San Francisco Bathhouse Struggles to Create a ‘Phallus Free’ Women’s Night

There is a nude Russian bathhouse in San Francisco called Archimedes Banya. Recently the spa announced a Women Only Night which was to be held once a month. This immediately created controversy because the spa’s website made it clear that they were talking about “biological women” only. Someone posted this outrage to Reddit where it created the predictable outrage.

The language was quickly updated to “sex assigned at birth,” but eagle-eyed Redditors noticed the original wording and shared receipts. “[They] changed the language to obfuscate the transphobia under the guise of religious accommodation,” wrote wordsthatoutliveus, who posted the screenshots to the San Francisco subreddit. Another screenshot posted to Yelp showed the bathhouse also initially changed its men’s night to be for “BIOLOGICAL MEN” only before updating the language.

Despite the backlash, the spa maintained that it would continue to offer the women only night once a month as a “cultural and religious women’s night.”

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.

But the trans activists in SF can’t allow that to happen and immediately called for a boycott.

A group of transgender rights advocates is calling for a boycott of a San Francisco spa they say is enacting anti-trans, exclusionary policies.

“It’s exclusion. It’s discrimination. It goes against everything that I came here for,” said Breath Mormorer, a protester.

Breath Mormorer said she was told she would not be allowed to participate in a “Lady’s Night” at Archimedes Banya unless she remained clothed at all times inside the clothing-optional spa.

“I came from Alabama specifically to escape that type of prejudice and hate. And I got here and I found out this city has just as much of it,” said Mormorer.

This is such a textbook woke response. Catastrophize a single night for biological women in the entire month and suddenly all of San Francisco is a hotbed of trans hatred. For the record, not all trans people reacted this way.

“I think that cis women having their own day isn’t that bad,” Amanilmeke, a 25-year-old trans woman, told The Standard.

Amanilmeke, who declined to share her full name, said she doesn’t think excluding trans women and nonbinary people one night per month is much of a loss. “No sane person goes to the banya every day of the month.”

In any case, the boycott isn’t the only pushback the spa is facing.

San Francisco Human Rights Commission officials said they began investigating after the agency, along with the Office of Transgender Initiatives, received multiple inquiries about the bathhouse’s policy, which was posted to Archimedes’ website over the weekend. 

None of them had been elevated to “formal complaints,” the commission said in a statement, but officials said they were “analyzing the business’s policy and all inquiries to determine next steps.”

I think we can all see where this is headed. The city is going to decide that having a “phallus free” night is illegal discrimination and order the spa to allow trans women to parade around naked on “women’s night.” The city is all but saying that outcome is necessary because Trump.

In a statement, the Human Rights Commission said it recognized that the bathhouse’s policy change came “at a time when transgender and non-binary people are facing a barrage of attacks, and we want to be clear that the City and County of San Francisco is committed to ensuring that transgender people are protected from unlawful discrimination.”…

Rafael Mandelman, president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, said the timing of the bathhouse’s policy change — against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s gender policies — couldn’t have been worse. Mandelman said he hoped the spa was consulting with relevant organizations, instead of trying to stumble through on its own.

“In this hyper-fraught moment, where everything is political and trans and non-binary folks are under assault, I think there’s a real desire at least in our little blue island to be protecting that population,” said Mandelman. “People are going to be looking at this with heightened sensitivity.”

The spa is going to lose this battle. It’s not just the city itself. The law in California will take the side of limiting discrimination against trans women over the privacy concerns of actual women. A phallus free night in a nude bathhouse is no longer possible.