DAR Chapters Continue Fight to Keep Men Out

During the American Revolutionary War, soldiers penned heartfelt letters to their wives or tactical missives to troop commanders. Today, some members of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR)—an organization founded in 1890 to honor those patriots—are writing letters of their own. Only now, they’re written to President Donald Trump in a desperate plea for him to rescue them from a transgender takeover.

“National and State leadership have abandoned the moral obligations of this once stalwart and prestigious institution to embrace the transgender movement,” read the letter sent from the Martha Laird Chapter in Texas. Alongside five supporting chapters, the group branded themselves as the “Daughters Advocating for Restoration,” promoting one clear message: The DAR has “fallen prey to trans ideology.”

The letter, signed by over 150 DAR members, highlighted Trump’s executive order, which he signed during his first day in office, establishing that the U.S. only recognizes two genders. “Being unable to join the Sons of [the] America[n] Revolution, the DAR was founded in 1890 for women, by women,” the letter emphasized. But the DAR’s national organization refuses to oppose trans-identifying men from joining their ranks claiming it would “strip the DAR of its 501(c)(3) nonprofit tax status without referencing any federal, civil, or municipal code.”

The letter continued: “They proclaim that a man is a woman if he lives and identifies as a woman and that we must allow men with a state-certified birth certificate, altered to show a female sex marker, in our women’s only society.” Additionally, the DAR authorities “admonished members not to speak about it and threatened them with disciplinary action.” Considering the organization’s national branch’s hard stance on the matter, the opposing chapters have turned to Trump to “shine a light on what has happened within the ranks of the DAR.”

This all comes after the DAR National Board of Management already rejected a Texas chapter’s proposal to bar trans-identifying men from participating in the DAR. And with the DAR’s internal rift, the dissenting chapters await Trump’s response, hoping his administration will intervene. Yet, their pleas draw attention to a larger cultural battle, in which Americans concerned over the safety of women and girls have been fighting to keep trans-identifying men out of female sports and private spaces for years.

Addressing this issue from a biblical worldview, Dr. Owen Strachan, author and senior fellow of Family Research Council’s Center for Biblical Worldview, unpacked the depths of this cultural dilemma in an interview with The Washington Stand. It’s not merely a sports issue or a bathroom issue, he argued, but an intrinsically spiritual issue that stems from sin and results in utter rebellion against God’s created order.

“Evil, by its nature, doesn’t respect boundaries,” Strachan stated. “There’s something about the gender madness that, when it overtakes you,” boundaries and rationality often get “left behind.” He added, this is not exclusive to the women struggling with gender ideology at the DAR. However, whether at the DAR, in female sports, or elsewhere, the men parading into women’s spaces see it as a “justice issue.” It’s the “satanic lie,” Strachan stressed, that when you identify as transgender and someone disagrees with it, “the whole world is acting unjustly toward you.” It’s all “driven by satanic lying.”

Strachan further addressed how at least two-thirds of Americans are not on board with transgender ideology. “That tells us something,” he emphasized. “That tells us that a wave has risen, the wave of righteousness, so to speak,” in which Americans—including the Trump administration—see this as an issue worth engaging with. But “we’re not playing from a weak hand here,” Strachan urged. “We’re playing from God’s design according to Scripture, and we’re playing from the human body itself and the human conscience.”

By and large, he added, “People know it’s wrong for a boy to go into a girl’s restroom.” But the questions remain: What leads to lasting change? And what roles do Christians have in this? According to Strachan, believers are right to acknowledge that Trump “is giving us short-term victories, and we’ll take them.” And while short-term victories are good in and of themselves, the real treasure lies in the greater ability for the church to pave the way for discipleship—which Strachan detailed as the real way to greater change.

He reiterated, “These are issues of truth and God’s design, and that actually falls within discipleship. As Christians, we recognize that whatever short-term victories we get, we have to do the much deeper work of discipleship.” Because ultimately, he explained, “God, from the beginning, made us man and woman, male and female.” From the Old Testament to the New, “God has always been concerned for men to be men, women to be women, and present men as men and women as women. … God wants the sexes to be distinct from one another.” And as Strachan emphasized, this is “to His glory.”

“We’re not saying some far-right wacko thing,” he continued, “and we’re not calling for legalistic standards. [Christians are] just trying to say it’s to God’s glory that we be men and women and look that way.” These truths then “filter into the cultural hotbeds where we say, ‘Because of these foundational biblical principles, we want to raise our girls as girls and our boys as boys, and then we want to protect their spaces.’”

And so, Strachan concluded, “The Bible doesn’t explicitly say, ‘Thou shalt not be transgender.’ But the Bible is teaching us from Genesis to Revelation, the goodness of God’s design and the sinfulness of rejecting that.” It’s “the Gospel that frees us,” and so, “you can’t separate this issue from the Gospel and say, ‘I just focus on the Gospel. I don’t focus on these controversial things.’ No, the Gospel should drive our convictions in this area” and, ultimately, lead us to true freedom.

Originally published by The Washington Stand

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