#Furor over trans in LA spa proves progressives aren’t really feminists after all

Your first visit to a Korean spa can be a bit . . . jarring, if you don’t know what to expect. I’ll be blunt: Everyone is naked, and you’re required to be, too. You enter the locker room and leave behind everything: phone, wallet, shirt, shoes — and all of your modesty. 

What makes it tolerable is that it’s a truly safe space: We’re all real women. Normal women, not models, their looks enhanced by plastic surgery and Photoshop. Women are comfortable walking around naked because we’re surrounded by other women. 

But at a spa in California called Wi Spa, that safety has fallen victim to the latest intrusion of gender ideology.

The spa found itself at the center of a firestorm recently after a biological male who self-identifies as female entered the female-only, nude areas. The hullabaloo, which began because women and girls in the gender-segregated areas saw the transgender customer’s penis and complained, got physical over the weekend, as hard-line gender ideologues violently attacked women and men who objected to the intrusion.

Transgender activists believe the customer has a right to be in a female-only area on the sole basis of subjective self-identification. Detractors were seen on video fuming, “So, it’s OK for a man to go into the women’s section, show his penis around the other women, young little girls?”

As for the spa, there isn’t much it can do one way or the other. Wi Spa defended its policy in a statement to Fox LA, clarifying that California law “prohibits discrimination against transgender and gender-non-conforming people. As a spa located in Los Angeles, Wi Spa complies with California law prohibiting discrimination by a business, including the Civil Code provision set forth above.”

The battle lines are drawn, with Antifa thugs shouting down anyone on the other side, some of whom seemed to have religious objections. One wore a shirt emblazoned with the phrase “OBEY JESUS”; another urged those gathered to “read the Bible.” 

One woman protesting the situation was surrounded and physically intimidated by a group of largely male Antifa activists, who chanted in her face, denouncing her as a “transphobe” after she repeatedly and simply informed them that “I just don’t want to see penises.” It looked like a scene from China’s Cultural Revolution. 

Curiously, there were few other self-identified feminists among those protesting the policy allowing biological men into a traditionally female space. Los Angeles, the city where celebrities wore all-black just a few years ago in honor of the #MeToo movement, is suddenly devoid of liberals and progressives willing to take a stand for women and for femininity as an embodied reality.

Women are expected to sit down buck-naked next to a similarly naked biological male — and shut up about their worries. And if they don’t? They’re physically intimidated into silence by a violent mob of men. And the law rests on the side not of women objectors concerned about safety, but of the biological men. 

Men are predatory, and women must always be believed: That was the message of the #MeToo era, and that era is over. Now, the feelings of biological males trump women’s need for emotional and physical safety. 

Oh, how far we’ve come. What progress. 

Critics of gender ideology saw this coming. The anti-reality theory that gender has no biological basis, that “man” and “woman” are purely subjective and, therefore, interchangeable categories, was bound to redound to women’s disadvantage. The progress of the women’s movement in the last century, after all, rested on sex differences as an embodied reality. Remove that cornerstone, and America’s suite of rights and protections for women will become simply meaningless.

Meanwhile, progressives, even many who likely find all this abhorrent, are silent. #MeToo, it turned out, was just that: a hashtag, a fashion statement. 

The silent feminist celebrities are more culpable still. They like to preen about having stood up to Harvey Weinstein and other Hollywood creeps. But it turns out many were mere opportunists who feted Weinstein for years until it became untenable. 

And now the pack has turned against the women of Wi Spa, those who just want to be safe and comfortable in a women’s-only space. Never again should progressives be confused with real feminists. When they tell you who they are, believe them. 

Twitter: @BethanyShondark