Recently, Biden’s Selective Service System (SSS) issued a tweet that prompted both women’s rights activists and gender identity activists to question the federal department’s definition of “male.”

The Women’s Liberation Front commends the Biden administration’s correct application of “sex” while strongly opposing the involuntary conscription of female civilians on the basis of so-called equity. Further, the Biden administration inconsistently applies concepts of sex as a material, physical state, and self-identified “gender identity,” as a quasi-spiritual belief.

On the SSS website, the federal agency provides further clarification on Who Needs to Register, stating “Almost all male US citizens and male immigrants, who are 18 through 25,” including trans-identified males, are required to register.

The SSS stated in its requirement that eligible males, regardless of their self-perceived “gender identity,” would be required to register for the draft. Unsurprisingly, trans-activists quickly responded with condemnation of the Selective Service’s “transphobic, bio-essentialist” policy, as reported by Jo Bartosch.

The acknowledgment that trans-identified males are indeed male and therefore, must comply with government conscription of males, comes as a surprise from an administration bent on erasing the legal status of women and girls by allowing males to “identify as” women. The administration’s acknowledgment of biological reality comes as a welcome relief, and WoLF commends the administration for this new stance. However, the administration’s announcement is inconsistent with other actions taken previously.

Continue reading for an overview of the federal actions related to the US draft, female civilians, and “transgender status.”

Finding the Limits of “Transgender Status” After Bostock

In July 2020, WoLF stated its disapproval of the Supreme Court’s majority decision as it related to “transgender status” in Bostock v. Clayton County. The ruling essentially created more opportunities for lawsuits filed by people who claim “transgender status” to challenge sex-based employment decisions made because of their actual sex rather than their “gender identity.” Read more here.

In our criticism, we reflect on the court’s lack of definition for “transgender,” and provide the military draft as an example:

The justices have given considerably less thought to what qualifies someone for an exemption from ordinary civil rights law than the military has given to conscientious objection to military service. If there were a draft, a man registered for Selective Service couldn’t just show up to say that he didn’t want to go, and be affirmed by authorities as someone with deep philosophical or faith objections to war. He would be required to appear before a board, which would examine how he arrived at his beliefs and how his beliefs influence the way he lives his life. A similar process applies to prisoners who claim exemptions from otherwise applicable rules based on religious belief. But with “transgender status,” the Court gave no clue as to what qualifications one must meet, if any, to demonstrate the validity of their claim to hold that status… 

It’s further worth wondering whether those same authorities would be required to let a draftee go if he had “identified as a woman,” when women were still exempt from the draft.

Despite rolling back rights for single-sex sports and services; it appears that the Biden administration’s military will not humor the men whose personal beliefs include the delusion that they can become female, at least not for the hypothetical draft.

Biden’s Executive Order: “On Enabling All Qualified Americans to Serve Their Country in Uniform”

In January 2021, WoLF stated our strong opposition to Biden’s Day One Executive Order, which revoked 2017 and 2018 guidance on the conditions under which individuals who identify as “transgender” may serve in the US military, such as those with disqualifying mental or physical ailments including those resulting from “gender-affirming” medical interventions.

Despite misconceptions about the policies implemented by the prior administration, WoLF’s opposition to the 2017/8 guidance revocation prioritized the safety and well-being of female military personnel over the fantasies of trans-identified males: “[The 2018 memo] also outlines numerous complaints filed by female service members who have been forced to share private quarters, locker rooms, and showers with men who identify as women.”

Then, in June 2021, Biden’s Dept. of Defense (DoD) issued new guidance that changed the Army’s “retention, separation, in-service transition, and medical care standards for transgender personnel and [refined] entry criteria for individuals with gender dysphoria” which affected all active-duty, National Guard and Reserve Soldiers, U.S. Military Academy cadets, and contracted Reserve Officer Training Corps cadets. Biden’s changes reversed Trump-era policies back to Obama-era guidance on “transgender” soldiers.

In March 2022, Free Beacon obtained mandatory training slides that instructed service members to accept opposite-sex service members into their preferred “barracks, bathrooms, and shower facilities,” as reported by Breitbart this past July:

Soldiers must accept living and working conditions that are often austere, primitive, and characterized by little or no privacy. … Understand anyone may encounter individuals in barracks, bathrooms, or shower facilities with physical characteristics of the opposite sex despite having the same gender marker in [Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System].

