On Friday, a federal district court ruled that a sorority in Wyoming was legally obligated to allow a biological male to join and become a member, despite complaints from the women in the sorority.
As the Daily Caller reports, members of the Kappa Kappa Gamma (KKG) sorority at the University of Wyoming sued the national sorority organization in March for allowing the 6-foot-2 biological male Artemis Langford to join. The women alleged that allowing him to join was a violation of the national sorority’s bylaws, and reported that Langford showed perverted behavior since joining, such as spying on the women while they undressed.
But Judge Alan B. Johnson, who was appointed to the District Court for the District of Wyoming by Ronald Reagan, declared that the national organization is allowed to interpret its own bylaws’ definitions as it sees fit, and thus was not in violation of its contracts by allowing Langford to join.
As the members demanded that KKG should use its bylaws to properly define what a “woman” is, Johnson disagreed: “Defining ‘woman’ is Kappa Kappa Gamma’s bedrock right as a private, voluntary organization – and one this Court may not invade,” the judge wrote in his decision.
Johnson determined that, since there was no violation of the written language in any of the sorority’s contracts, the complaints by the members were dismissed as false.
There have, however, been more successful efforts to protect sorority membership elsewhere in the country. In July, a chapter of the Chi Omega sorority in New York kicked out a biological male who attempted to join, since their guidelines do define what a woman is.
I’ve been following this story, so I do have knowledge of the situation on the ground, though I cannot relate to it as I’m a male who never had a female fraternity brother when I was an undergrad over 20 years ago.
As an alumnus of a very large national fraternity, I can relate to that element of these women’s dilemma. For us, National was nothing more than a bureaucratic non-entity that required periodic payment in exchange for absolutely nothing of value.
I hope the women of this sorority have considered banding together to form their own sorority on their own, apart from and offering no further dues to KKG.