The Tenth Circuit finally gave us a day in court to fight for something we never thought we’d have to: the right to live and associate with other women.
See, we joined Kappa Kappa Gamma at the University of Wyoming because we wanted to learn and grow with other women. Women have done this for ages: Kappa itself was founded in 1870, and when Title IX was passed in 1972, generally outlawing sex-based associations, sororities were explicitly exempted from the law.
But that all changed for us in the fall of 2022. Our sisters were pressured by the Kappa Kappa Gamma headquarters to initiate a male—going so far as to force our votes to be public and warning us that voting against the male would be a sign of bigotry, a basis for expulsion from Kappa.
But headquarters does not have to live with its decision. We do. They had their female-only environment when they were at college. We do not.
The benefits of female-only living are self-evident, but they are also scientifically backed. Personally, we want a place to be ourselves. We want (and deserve) freedom from a male gaze in private environments. These emotional needs manifest themselves in concrete ways. Research shows that women are much less likely to speak, especially authoritatively, in mixed-sex settings. And women are 200% as likely to accept a leadership role in single-sex settings.
Maybe we wouldn’t have noticed what we had until we lost it. We felt uneasy walking into bathrooms, knowing that our privacy there had been dissolved. Our bedrooms don’t have locks, and it was hard to fall asleep without that layer of protection in our intimate environment. Some sisters are sexual assault victims, and were forced to constantly shoulder the unease of trauma by having been stripped of their female-only environment.
So after months of begging for the sorority we were promised, we sued. And we’re speaking up publicly too. Because this case, this issue, isn’t just about opportunities being stripped from us in college and in sorority houses. It’s also about being able to speak out and defend your beliefs without intimidation. We are women who want our constitutionally protected right to speak out and associate freely, including in women-only spaces. We have heard from hundreds of other women who share our views but fear speaking out and facing public shaming and persecution. We want them to find their voices and lead the way by taking this stand now.
The four of us, and the other women who joined us in speaking out, have put a lot on the line with this lawsuit. At the outset, the court dismissed our concern for privacy in rejecting our request to proceed anonymously. We were just normal college girls who wanted everyone’s privacy protected, including the male’s. When we were forced to be public, we were then shamed for seeking publicity. We felt like we couldn’t win.
Our lives have all been affected beyond the court case.
Hannah made the hard decision to transfer to the University of Nebraska, where they have yet to initiate a male, fortunately. Maddie, the trooper among us, still lives in the same house as the male that Kappa initiated. Words cannot describe the tension of constantly seeing someone whose membership you’ve challenged in court. Jaylyn ultimately resigned her membership, leaving behind the house she was once a leader in.
We don’t want this to happen to others. This issue is also bigger than Kappa, or sororities, or what’s happening to women on college campuses. It’s about women’s spaces nationally, and, more critically, whether women’s biological existence matters.
Just this week, the Biden administration released new regulations that will push our college campuses further in the wrong direction. The Department of Education reinterpreted Title IX so that rather ensuring women have equal opportunity and don’t face discrimination “on the basis of sex,” now they have elevated the concept of “gender identity” so that any man who decided to claim to be a woman can access our spaces, our sports team, and our dormitories. Women’s interests are once again pushed aside to accommodate men.
This is wrong. Women have to stand up for ourselves, our sisters, and our rights. Calling women bigots for refusing to pretend that the stronger, bigger, testosterone-driven, male-bodied person next to them is a “woman,” threatens and belittles us and our experiences. Biological realities have tied women together since the beginning of humankind. We know that men have the potential to overpower us. We know that we need to be careful and aware of those vulnerabilities wherever we are. Our nation’s policies, norms, and culture shouldn’t make this harder by forcing us to ignore biological reality.
This lawsuit is the beginning of the fight, not the end. With Independent Women’s Forum, we will work to define women in state law, we will make the case to the public and the courts, and we will not rest until young women once again are recognized in law and in society as unique, deserving, and equal—not interchangeable—with men.
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Jaylyn Westenbroek, Hannah Holtmeier, Allie Coghan, and Maddie Ramar are plaintiffs in Westenbroek v. Kappa Kappa Gamma and ambassadors for Independent Women’s Forum (iwf.org).
The views expressed in this piece are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.