Clearly, women’s dignity and safety consistently rank among the lowest priorities of this administration which instead acts to end single-sex spaces and services. Lierre Keith, WoLF board chair, summarizes, “When it’s about women’s basic human rights, President Biden has no idea what a woman is. But when it’s about the military, suddenly all is clear: there are men, and there are women, and one cannot become the other.”

Now, so-called progressives risk conscripting female civilians for purposes of “equity.”

The History of Women and the Draft

At the moment, there is no active draft—there is only registration for the draft through the Selective Services System (SSS) and voluntary military service. To date, female civilians have never been required to register with the SSS or draft, although women can and do voluntarily join the military.

The most recent involuntary civilian draft was during the Vietnam-American war and ended in 1973—involuntary draftees were selected through a lottery and accounted for one-third of all US military who served in the war.

In Case You Missed It: WoLF’s Lauren Adams Bone and Jennifer Chavez joined IWLC’s Jennifer C. Braceras and Inez Feltscher Stepman for an episode on At The Bar last September:

“Should Women Be Forced to Register for the Draft?”

After reactivating the SSS registration process in 1980, President Carter recommended that Congress amend the Military Selective Service Act (MSSA) to permit the registration and conscription of female civilians as well as males; however, Congress declined to permit the registration of female civilians.

In 1980, several men brought a lawsuit to the US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania to challenge the constitutionality of the MSSA. In 1981, Rostker v. Goldberg ruled that registering men only did not violate the due process clause of the Constitution (the Fifth Amendment).

In 1988, the US Dept. of Defense (DoD) adopted a policy called the Risk Rule that “extended women’s combat exclusion to bar their participation in any non-combat unit where the risks of exposure to combat were equal to or greater than the combat units they supported.” (It would later be repealed in 2015.)

In 1992, a Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces reexamined the issue of registration and conscription of women but ultimately recommended that women not be required through a vote of 11 to 3, citing Rostker v. Goldberg.

In 1994, President Clinton asked William Perry, then Secretary of Defense, to “[continue] to rereview the arguments for and against continuing to exclude women from registration now that they can be assigned to combat roles other than ground combat.” Subsequently, the DoD maintained that registering and drafting women was unnecessary, again citing Rostker v. Goldberg.

In At The Bar, Jennifer Chavez, Lawyer and WoLF Advisor, explained the ideological discourse on including women in the US military draft:

[In] the history of this debate since the 1980’s law, it sparked a series of events—Congress, at one point, appointed a commission to examine the question of whether women should be in the draft. One thing that really stood out to me from that commission report [...] says: Male only registration sends a message to women, not only that they are not vital to the defense of the country but also that they are not expected to participate in defending it. It’s this concept of ‘sending a message’ to women and what really stood out to me is that the purpose of the draft is not to send a message, it’s not to validate people’s feelings, or to make people feel that they’re being treated equally; it is to create a supplyline of [combatants.]

In September 2020, President Biden stated that a draft is not needed “at this time,” however he also stated he would “...ensure that women are also eligible to register for the Selective Service System so that men and women are treated equally in the event of future conflicts.”

On its webpage, the SSS explains why women are not required to register for the draft: “Selective Service law as it’s written now refers specifically to “male persons” in stating who must register and who would be drafted. For women to be required to register with Selective Service, Congress would have to amend the law.” The website further explains the background of women and the draft here.

Currently, pending legislation seeks to replace phrases “male citizen” and “male person” with “citizen” and “person,” similar to other so-called progressive efforts to remove sex-based language in favor of sex-blind neutral language… This should concern mainstream liberal feminists as much as it concerns radical feminists and conservative women.

Director of the Independent Women’s Law Center, Jennifer C. Braceras, added that many of those promoting a universal draft are neglecting to consider the purpose of the draft, with regard to women’s physical differences from men:

I think it’s very easy to say, ‘Oh yes, everything should be equal,’ when we don’t actually have a draft. We have the Selective Service, we have registration for the draft, but nobody is currently being drafted. So, in some sense, it’s very performative—these statements that everyone should be treated equal and that men and women should both sign up for this thing, and we’re not really talking about what this thing is and what it would mean for women.

