Maddie Ramar is an advocate for women’s spaces, but she’s also “just a normal college girl.” In an interview with Independent Women’s Forum, Ramar said that she never expected to be in the public eye: “I just want women to be able to experience the same opportunity I had to grow and meet amazing friends in a safe, women-only household,” she said.
While completing her nursing degree at the University of Wyoming, Ramar, a member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma (KKG) sorority, is sharing her living space with Artemis Langford, a male identifying as a transgender woman, who was initiated into KKG during the fall 2022 sorority continuous open bidding season.
When she joined, Ramar expected KKG to be a women-only organization where she could feel “safe.” But due to radical gender ideology, which has called into question the “single-sex haven” KKG promises, that dream was crushed.
“It was really important to me to be part of a sisterhood throughout college,” she said of her initial decision to rush. “These are really crucial, important years of our lives […] I knew I wanted strong women in my life in order to support me and be there for me throughout this journey.”
Ramar said that the female-only environment she briefly got to experience at KKG felt like “home.”
“I have a lot of friends that go through really scary situations with men, and being able to come home and have a safe environment, where only women are able to come upstairs, allows you to feel safe,” she said. “It’s really important to have that home feeling while in college because we have stressful lives.”
According to Ramar, she was “intimidated” by the male student when she first saw him during the fall 2022 rush season.
“I just did not realize how much bigger he was than all of us,” she said. “I talked to him during recruitment, during one of the first rounds. He had a whole list of questions about us, but he never wanted to open up about himself.”
Ramar, along with a few other members, said she brought her concerns about the male student to sorority leadership and was told that “there’s a 99.9% chance that this individual would not be getting into KKG.”
Despite these assurances, he was initiated into KKG—even though sorority members initially voted against his admission. According to fellow member Allison Coghan, his case was brought to a second vote during which active members were pressured to vote for him, lest they be considered “transphobic.”
Ramar and her sorority sisters are now required to share their living space with the male student, but his presence has not stopped Ramar from calling KKG home.
“My best friends are still here. The women that are going to be my bridesmaids are still here,” Ramar said. “I want to be able to stay, not for just me, but to show other women, ‘Hey, you can be strong. You can stand up for what’s right, and you can still love where you’re at and fight for it.”
Ramar’s identity was made public when she and six other sorority members brought a lawsuit against KKG’s national headquarters in 2023, even though she said that they originally wished for everyone—including the male student—to remain anonymous.
“We wanted everyone to be protected,” she said. “When the judge came back and said, ‘you have to put your names on it,’ we [thought], ‘we can either stop this fight that we’ve already worked so hard for, or we can put our names on it. We already fought so hard and for so long, we’re not backing down now.’”
Although Ramar said it was “scary” to put her name on the lawsuit, she hopes to preserve the right to female-only spaces for future women.
“We’re not only standing up for sororities,” she said. “[We’re standing up] for all women’s organizations and private spaces.”
