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Judge Lawrence VanDyke issued a crass and indecent solo dissent on Thursday, castigating his colleagues for protecting the rights of transgender women. VanDyke—a Donald Trump appointee to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals—attempted to shame his fellow judges with lewd descriptions of genitalia and ultrapartisan complaints about trans antidiscrimination laws, which he derided as “Frankenstein social experiments.” Although VanDyke regularly belittles his own federal appeals court with juvenile insults, this latest shock-jock routine crossed the line from attention-grabbing performance art into outright vulgarity, prompting an unprecedented rebuke from 29 of his own colleagues across the entire ideological spectrum. His trolling, however, may well draw the attention of President Trump, who was clearly the intended audience for this obscene Supreme Court audition.

On this week’s Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus, co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed VanDyke’s appalling dissent, the extraordinary response from his life-tenured colleagues, and the implications of this sordid spectacle for judicial independence. A preview of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: Judge VanDyke has constructed a reputation for himself as the judiciary’s most decorum-shredding troll. There’s stiff competition for that position, to be sure, but he outdid himself with this dissent. He began it this way: “This is a case about swinging dicks.” And it only gets worse from there.

Mark Joseph Stern: I’m going to limit how much I quote VanDyke, because I hesitate to give him the attention he so obviously craves, but here is what he went on to write: “You may think that swinging dicks shouldn’t appear in a judicial opinion. You’re not wrong. 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.”

So what’s actually going on here? Olympus is a Korean spa in Washington state whose Christian owners say they only allow entry to “biological women,” which apparently excludes preoperative transgender women.........

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