Does an 84 year-old Reagan appointee to the United States District Court for the District of Wyoming really believe that it is acceptable, morally or legally, for a man who claims he identifies as a woman to join a college sorority and intrude on all that entails?
Last year at the University of Wyoming, officers and graduating seniors bullied younger members of a national college sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma, into not objecting to the admission into their sorority and their sorority house of a person who not only was not a woman, but who also did not meet the academic standards of the sorority.
Having been so bullied, the sorority sisters tried to live with the consequences of the admission of Artemis Langford. His 6’2”, 260-pound presence exacerbates the intimidation factor, but is not the reason he has no business in the sisterhood. If he were 5’4” and 115 pounds, he would nonetheless be a man.
After months of enduring his asking highly intrusive personal questions about intimate matters that even women do not discuss with each other, and his staring at them in their women-only sorority house while conspicuously aroused, the sisters decided to take action to restore the women-only character of the women-only sorority they had been promised. They sued to have Langford’s admission voided and to clarify that their sorority is for women only, which does not include men who claim to identify as women. Wishing does not make it so. Nor does growing one’s hair long and putting on lipstick.
Langford’s driver’s license identifies him as male, and he is on dating websites as a man looking to “meet” women. Even without those facts, though, Langford is not a woman, which until the day before yesterday was universally understood to be an essential qualification for joining a sorority.
Late last Friday, Judge Alan B. Johnson issued an order dismissing the sisters’ complaint. Reading it gives the impression that he has been captured by his clerks, and that they have been captured by the woke virus infecting so many brains in recent years. The very first sentence of the background section reveals his bias against the complaining sorority sisters and foretells his ultimate conclusions:
Embittered by their chapter’s admission of Artemis Langford, a transgender woman . . .
To begin a statement of facts with an assumption about the mental or emotional state of the plaintiffs is insulting, bizarre, and downright injudicious. As is the use of a term – “transgender woman” – that has never been established as a legal reality. The paragraph continues:
Plaintiffs . . . ask the Court to . . . void their sorority sister’s admission . . . and prevent other transgender women from joining KKG.
Here the court adopts as a fact the very point that is the crux of the issue: Langford is in fact not a woman notwithstanding that he claims to identify as one. It goes on, still in the very first paragraph of the background section:
The delegate of a private, voluntary organization interpreted “woman,” otherwise undefined in the non-profit’s bylaws, expansively; this Judge may not invade Kappa Kappa Gamma’s freedom of expressive association and inject the circumscribed definition Plaintiffs urge.
It is well settled that, in interpreting contracts, courts are to employ the plain meaning of the words in the contract. And that is what is at issue here: the plaintiffs entered into a contract with the defendants to join an organization of women and live in a sorority house with only women.
Until the day before yesterday, no one needed a definition of woman, and there is no reason an organization founded in 1870 would have made it a defined term in its bylaws. To not only suggest otherwise, but also rule accordingly, is reckless, outrageous, and harmful to society.
Unfortunately, courts are caving right and left on the “trans” issue, particularly where the person affected is a man claiming to identify as a woman. Tragically, this includes sending men convicted of rape to serve their sentences in womens’ prisons after they claim they now identify as women.
In the pursuit of tolerance and inclusion for men who claim to identify as women, it is only women who are being made to sacrifice.