Dispatches from 'fly-over country' on Title IX and Kappa Kappa Gamma

Reason gets a hearing in the nation's interior.

Some notable events happened in the courts last week.

I usually leave this kind of thing to writers with legal expertise like Kara Dansky, and that’s what I’m about to do with the Title IX story. It concerns rulings in Louisiana, Kentucky and Texas which affect 21 U.S. states that challenged Biden’s revisions to Title IX. Kara’s article, published last Monday, lays it all out beautifully. The story is a little shocking, but in a good way!

The other story is also shocking, but not in a good way. It’s an update and a likely epilogue to the series of unfortunate events that befell the University of Wyoming’s chapter of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority over the last two years. I won’t try to offer a legal analysis of what happened there,¹ but I think there is a more interesting and even hopeful frame in which to think about it.

As told in my conversation with Cheryl Tuck-Smith in a recent podcast episode, the drama surrounding the sisters of KKG in Laramie, Wyoming almost strains credulity, yet it’s all documented in court filings. To summarize:

A group of senior student KKG members, apparently determined to demonstrate Kappa’s ‘inclusivity,’ insisted that a male student be invited to join the sorority over the objections of younger members —who, unlike the seniors, would be expected to live with him per the sorority’s rules.

The male in question, ‘Artemis’ Langford, was objectively ineligible for membership for reasons apart from his being male! —for one, a decisive failure to meet Kappa’s minimum grade point average —yet he was aggressively promoted for membership by the aforementioned seniors, with the support of the adult leadership of the national organization, all the way through an adversarial legal process that would wreak havoc and division among the sisterhood on the prairie campus and leave stunned observers everywhere wondering what just happened.

Notwithstanding the possibility of further legal maneuvering, what happened, basically, is that ‘Artemis,’ alongside the ‘inclusive’ seniors and the adult women in charge, won. As of this writing, Kappa Kappa Gamma, a sorority for women since 1870, can lawfully initiate men who say they have a woman identity thanks to a quiet rule change made —by grown women, sorry to say — without the consent of the membership.

Bruised and defeated as the Wyoming plaintiffs might feel right now, I think their case could actually hasten the triumph of sanity, however counterintuitive that sounds. This hunch is inspired by the case of the Englishwoman Maya Forstater.

In 2019, Forstater, a global development consultant, was fired over tweets from her personal Twitter account stating her belief that ‘trans women’ are men because humans cannot change sex. She appealed her firing to a legal employment tribunal and lost on the grounds that “such views are incompatible with human dignity and the fundamental rights of others." The near-universal understanding of sex categories was judged "not worthy of respect in a democratic society."

But precisely because that ruling was so flagrantly bonkers, it led to a highly consequential correction. In separate appeals two and three years later, not only was Maya Forstater vindicated personally and professionally (including damages awarded for lost pay), but the laws governing speech in the U.K. were examined and re-interpreted to become more (classically) liberal and coherent than they’d been when Maya was fired.

So, a plainly-nuts decision in court pointed a glaring spotlight on a plainly-nuts real-life situation which, thanks to the spotlight, could no longer be overlooked. My hope is that the plaintiffs in the Kappa drama will see the intimidation, gaslighting and meanness they suffered become the match that lights the torch of reason.

It could happen! The following factors will help:

1. Some deeply flawed selection criteria

In their eagerness to perform ‘inclusivity’, the defendants (those seniors who installed Kappa’s first male pledge, and the adult women who’d set the table for it, so to speak) didn’t even bother to select a man who had been ‘feminized’ as in the manner of Jazz Jennings.

As we now know, in the 17 years since America’s first youth gender clinic hung out its shingle at Boston Children’s Hospital, some undisclosed number of effeminate, proto-gay boys have had their development halted by puberty blocking drugs to make them appear female. How? By freezing in place their childlike features and their pre-sexual neural pathways. Gender clinics have long boasted that nearly all puberty-blocked children ‘progress’ to synthetic opposite-sex hormones, and some undisclosed number of boys have also been surgically castrated. Some of these young men are now college-aged.

