Congressman says Daughters of the American Revolution can govern themselves — unless trans women are welcome

This story originally appeared on Them.

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 ban on trans women joining the organization. The ban had been supported by a right-wing contingency within DAR known as Daughters Advocating for Restoration, which claims to advocate for “preservation of Historic American Societies for Women.”

“Transgender Americans are patriots, family members, volunteers, historians, and descendants of Revolutionary War ancestors just like anyone else,” one member wrote in a Facebook group dedicated to rejecting the proposed ban. “Excluding or targeting people because of their gender identity contradicts the values of respect, service, and sisterhood that the DAR claims to uphold.”

The proposed ban came after DAR had amended their guidelines to include language protecting trans members in 2023 and rejected a proposal from one of its chapters to ban trans women in 2025.

Founded in 1890 and chartered by congress in 1896, the DAR was begun in the same year as the Sons of the American Revolution, which did not allow women to join. Both groups came about during the colonial revival of 1890, inspired by the 100th anniversary of George Washington’s presidency.

Them has reached out to the Daughters of the American Revolution regarding Cline’s legislation, and will update if we hear back.

Of course, lovers of irony that we are here at Them, we cannot help but point out that a group of Revolutionary War ancestors is trying to exercise their liberty by admitting whoever they would like to their organization after a democratic floor vote … only to be told by a politician that they do not have the freedom to self-govern and must be governed by unilateral restriction. Sounds like Cline is very severely treading!

Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for Them’s newsletters.