An unusually crass opinion
And so they fall into the trap.
A Donald Trump-appointed federal appellate judge invoked the term “swinging dicks” three times in an unusually crass opinion involving a nude, female-only Korean spa, drawing sharp rebukes from 29 of his colleagues.
“This is a case about swinging dicks,” began a Thursday dissenting opinion from Judge Lawrence VanDyke of the US Court of Appeals. He said he would have ruled in favor of Washington state’s Olympus Spa, which had sought to bar transgender women from its spa facilities on free speech grounds.
“You may think that swinging dicks shouldn’t appear in a judicial opinion. You’re not wrong,” he wrote. “But as much as you might understandably be shocked and displeased to merely encounter that phrase in this opinion, I hope we all can agree that it is far more jarring for the unsuspecting and exposed women at Olympus Spa— some as young as thirteen—to be visually assaulted by the real thing.”
He went on to say that it “feels like the supposed adults in the room have collectively lost their minds” and criticized “woke judges’ willingness” to sacrifice constitutional rights “on the altar of ‘social progress.’”
VanDyke’s dissent prompted a harsh rebuke from more than two dozen of his colleagues, who wrote separately to say that the US legal system “is not a place for vulgar barroom talk” and that VanDyke’s dissent “ignores ordinary principles of dignity and civility and demeans this court.”
“That language makes us sound like juveniles, not judges, and it undermines public trust in the courts. The lead dissent’s use of such coarse language and invective may make for publicity or entertainment value, but it has no place in a judicial opinion,” wrote Senior Judge M. Margaret McKeown, joined by 26 other Ninth Circuit colleagues.
True. So, if the words “big swinging dicks” have no place in judicial opinions, are we really truly completely sure that actual dicks belong in female changing rooms?
They walked into his trap. The crude language was a trap. Guess what, colleagues: if the mere words upset you that much, why are you so relaxed about the actual physical dicks themselves in the actual physical presence of girls and women who are changing their clothes?
Please do explain, in your most dignified judicial language. We’ll wait.
I’m of the mind that crass language and blunt, confrontational talk is a great tool for smashing bullshit. Too often, people use politeness and euphemism as a shield to hide behind, as deflection to avoid responsibility. When confronted with blunt reality it’s often a lot harder for people to avoid facing their complicity in bad things. I see it in office culture all the time, and I can’t stand it. Bureaucracies love euphemism and they hate bluntness. Especially bureaucracies that are propping up bad things.
In the 2000s, for example, it was euphemism and politeness that enabled unscrupulous financiers to repackage and sell junk mortgage debt: they danced around the blunt facts with pretty language, and by 2008 the ruse collapsed and nearly brought down the global economy with it. It was the pretty language that those bad mortgages were packaged in that gave everyone all up and down the financial chain of command permission to look the other way for so many years, even as many individuals within the system had surely, privately, caught on that it was a scam. More than a year before the subprime mortgage fiasco began to unravel, Harper’s magazine ran a cover story with blunt language, exposing the whole thing. But of course, finance bros don’t read Harper’s. If only more industry insiders were more plainspoken about the scam earlier on, if only they’d been more crass and called those financial instruments what they were — bullshit for suckers — all that financial destruction and the human suffering it caused might have been prevented.
I come from poor neighbourhoods, and I feel like an outsider in environments that fetishize politeness to the point of ignoring higher principles. If I worked in law, I’d be more like Erin Brockovich than, say, Barack Obama.
With respect to the transgender mess, the legal system could do with a whole lot more blunt talk, Erin Brockovich-style, to shake some sense into those cowardly, complicit phonies. This issue really comes down to men’s genitals and men’s sexual entitlement.
When I see people get outraged over crude language even when it’s being deliberately deployed to call attention to more fundamental, higher-order problems, I immediately suspect it’s because the crude language is hitting them in a sensitive spot, and it’s about to uncover a hypocrisy they don’t want to face. I’ve been the one calling bullshit bluntly to people who don’t want to hear it, more than once.
When judges panic about crude language around penises, maybe it’s because they can’t face the fact that they’ve been complicit in allowing those penises in places they absolutely shouldn’t be.