If I had to nominate a male to blend into a house full of young women, I would try my best to recruit one of those poor souls, wouldn’t you? Not because he’d be more practiced at simulating femaleness (though I definitely think he would) but because he’d be far less likely to exploit women sexually, having been drained of testosterone and maybe relieved of his testicles, but either way rendered sans libido (as in the manner of Jazz Jennings). And maybe I’m piling on, but this hypothetical man’s libido would likely avoid females even if he’d been allowed to have a libido.

Curiously, Kappa’s stewards of social progress selected a man with all the outward markers of Dr. Blanchard’s other typology of men-with-woman-identities: the autogynephilic heterosexual type, or AGP. If you are unfamiliar with the two clinically-defined types of male transsexual, I describe them here. Suffice to say it’s a distinction with a massive difference.

It would be irresponsible to suggest all autogynephiles are inclined to commit sexual assault. It would be careless to imply that all AGPs have antisocial, narcissistic or misogynist tendencies. However, if you’re confronted with a ‘trans’ identifying man who displays antisocial tendencies and has committed a few sexual assaults, there’s an exceedingly good chance he’s the autogynephilic heterosexual type: the one characterized by an urge to gain access to female-only spaces and to display sexual arousal once there.

2. What IS a woman, though?

In planning my interview of Cheryl Tuck-Smith, a retired lawyer who’d been a proud Kappa alumna for 53 years until her ousting (in the manner of Maya Forstater), I debated whether to bring up autogynephelia. I was curious about whether the concept had featured in KKG’s fraught internal debates; but in the moment, I didn’t have the heart. She was so dignified: why should she have to go there, now or ever? What I did instead was dangle this comment:

“Somehow, one group of women will be convinced that kindness requires them to insist on this incoherent fiction that puts them in direct opposition to another group of women whose only crime is being grounded in material reality. And these two groups of women will sort of duke it out to the bitter end over this one dude; but his only commitment is to a fetish that his female allies probably have never even heard of.”

Perhaps because she is so dignified, or because she’s a lawyer, Cheryl resisted my fetish bait and pivoted instead to what she views as the point of all this nonsense, which is that it would be useful to have a definition of the word “woman” in the case law to codify a shared, objective meaning of what defines half of us humans. The case we’re talking about ran aground without even acknowledging this problem, much less addressing it. But I doubt you’re surprised by that.

I would wager a lot on the likelihood that AGP remains an utterly foreign concept to the defendants in this case and their allies on Team Kindness. They have collateralized their own moral identities for what needs to be seen as hate-fueled oppression of ‘Artemis’ and the Artemis proxies who imitate women while mocking and exploiting us. Such men tend to have extreme antipathy for women and girls, yet they’re imbued with the aura of the Freedom Fighter —usually by women, alas — thereby forcing other women to fight back in defense of their rights, privacy and opportunities by defending basic material facts and absorbing the deranged punishments that may follow.

3. We should encourage more courage

The plaintiffs in this case include six undergraduate women who displayed spectacular courage defending the truth even after they were forced by a judge to attach their legal names to the public filings, which would predictably expose them to all kinds of abuse and harassment. They are:

Jaylyn Westenbroek, Hannah Holtmeier, Allison Coghan, Madeline Ramar, Grace Choate, and Megan Kosar.

Four of them, as well as their lead attorney May Mailman, separately gave interviews to ‘She Thinks,’ a podcast by the Independent Women’s Forum, last month. These interviews pre-date last week’s ruling, so they are out of date in a newsworthy sense; but the poise, strength and clarity of the student plaintiffs is galvanizing and impressive to watch, so here’s a link. I wish I were in a position to hire them all, but they’re going to do fine regardless.

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Next week: an interview on the podcast with Sarah Barker, the journalist behind the fantastic Substack TheFemaleCategory, about WTF is happening to women’s sports. Don’t miss it!

1. To me, the decisions seem like a mix tape of procedural cop-outs by judges who will do anything to avoid answering the essential legal question: ‘what is a woman?’ I could have told them the answer, and so could you, but who are we to reveal such deep cosmic mysteries?