The Wyoming sorority sisters who sued to eject a trans member from the Kappa Kappa Gamma (KKG) sorority in 2023 are back in court.

Emboldened by the Trump administration’s crusade to erase trans people from American society, the cisgender sisters filed a new lawsuit in federal court last Monday.

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They also threatened to end funding for a state university for allowing a trans woman to join a sorority.

The amended suit follows the Department of Education’s announcement last week that it’s investigating the University of Wyoming for allowing the trans student originally sued by the sisters to join Kappa Kappa Gamma.

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“A sorority that admits male students is no longer a sorority by definition and thus loses the Title IX statutory exemption for a sorority’s single-sex membership practices,” the Department of Education claimed in a press release. 

The sisters’ amended complaint reiterates the Trump administration’s assertion, arguing that KKG’s inclusion of trans women “is inconsistent with its reliance on the exemptions for ‘single-sex’ organizations under Title IX.”

Based on the sorority’s “bylaws’ reference to and reliance on the ‘exemption’ in Title IX … the notion of a single-gender organization, as the phrase is used in the bylaws, must be read as synonymous with ‘single sex,’” the complaint states. 

The Wyoming sorority became a pet project for the Trump administration after the sorority sisters’ lawyer, May Mailman, became deputy assistant and senior policy strategist to Trump in January.

Mailman has been credited with crafting Trump’s “Defending Women From Gender Ideology” executive order alongside Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy. 

Title IX has been at the heart of Trump’s strategy to investigate and deny federal funding to schools that are trans inclusive. Title IX bans discrimination on the basis of sex in education and has been used by both pro- and anti-LGBTQ+ rights advocates to argue for and against equal rights for queer people.

On the left, progressives argue that discrimination against LGBTQ+ people is inherently a form of discrimination on the basis of sex, since it is impossible to discriminate against someone’s sexual orientation or transgender status without taking their sex assigned at birth into account.

On the right, conservatives and the Trump administration argue that Title IX protects girls and women from discrimination in education and that rights for LGBTQ+ people take away from girls’ and women’s rights, especially when it comes to trans female athletes’ participation in school sports.

The sorority sisters’ amended complaint was filed by two of the original plaintiffs, who were joined by a new third Kappa Kappa Gamma member. The suit drops the original defendant, trans sorority sister Artemis Langford, who was needlessly “stigmatized” in the original filing, according to the judge in the case.

Judge Alan B. Johnson pointed out that most of the paperwork submitted by the sisters in the original complaint was nothing more than personal smears.

“If Plaintiffs wish to amend their complaint, the Court advises Plaintiffs that they devote more than 6% of their complaint to their legal claims against Defendants,” he advised in the ruling against the plaintiffs. The consistent misgendering and transphobic insinuations were so heinous, he noted, that he refused to recount them in the decision.

“As she has maintained all along, there was no reason for the plaintiffs to sue Ms. Langford or to add inflammatory allegations about her to their complaint,” Rachel Berkness, Langford’s attorney, told WyoFile in a statement. 

“Now that the gravy train has run its course, the plaintiffs have apparently decided to move forward with the legal aspects of their claims, which have always been dubious,” Berkness said. “Ms. Langford, however, has graduated and is moving forward.” 

The original complaint alleged “leering, gawking, lurking, and intimidation” by Langford while in the sorority house or around the plaintiffs and the witnesses who joined their lawsuit, according to Cowboy State Daily.

Langford, “while watching members enter the sorority house, had an erection visible through his leggings,” the suit claimed. “Other times, he has had a pillow in his lap.”  

“Plaintiffs are living the reality of Langford’s biological, sex-based differences,” read the response to the Kappa Kappa Gamma organization’s motion to dismiss.

“When a 6’2” person who weighs 260 pounds and has benefited from male puberty sits in a sorority dining room – staring and scowling at the young women who filed a complaint with this Court – that moment is not just a disagreement among ‘us’ girls. That angry glare is a threat, a threat made possible by that man’s superior size and strength,” the Wyoming KKG sorority sisters wrote.

In the motion to dismiss, Langford and the national organization accused the six aggrieved sisters of slinging “dehumanizing mud.” They argued the sorority can dictate the terms of its membership under its constitutional right to free association.  

Kappa Kappa Gamma said it can evolve along with the definition of “woman,” which they said is a more “inclusive” description now than when the sorority was founded 150 years ago.  

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