Aside from the obviously correct morality of the stand it took, let’s take a moment to commend traditional Russian Archimedes Spa for having the balls, as it were, to take on the alphabet mafia in its own backyard of San Francisco.
Back on Feb. 2, San Francisco traditional Russian spa Archimedes Banya issued the following decree in defense of the women who frequented their business and didn’t want testicles dangled in their face while trying to relax (emphasis added):
** Archimedes Banya designated one day a month as Ladies/Women’s Day to shelter religious preferences of women in our community. To further accommodate their religious beliefs we have to limit admission on Women’s Day to BIOLOGICAL WOMEN ONLY.
*** Archimedes Banya designated one day a month as Men’s Day to shelter religious preferences of men in our community. To further accommodate their religious beliefs we have to limit admission on Men’s Day to BIOLOGICAL MEN ONLY.
All are Welcome during our normal business hours.
Related: 'Trans Buddies' Assigned to Monitor Doctors for Transphobia
Under immense pressure, having had its Yelp page deluged with negative reviews and surely threatened behind the scenes by local government officials — this is San Francisco we’re talking about — the spa amended its “biological women only” policy to create separate “women’s” nights.
The first would be an “inclusive” women’s night for whatever walks on two legs and calls itself a lady, while the second would be a “Cultural & Religious Women’s Night” reserved for legacy women.
From the spa’s Mar. 3 press release (emphasis added)
To honor both our commitment to inclusivity and the needs of religious and cultural communities who require gender-segregated spaces, we are introducing two distinct women’s nights:
Inclusive Women’s Night: Open to all individuals who identify as women, regardless of sex assigned at birth or gender expression. This night is designed to be a welcoming and affirming space for all women in our community.
Cultural & Religious Women’s Night: Designed to provide a space that aligns with the needs of women from religious or cultural backgrounds who observe practices requiring a female-only environment based on sex assigned at birth.
Related: 'Transgender Woman' Roxanne Tickle Sues Women-Only App for 'Discrimination'
The spa’s manager, Abhishek Vaidya, explained the impetus behind the fostering of the “phallus-free environment” on its “Cultural & Religious Women’s Night.”
Via The San Francisco Standard (emphasis added):
In an email to The Standard, general manager Abhishek Vaidya said the latter came out of a desire to respect the religious and cultural beliefs of women who need “a phallus-free environment.”
“We need to help religious women and tried to navigate an important conversation about inclusivity, safety, and respect,” he wrote. “We recognize that our words did not fully reflect our values, and for that, we are truly sorry.”
Was this explanation and highly generous compromise amenable to the transgender mob?
Surely not — the entire exercise in the first place was in the service of maintaining their sacred right to wave their phalluses in the face of legacy women with impunity. This is a religious rite to them, and they had been robbed of it by the transphobes at Archimedes Banya.
The Social Justice™ people, once the hate crime had gained social media traction, then did what they do best: they assembled a very sad protest of about a dozen people that the local news media felt compelled to cover lest they also be implicated in the hate crime.
(I’m not quite sure why the “are” in “trans women are biological women” is in quotation marks — as if to imply that they don’t exist — and I’m almost certainly the transgender activist holding the sign doesn’t know either.)
