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They are unapologetically in favor of abortion rights. They view gender as a tool of the patriarchy used to oppress women. And they have the ears of Republican lawmakers in Washington.
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Meet the Women’s Liberation Front, a self-described group of “radical feminists” who seek to abolish the societal construct of gender, believing it is a hierarchical caste system that upholds male supremacy and subjugates women.
As opposed to more mainstream feminist organizations that accept biological men who identify as female, gender abolitionists such as WoLF believe in the material reality of sex and that men cannot become women simply because they say so.
Such beliefs have earned sex realists in the feminist movement the label “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” a pejorative term meant to cast so-called TERFs as intolerant bigots for wanting to protect female-designated spaces from the intrusion of biological males.
Meanwhile, feminists who embrace biological males who identify as female as an equal-footed form of womanhood have mainly remained silent on, or even supportive of, the transgender takeover of women’s spaces by biological men. Conservatives, in turn, have largely grouped that wing of the feminist Left, a faction of contemporary feminism elevated in the public eye, with all modern-day feminists, mistaking them as a monolith that has abandoned its original mission.
“WoLF is here today to answer the well-worn question: ‘Where are the feminists?’ Well, here we are!” Margot Heffernan, the vice president of WoLF, said at a May 21 outreach event at the Capitol complex.
“No man has the ‘right’ to take on the persona of a woman and claim his place in the female sphere,” Heffernan declared.
Banners reading, “Misogyny is everywhere and so are we” and “Womanhood is not negotiable,” hung beside Heffernan in the meeting space, a legislative hearing room in the Cannon House Office Building.
Rep. Ben Cline’s (R-VA) office had helped Heffernan, a Virginia resident who lives in his deep-red rural district, book the room.
“As a former domestic violence prosecutor, I am very concerned about commercialized sexual exploitation of women and girls,” Cline said in a phone interview with the Washington Examiner.
WoLF, among other areas of alignment with social conservatives, is opposed to prostitution, which WoLF sees as “paid rape,” and pornography, which the feminist group calls “recorded rape.”
“So as an advocate for women and victims of domestic violence, I definitely share their support for sex-segregated facilities like locker rooms, bathrooms, and prisons,” Cline continued. “To that end, I support those goals.”
WoLF’s open house on Capitol Hill marked the culmination of a weeklong lobbying trip intended to reach lawmakers across the political spectrum.
That week, a team of WoLF “sisters” met with more than 30 congressional offices, Democratic and Republican, in hopes of gaining the support of like-minded allies, regardless of party affiliation.
WoLF’s organizers said they found a friendly audience in their Republican hosts but were dismayed to see the Democratic side not nearly as receptive.
“The Democrats have been a severe disappointment,” WoLF’s founder, Lierre Keith, reported at its roundup session.
“It is interesting for a lot of us who lean left to find that Republicans have been, in some cases, way more supportive of women’s basic humanity,” Keith added. “We were not expecting that. I mean, I’m to the left of Karl Marx.”
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Out of the most hostile interactions, WoLF leadership mentioned that when its outreach team spoke with a legislative aide of Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), the conversation was “a disaster,” lasting less than 10 minutes of the scheduled 15.
Brianna Pressley, an Illinois-based member of WoLF, said she was able to break through to Sen. Dick Durbin’s (D-IL) criminal justice team. One woman serving as legal counsel on the team heard from Pressley about biological men being housed with women at Logan Correctional Center, an all-female facility in Lincoln, Illinois.
“She seemed appalled by what we were telling her — that men are allowed to shower with and be housed in the same cells as the women there,” Pressley told the Washington Examiner. “She seemed surprised to hear that there are occurrences of rape going on in that prison today.”
Pressley had shared a specific case involving James “Michelle” Blessent, an inmate at Logan who pled guilty in 2024 to predatory sexual assault of his own children, ages 8 and 9. Earlier this year, Blessent was sent to segregation for allegedly raping a female inmate at Logan.
“Her jaw dropped,” Pressley recalled. “She seemed really disgusted to hear that and was taking notes diligently. So I appreciate her attention to the issue, and I hope something comes of our meeting.”
At a constituent coffee meet-and-greet, Pressley informed Durbin directly about the mixed-sex housing practices at Logan.
“Isn’t that a women’s prison?” Durbin, according to Pressley, responded by asking.
“Yes, it is,” Pressley recalled replying. “But there are at least a dozen men that we know of that are housed at that prison.”
Logan currently holds 12 male offenders, according to NotOurCrimes.info, a database compiled by Women’s Declaration International USA that tracks the number of biological males who identify as female placed in women’s prisons nationwide. State-run prisons in Illinois, as ordered by the Illinois Department of Corrections, allow facility assignments to be based on “gender identity.”
