The “swinging dicks” case, explained
Olympus Spa v. Armstrong
March 14, 2026
If you want to understand why people are talking about “swinging dicks” in the context of a federal court case (which is pretty weird), you are unlikely to come across a more cogent analysis of it than what is contained in this post. The case in question is here. It was published on March 12 by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
But first …
NYC Mayor Mamdani has appointed the first “transgender woman” (man) to head up the new Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs. You can watch Taylor Brown accept this honor, in a video in which he says:
The queer community, as well as intersecting communities and adjacent communities, are under extreme attack in the country.
No mention is made of lesbians or gay men and no definitions of “queer,” “intersecting,” or “adjacent” are provided. We’re just supposed to know, I guess. As the group ROAR Women NYC says:
This is an insult to all the lesbians, gays, and bisexuals in NYC who want nothing to do with the backwards, regressive homophobia of gender ideology, as well as the women who have been written out of law and policy on the demands of men like this.
I would add that it’s also an insult to Stormé DeLarverie, the lesbian who actually started the Stonewall uprising in 1969. Contrary to popular belief, it was not “Marsha Johnson” (Malcolm Michaels) who was responsible for that.
In my 2023 book The Reckoning, I addressed the concept of “transwashing” (painting the entire history of the gay rights movement as a “civil rights movement for trans people”). I noted:
In June 2023, New York Democratic state senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal posted [on X], “On June 28, 1969, a crowd of mostly trans women of color rose up against state-sponsored bigotry at Stonewall Inn. 54 years later LGBTQ NYers continue to fight back, enacting our nation-leading legislation to protect trans youth & their families seeking gender-affirming care.” This is not true. The Stonewall rebellion was started by a lesbian and fought by lesbians and gay men at a time when the concept of “trans women of color” did not yet exist. Democrats and progressive organizations simply have to make us think that “trans” is a decades-long civil rights struggle to justify their efforts to allow men to invade women’s spaces and poison children with dangerous hormones.
New York, get your act together and stop lying to everyone, please.
People are expressing shock and outrage after a man was caught, for the third time, in Melbourne, Australia, taking hundreds of photos of women in a women’s bathroom. He got off without a conviction this time, and will be permitted to pursue his dream of becoming a doctor. He explained to the judge that he was “unsure about his gender.”
People are understandably upset about all of this, but what many people don’t understand is that it’s totally normal for people to use “I’m transgender” as a get-out-of-jail free card. It’s exemplified in a Family Guy clip:
Anyway, this post is about the recent “swinging dicks” case (Olympus Spa v. Armstrong). It’s a follow-up to a post from yesterday, and builds on it. If you read yesterday’s post, this is a bit of a repeat, but there’s more to cover. I do my best (but often fail) to make it legible to non-lawyers.
The group Women’s Declaration International USA filed an amicus (friend-of-the-court) brief in the case, which ended up being cited extensively in one of the opinions in the case. To the best of my knowledge, the only other time a contemporary TERF group has been cited in a federal court opinion was in 2022, when the 9th Circuit decided in Green v. Miss USA that a beauty pageant may maintain a female-only policy, citing the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) (heads-up: it was the same judge).
If all goes as planned, I’ll be on the show “Free Speech Nation with Josh Howie” on GB News on Sunday at 3:45 p.m. ET to discuss the case. American readers can find GB News on its YouTube channel.
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