In a recent court motion, a national sorority has defended its decision to admit a transgender woman into its University of Wyoming chapter, asserting that the chapter adhered to sorority rules despite a lawsuit brought against it by seven women within the organization who claimed otherwise.
The lawsuit was filed in March by seven members of Kappa Kappa Gamma, a sorority at Wyoming’s sole four-year state university. The plaintiffs argued that the sorority violated its own rules by admitting Artemis Langford the previous year. After being twice prohibited from suing anonymously, six of the women refiled the lawsuit in May.
The Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority’s motion to dismiss, submitted to the U.S. District Court in Cheyenne on Tuesday, represents the sorority’s first substantive response to the lawsuit. Previously, the sorority’s executive director, Kari Kittrell Poole, issued a statement in March denying the allegations raised in the complaint.
At the core of the case, as stated in the motion to dismiss, lies a fundamental question: do the plaintiffs possess a legal entitlement to belong to a sorority that excludes transgender women? According to the sorority’s argument, they do not.
Since 2015, Kappa Kappa Gamma has maintained a policy allowing its more than 145 chapters to admit transgender women. The sorority’s policy aligns with those of the other 25 sororities within the National Panhellenic Conference, the umbrella organization overseeing sororities in the United States and Canada, as outlined in the filing submitted by Kappa Kappa Gamma.