Appeals court hears arguments over sorority allowing male members

A panel of federal judges in Colorado heard arguments Monday over whether to revive a lawsuit over the Kappa Kappa Gamma Sorority’s decision to require chapters to accept male pledges. Members of Kappa’s University of Wyoming chapter sued the Ohio-based nonprofit in 2023 after the organization’s national leadership board changed its definition of woman to include men who identify as female.

A group of sorority sisters challenged the sorority’s definition of woman in a lawsuit, which a Reagan-appointed judge initially dismissed in 2023. The group appealed to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2024 to overturn the lower dismissal. The appeals panel issued a unanimous refusal. The sorority sisters later filed a second amended complaint against Kappa, which U.S. District Judge Alan Johnson dismissed in June 2025.

What happened on Monday? Angela Lavin represented a group of sorority sisters before the 10th Circuit and petitioned to revive the case, according to a live stream of the arguments. The organization’s leadership board made a fundamental change to the group’s founding documents by allowing an entirely new category of members without bringing it to the larger body of members, Lavin argued. Kappa Kappa Gamma represented itself to be a single-sex organization for over 150 years, since its establishment in 1870, but Kappa’s national leaders changed that without informing members, she said, according to the arguments as viewed in the live stream. Bylaws clearly extended membership to women only, and Ohio law barred nonprofit leaders from making regulations inconsistent with an organization’s purpose stated within its bylaws, Lavin argued.

The appeals panel noted that the term “woman” was not defined within the bylaws, and nonprofit leadership boards held the power to interpret undefined terms within bylaws. Lavin emphasized the organization’s historic precedent and its more than 150-year history in which no one in the organization questioned the definition of “woman.”

The leadership board added a completely new category of members that contradicted how Kappa represented itself for over a century and upended the sorority’s very purpose, Lavin contended. She also took issue with the board’s apparent secrecy around defining “woman” without informing the organization's members. The court was not being asked to define what a woman was, or to manage sorority affairs, Lavin noted. Plaintiffs called on the court to decide whether the nonprofit’s national leadership board held the power to fundamentally change the organization, she said.

How is the sorority justifying the change? Natalie McLaughlin addressed the court on behalf of Kappa Kappa Gamma’s national leadership board, based in Ohio, and noted that the sorority’s bylaws never officially defined the term “woman.” Kappa’s bylaws afforded the leadership board authority to define terms, and the board used that power to officially define what constituted as a woman, she argued, as viewed on the live stream. The new definition simply noted that transgender women, or biological men who identified as women, were considered women under the bylaws, she continued.

Judges questioned whether the board’s interpretation was unreasonable, considering that they added biological men to a functioning definition of a woman, and wondered how the organization could argue accusations of “bait and switch.” McLaughlin argued that the historic meaning of woman within the sorority didn't matter, since the term remained undefined until modern day. She also pushed back on the judge’s argument that the interpretation was unreasonable, noting that several dictionaries and organizations include so-called transgender women in the definition of woman.

It remained unclear when the appeals panel would issue a ruling.