Pressley, the Illinois contact for WDI USA, lamented Durbin’s lack of awareness about the dangerous conditions that women face in Illinois prisons due to these transgender accommodation policies.
“I’m happy to let the senator know, but it’s disappointing that he is the minority whip on the Senate Judicial Committee and doesn’t seem to be aware,” Pressley said.
Sara Jay McGuffey, a college student from California, said she witnessed “a lightbulb moment” with one legislative aide from another Senate Democrat’s office once they showed mugshots of male inmates to illustrate the situation at hand and the discomfort incarcerated women must feel.
McGuffey said that when WoLF’s members spoke specifically to female staffers, they connected with them by centering the issue from the perspective of the female experience.
“It was helpful to paint a picture that they could relate with, one that makes it all less abstract for them,” McGuffey told the Washington Examiner.
WoLF’s outreach team similarly explained the issue to Democratic staff in the context of women’s rights, bodily safety, and gay identity.
McGuffey, a detransitioner, said she argued that gender theory is regressive and reinforces sexist stereotypes of what it means to be a “real” man or a woman, rather than allowing gender-nonconforming gays to embrace their authentic selves.
“The progressive stance, in my mind, is if you’re able to accept diversity amongst women, not saying that a butch woman is less of a woman than a feminine female,” McGuffey said. “Likewise for men. It’s much narrower thinking that if a man steps a toe out of that box, you’re less of a man simply for being effeminate.”
Other members of WoLF’s outreach team said they got the impression that this was the first time some of the Democratic staffers physically met a detransitioner, after acknowledging that they had only heard about detransitioner stories in the news.
Arianne Gieringer, co-vice president of the LGB Alliance’s USA chapter, was especially excited to talk to three staffers of Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), the first openly gay legislator elected to the Senate.
“It was important to have a lesbian in the room and a Smith College lesbian, no less,” Gieringer said. She and Baldwin both attended the prestigious women’s university.
During the discussion with Baldwin’s staff, Gieringer tried to educate them about how the transgender push harms gay people in particular.
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Tlaib’s and Durbin’s offices did not respond to requests for comment. Baldwin’s office declined to comment.
Gieringer attributed the Democratic Party’s general pro-transgender sympathies to a broad misconception that the transgender cause is an extension of the decades-spanning struggle for same-sex rights.
“You have this narrative that the LGBTQ+ agenda is the gay rights movement 2.0,” Gieringer said. “A lot of Democrats may feel bad that they didn’t support marriage equality until later, but they feel like they are now somehow on the right side of history.”
Gieringer noted that legacy gay rights groups such as GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign have also shifted their focus to promoting gender ideology. Along with this shift in priorities, “They’re funneling a lot of money and activism to the Democratic Party,” she said.
Cline expressed disappointment to hear that some of his Democratic colleagues seemed dismissive toward WoLF’s outreach efforts. Cline, like all of the Republican legislators, welcomed WoLF’s visit and the information that was shared.
“These issues should be bipartisan,” Cline told the Washington Examiner. “Just because WoLF advocates for the non-inclusion of men in women’s sports, for instance, that that somehow disqualifies them doesn’t make any sense to me.”
Founded in 2013 by Keith, a longtime feminist activist, WoLF has been fighting for female-only sports in court longer than any civil rights organization, preceding many high-profile conservative legal foundations that, relative to WoLF’s years of impact litigation, just joined the fight.
Former President Joe Biden’s reinterpretation of Title IX to include gender identity gave rise to a wave of Republican-aligned legal action in 2021. WoLF, however, was the first organized group to file a civil rights complaint explicitly intended to preserve women’s sports. In 2016, WoLF sued the Obama administration over its attempt to redefine sex in Title IX.
Since its formation, WoLF has filed numerous amicus briefs at the Supreme Court level and lawsuits aimed at protecting women’s rights as a protected class, though the feminist group still struggles to attract attention afforded generously to other organizations in this sector.
Many of those who joined the outreach campaign were volunteers with WoLF, which operates on a shoestring budget compared to better-funded feminist groups. Some traveled to Washington at their own expense and stayed at Airbnbs while in town.
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Heffernan said WoLF, a nonpartisan nonprofit, hopes to continue its coalition-building and teach that women’s sex-based rights are an issue extending beyond partisan politics that both parties can rally behind.
“If nothing else, I hope at least this trip plants the seed of consideration,” McGuffey added. “The issue is being treated as though this is some hard-line right-wing, highly conservative talking point. Women are women, irrespective of where in the world your ancestors are from, what your political affiliations are, what religion you practice. It’s a universal fact that transcends the rest.”
