that the male was a convicted sex offender. In October 2022, a trans identified man who was denied entry to the women’s section of a korean bathhouse or k-spa in New Jersey filed a complaint to the state’s Department of Law and Public Safety alleging discrimination. Alexandra “Allie” Goebert is a US army veteran and law school graduate who took exception to being told to use the co-ed areas.
Goebert’s Instagram profile reveals that he follows a range of fetish-related accounts. Among them are women’s lingerie company Honey Birdette and sex toy retailer Wet For Her. Hashtags followed by Goebert include “lesbian”, “boyinadress”, “menindresses”, and the misspelled “nuedisnormal”, which features photos of naked or nearly-naked women, often in sexualized poses.
On Twitter, Goebert has stated that he has not had any genital surgery, and clarified that he has no intention to do so in the future.
You might think these are all dodgy chancers trying their luck in a society that has recently become unmoored from age old social conventions. Pig ignorant explorers, colonisers and invaders have set off from one continent to another, not recognising the language, race or customs of the new people they encountered but they have always been able to tell women apart from men. It takes 21st century progressive politics and very confused legal principles to lose such a basic human ability. Enter a judge in Washington state.
Olympus Spa, a k-spa which accepts post-operative trans women into its female only spaces found it was not being inclusive enough. Haven Wilvich who self-describes as a “tall, bearded, transfemme” and supposedly sits on the board of the Seattle Non-binary Council had sued the spa through the state’s human rights commission after a telephone enquiry confirmed that the spa did not allow membership to putative females with intact male genitalia. The spa had countersued the Washington State Human Rights Commission’s ruling (WSHRC) and lost its case recently.
The Seattle judge has ruled that the k-spa is in violation of state discrimination laws and one wonders at these laws. Recognising transwomen as women was a social nicety that became a legal fiction through vaguely worded laws that never defined anything, because, they laughed at the critics, everyone knows what we are talking about when we write men and women, dont be ridiculous!
There will be a debate at Westminster on Monday June 12 because it turns out that many learned men and women have suddenly lost the ability to define what a woman is and the laws like the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) are extremely contentious if they don’t define what these words mean. The debate is being held due to a petition from gender critical activists to amend the GRA to define women as “biological” women and a counter petition from trans rights activists to keep the GRA as it is. The debate will start at 4.30pm and library papers can be downloaded here (scroll down the page to find them).
Menwhile in the United States an ethnic minority loses the right to its own cultural traditions and women and girls have found that the law provides them with no refuge from sexual predators and trans activists. The Olympus spa owner fears “that exposing female customers (especially minors) to male genitalia could subject Olympus Spa to criminal penalties.” There have already been incidents where female patrons “noticed male genitals exposed ” in the spa — creating “humiliation, trauma, and rage,”
“Those patrons apparently demanded refunds and never returned.” Well, that must count as success in some quarters.
