WoLF Goes to DC!
Venimus, vidimus, vicimus.
We came. We saw. We surprised ourselves, in being more successful than we dared hope.
This was an ambitious undertaking.
We had a great problem for a women’s rights organization to have - too many women from across the country wanted to come with us to DC. 12 women travelled there, another drove in from Maryland, while another flew up for the day from South Carolina. Our wonderful WoLF supporters helped us book meetings with their representatives to talk about women’s rights, so we had a jammed schedule. The Senators’ offices are all at the northern end of the Capitol, with the Representatives’ offices at the south end (so loads of walking back and forth! We definitely got our steps in.). We had to book two airbnbs to hold the entire team, and we could, thanks to our incredible donors!
An amazing team of women assembled in DC.
In addition to our Executive Director, Sharon Byrne, Board Vice President Margot Heffernan, and several terrific WoLF sisters-in-action, the team included representatives from LGB Alliance USA, ROAR NY, WDI USA, and PA4Sexed Based Rights. These women were tough, ready to step up and meet this moment, and focused on the importance of this week. They left their egos at the door, and bravely committed to standing up for all women and girls, and being heard.
The goal was to start relationships, to become working partners in legislation that helps women and girls. There’s an art to advocacy, and Sharon taught it to the team: be friendly, approachable and open. Praise them for the things they’ve done that helped women and girls, lay out your advocacy, and discuss the areas where you can work together. Where there’s disagreement, make a concise argument, and maintain that above all, you seek a working relationship on the areas you agree on. Close the meeting by offering to serve as a resource for them, and follow up. Most meetings were 30 minutes, so the temptation to to spray a firehose of facts at representatives had to be strongly resisted. If you land 2 or 3 key points, and they hand you their business card indicating they want more contact, you’ve done quite well.
Some representatives ran in fear from us.
An ‘LGBTQ+’ reporter from The Hill was lurking on our email list, saw we had meetings scheduled with Democratic representatives and senators, and called them to demand they explain why they would meet with us. One can imagine how those conversations went, but the following representatives’ offices canceled Thursday and Friday before we were to leave for DC. They did not offer to reschedule.
Representative Ross, D, NC - co-chair, Democratic Women’s Caucus
Representative Kamlager-Dove, D, CA - co-chair, Democratic Women’s Caucus
Representative Raskin, D, MD
Senator Schiff, D, CA - our Executive Director’s senator, also that of the LGB Alliance representative.
Senator Schumer, D, NY - three women from New York were with us, eager to meet with their Senator.
Senator Duckworth, D, IL - this was a surprise. She’s a veteran with combat injuries, and is widely admired. Her team initially signaled they would keep the meeting, because we have to get to some place of compromise. That is exactly the conversation we wanted to have, and we were excited to talk with her team.
Harassing elected representatives out of meeting with their own constituents is deeply antithetical to democracy.
That Hill reporter publicly demonstrated how gender ideologue factions hound representatives to cleave to the transgender orthodoxy, and intimidate them from deviating even slightly from it. Rep Jonah Wheeler, a Democrat in the New Hampshire Legislature, said that this orthodoxy is a problem during his own public witchburning, after he listened to women, and then voted for a New Hampshire bill to protect women’s spaces. Trans ideologues believe representatives should scurry away from meeting with women’s rights group and lesbians seeking to challenge the orthodoxy. They police representatives, and shout with megaphones in their ears, leading reps to conclude, erroneously, that the megaphones equate to public opinion, when polling shows otherwise.
Undaunted, we popped by their offices.
Women are not to be dismissed. We will not just ‘go away’. We will be heard.
These are elected government officials in the most powerful country in the world. If meeting with a few women’s rights and LGB advocates terrifies them, they should have picked a different career. Rep Ocasio-Cortez refused to meet with her constituents.
One of our WoLF sisters-in-action brought rubber chickens, and we made good use of them.
