After Daughters of the American Revolution Choose Trans Inclusion, GOP Rep Says, Wait, Maybe Democracy Is Only for When I Agree

Seemingly unhappy with a group of women deciding to make rules for membership in their own organization, Virginia Republican Ben Cline has introduced legislation to force the Daughters of the American Revolution to ban transgender women. The bill comes less than a month after the historical society voted 1474-981 to reject a ban on trans women.Cline, who has represented Virginia’s 6th congressional district in the House of Representatives since 2019, introduced the Daughters of the American Revolution Membership Integrity Act on Wednesday, per an exclusive in Fox News. “The DAR has a longstanding tradition of celebrating and empowering women who represent the exceptional heritage of the birth of our Nation,” Cline told Fox News in a statement. Calling the proposed law “common-sense legislation,” he said the act would require the organization to “return to serving the true daughters of the American Revolution.”“As we celebrate America’s 250th birthday, the organization has now abandoned the very principles on which it was founded," Cline said in his statement. “Rather than honoring and preserving a lineage-based organization for women, it has embraced radical gender ideology at the expense of the women it was created to serve.”According to Fox News, Cline’s proposed legislation would add a restriction to the group’s federal charter restricting membership to anyone “who naturally has, had, will have, or would have but for a congenital anomaly or intentional or unintentional disruption, the reproductive system that produces, transports, and utilizes the large gamete (ova) for fertilization.” This echoes the convoluted language of many GOP laws and policies that seek to define womanhood in a trans-exclusionary and biologically essentialist way.On June 26, the Daughters of the American Revolution, a nonprofit historical society composed of women with direct ancestry to people who served in the American Revolutionary War, rejected a proposed