In early 2021, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), ACLU of Texas, and Hogan Lovells LLP filed a petition on behalf of a men’s rights group, the National Coalition For Men (NCFM), urging the Supreme Court to declare the MSSA unconstitutional, describing it as “one of the last examples of overt sex discrimination in federal law.” Separately, the ACLU also argues that excluding male sex offenders from women’s prisons is also discriminatory and unconstitutional while representing the interests of male rapists in Chandler v. CDCR.

To be clear: WoLF does not have an official position on the involuntary conscription of male civilians, but we vehemently oppose the involuntary conscription of female civilians.

Feminist Efforts to Oppose Drafting Female Civilians

As a radical feminist organization, WoLF opposes any law or policy that enables men to make decisions that affect the bodily sovereignty of women and girls or perpetuate wide-scale male violence.

In At the Bar, Jennifer Chavez explains the radical feminist analysis of the military through the perspective of institutionalized male violence, and the feminist relevance to opposing women’s inclusion in the draft:

WoLF’s position on military involvement goes into deeper levels of our fundamental principles about opposition to any type of male violence. I think most [WoLF] members would consider most military actions to be a form of male violence when looked at in the big picture, but I don’t think that removes us from this debate. Again, it comes down to: How does the law look at the differences between men and women?

Lauren Adams Bone, WoLF Legal Counsel, added that WoLF’s principles on bodily sovereignty present another reason for feminists to oppose female civilians’ inclusion in the draft:

We have strong positions on bodily sovereignty for women, and that extend just beyond what people would consider ‘pro-choice.’ In terms of being literally drafted into fighting wars, that really is contrary to our ideas about male decisions being made about women’s bodies. That’s really antithetical to a lot of what we work for.

Meanwhile, mainstream liberal feminists have pushed the concept of sex-blind egalitarianism that radical feminists widely reject. In her recent Spiked article, Jo Bartosch goes on to describe how feminists are blamed for considerations of women being conscripted:

Many on the US right lazily blame feminists for pushing the idea that differences between the sexes are irrelevant. It is true that academics in queer studies and gender studies departments, who claim the label ‘feminist’, are at the forefront of trying to redefine what a woman is. But those who do the practical work of supporting women victims of male violence have always known that sex matters. They see it every day. However, the voices of those grassroots feminists have largely been drowned out by the noise of the gender-identity movement.

Still, WoLF is invested in protecting the women who voluntarily enlist because, as of 2019, women comprised 20 percent of the Air Force, 19 percent of the Navy, 15 percent of the Army, and almost 9 percent of the Marine Corps.

Sexual Abuse of Women in the Military

It is also evident that eliminating the single-sex spaces to accommodate “gender identity” will put female service members at an even higher risk of sexual assault in the US military.

In the military, female service members are more likely to be sexually assaulted, although overall rates of sexual assault are high. In 2014, the DoD estimated that 20,000 service members were sexually assaulted in total, but fewer than 25 percent of them agreed to put their names on a case report. Nearly 8,000 cases of sexual assaults were reported to the DoD in 2019 alone—The Battered Women’s Justice Project found that 1 in 4 female veterans reported being sexually assaulted at least once.

Even worse, victims struggle with the process of reporting sexual assault and seeking justice in a deeply flawed system that risks additional retaliation against victims. In 2014, the office of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) reported that more than 1 in 5 victims who filed non-anonymous reports later gave up on the process. In a 2015 report, the DoD reported that 62 percent of servicewomen who were victimized experienced some form of retaliation for reporting sexual assault.

Advocating for Women: The Importance of Acknowledging Biology and Reality

WoLF will continue to advocate for the safety and dignity of all women, including both civilians and service members. We commend the Biden administration for its recent recognition that trans-identified males are male and therefore, trans-identified males should be treated the same way that all other males are treated when it comes to conscription.

However, while we are grateful for the administration’s acknowledgment of biological reality in this one particular situation, we remain gravely concerned at the numerous ways that gender ideology is continuously promoted by this administration. Americans deserve consistent government policies based on science and reality instead of social and political ideologies.

We urge the Biden administration to apply the same logic it used in its recent announcement about conscription – a logic that acknowledges biological reality – in all other facets of governance. Trans-identified males are male and must be treated the way that other males are treated. The administration should never officially categorize or refer to trans-identified males as women or females.

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