How it went: The Democrats
We researched all of the representatives we were meeting with prior to arriving in DC. We wanted to find areas to make common cause. Democrats are strong on reproductive rights, and all had voted for the Take It Down Act. We thanked them for these votes to protect women and girls.
We knew the gender ideology discussion would be difficult, but necessary. We noticed that on many of the Democratic rep’s websites, they indicate they supported ‘LGBTQ rights’ using this framing: everyone deserves to live in dignity and equality.
Our executive director Sharon Byrne is an international human rights consultant. This framing is quite similar to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the USA had a leading hand, in the form of Eleanor Roosevelt, in drafting it, though we’ve never applied it to our Constitution.
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration says:
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
Everyone can agree with this, and we started our meetings using this human rights framing.
We wondered if Democrats who say they support ‘LGBTQ+’ knew how much harm is being done to LGB by the forced teaming of transgender ideology. We were lucky to have five lesbians on our team who could speak with clarity and emotional impact on losing their spaces to meet and be together, getting flooded in their dating apps by straight men pretending to be lesbians, and being fetishized in porn. Lesbians led the conversation on how ‘allyship’ with ‘LGBTQ+’ hurts lesbians. We also expressed that 80% of those identifying as trans and non-binary now are girls, and this is likely due to the violent, misogynistic porn that very young girls are exposed to online. Girls and young women would naturally be desperate to opt out of becoming targets of that kind of sexual violence. Frankly, it’s a terrible vision of womanhood, and one of WoLF’s key advocacy areas is to abolish porn. Finally, we felt there was an opportunity to explain that many of the kids being pushed into transgender medical procedures and cross-sex hormones would likely grow up to be healthy gay or lesbian adults. Transgender ‘medicine’ is conversion therapy dressed up in a new disguise.
Thus, the transgender movement is deeply homophobic, and actively harming LGB.
We suspected this was not known by Democratic representatives, and we were right. Our first meeting was with Rep. Desaulnier (D), on Monday afternoon, booked by a supporter who hustled to get it scheduled. His legislative aide was shocked, and had no idea transgenderism was so harmful to lesbians.
We met with Senator Alsobrooks the first thing on Tuesday morning, and she was marvelous. She and her staff became deeply concerned when her constituent, a lesbian mom, gave a moving statement on her experiences. Senator Alsobrooks was visibly alarmed and stunned, and said, with considerable empathy, “I did not know. I have never heard this before.”
Senator Gillibrand’s legislative team had a similar reaction, expressing surprise that while they’ve seen things on social media and gotten emails, no one had ever come to their office and explained this before. They asked us for language to amend the Equality Act, which seeks to protect individuals from discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. We cannot support protecting a characteristic in law that anyone can identify into, and out of, that trumps sex and sexual orientation.
We mentioned that to other Democratic reps, and they also requested that we give them amendments - a huge win!
Some Democratic Representative and Senate legislative staff were polite, but noncommittal, so we feel we didn’t move them, particularly when the legislative staffer was male. When the staff were female, they reacted with empathy and wanted to collaborate.
Then there was Senator Fetterman’s office. Truly disappointing.
Our Pennsylvania team of women had prepped diligently for their meeting. We’d seen signaling via posts on Bluesky that Fetterman’s team said he declined to meet with WoLF. One of our WoLF sisters-in-action had tried to book a meeting with us and his office in March, and was turned down. But several fierce Pennsylvania women WoLF supporters vigorously chased Fetterman’s scheduling team and prevailed in getting a meeting scheduled.
We received no notice of cancellation, so the team turned up at the meeting time at his office.
His staff made the women wait 45 minutes, clearly hoping we’d just go away. Finally, his legal counsel Jason Smith took the meeting. He’s supposedly the women’s rights specialist in Fetterman’s office.
It started off well, with a brave young sexual assault survivor from Pennsylvania leading the conversation. But it quickly went sideways, when Smith denied there were any male inmates in women’s prisons. He said it was the craziest thing he’d ever heard, and he talked to people who believed in aliens. When some of the women explained women were leaving the Democratic party over this, he said, “Good. Leave. Go.” He encouraged lesbians to vote Republican on the way out.
Progressives misogyny may have donned rainbows and sparkles, but it’s still just misogyny.
So we trotted out those rubber chickens and sent Fetterman’s team a message. Click here to see the video short.
We ran into Ted Cruz and thanked him for the Take It Down Act
This act, second time it was put forth, was signed into law Monday. The Act makes it illegal to share deepfake and revenge porn images without consent, and requires they be taken down from the internet when requested by the person who didn’t consent to them.
We loved this legislation and advocated for it. We thanked Senator Cruz for authoring it, and for highlighting the problems with the appointment of Judge Sarah Netburn, whose confirmation we helped defeat. He saw our WoLF shirts, said he knew who we were, and when we joked had he ever met this many feminists at one time, he laughed and said, ‘you’d be surprised.’
How did it go with Republicans?
We met with several, again, thanks to supporters that helped us schedule these meetings. We thanked Republicans for voting to save women’s sports and the Take It Down Act, and requested that they help codify President Trump’s executive orders protecting women and girls from gender ideology into law. We received very positive responses, and started connecting them with other Republicans who’d indicated they’d be willing to help with this legislation, as potential authors and co-sponsors.
The difficult conversation: We stand for women’s reproductive sovereignty. We didn’t expect them to support us on that, but we pointed out that the tsunami of bills aimed at restricting reproductive rights presents as decidedly anti-woman, a problem the Democrats have with gender ideology. There’s only one bill supporting women and families. Legislating that life begins at conception creates direct conflict with many of their constituents’ need to access reproductive technologies like IVF. The female legislative staff understood this point, and agreed.
Summing up: It’s required that we speak to power.
It was an intense two days of meetings, and the first time we’ve done this! We got a lot accomplished! Our supporters took power into their own hands in helping us book all these meetings with their representatives. The team of women who took time out of their lives, made the effort and paid their own way to travel to DC, as unpaid volunteers, to advocate for women and girls, was simply stellar. The reception from representatives was overwhelmingly positive. We sought common ground with every representative, to make a common cause, and we found it, surprising ourselves in the process. Who knew they were so open to hearing from women? Who knew they’d listen to lesbians?
Until we did this, we had no idea how many allies we’d find, and how many representatives would welcome this conversation with us.
We are so grateful to our wonderful supporters for helping make all of this happen!
Next year, we want 30 women, 300+ meetings, and a week to do it all! Mark your calendars now - we’ll be heading to DC in early June of 2026! (we learned from staffers this is the golden window - we’ll take it!)
The final count:
Representatives we met with in person:
Sen Alsobrooks, D, MD
Rep Carbajal, D, CA
Sen. Cruz, R, TX
Rep. Garamendi, D, CA
Senator Ricketts, R, NE
Meetings with legislative staff (who do the heavy lifting):
Sen Budd, R, NC
Sen. Fetterman, D, PA
Sen Gillibrand, D, NY
Sen Grassley, R, IA
Sen. Kelly, D, AZ
Sen. Marshall, R. KS
Sen Ossoff, D, GA
Sen Van Hollen, D, MD
Sen Warnock, D, GA
Sen. Young, R, IN
Rep Mace, R, SC
Rep Carson, D, IN
Rep Garamendi, D, CA
Rep Smith, R, NE
Rep Desaulnier, D, CA
Rep Deluzio, D, PA
Rep Kline, R, VA
Offices we stopped in and chatted with staff:
Sen. Blunt, D, DE
Rep Donalds, R, FL
Sen. Lujan, D, NM
Sen. McConnell, R, KY
Sen. Murkowski, R, AK
Thank you for donating to fund this trip, and for scheduling meetings with your representatives with us! We could not have done any of this without YOU - our wonderful WoLF supporters!
