When a U.S. District Court judge in Wyoming tossed a lawsuit by six sorority sisters who sought to prevent a man, who identified as a woman, from joining their chapter in violation of the sorority’s women-only membership requirement, he based his ruling on the failure of the sorority’s bylaws (circa 1870) to define the word “woman.”

In a sympathetic Washington Post profile, Artemis Langford, the male Kappa Kappa Gamma, was presented as a victim. Langford attributed the opposition to his membership in an all-women’s sorority not to his being a man but to “hate” on the part of women who felt uncomfortable having a guy around the sorority house.

It sounded like a job for May Mailman, the new director of Independent Women’s Law Center (IWLC). IWLC stepped in and helped the six women bring their appeal. “This is a tough case for a lot of reasons, beyond the definition of a woman and too many people forgetting what that is,” says Mailman. “It is very important that the arguments be made in a powerful fashion that other people can use.”

“So, once IWF has its brief out there, people facing similar problems will be able to use our arguments and our research, and that is a huge public service,” the Harvard Law graduate maintains. “Obviously, these women need to be out from under living with a man, but they know that this issue is even bigger than that. They’re going to go on to have kids, and those kids will need to have women’s only spaces. So these brave women are hopeful that they’re changing the future. So, that’s IWLC’s current big case, where we are the ones who are arguing it, briefing it, litigating it.”

IWLC was founded by Jennifer Braceras, IWF Vice President for Legal Affairs, a former member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and an expert on Title IX and nondiscrimination. Mailman was appointed Director earlier this year. IWLC is an answer to the Left’s lavishly-funded legal advocacy machine.

“There’s a huge imbalance right now between the legal challenges coming from the left versus the right and this affects private organization behavior, it affects government behavior, it affects individual behavior,” Mailman says. “We have heard from organizations that they adopt certain policies because they’re scared of getting sued by the Left. So, they’re going to allow men in women’s sports because they fear a lawsuit from a male who wants into women’s sports and will not be let in. And the imbalance is real.”

“The ACLU spends roughly $120 million on litigation and then receives another $40 million of donated legal services because all these leftist law firms are aching to help the ACLU. The National Women’s Law Center is also a $100 million organization. So, it is true that many organizations feel this threat coming from only one side. And so long as they only feel the threat coming from only one side, and they only hear legal theories coming from one side, then of course, they’re going to capitulate to the most insane demands.”

IWLC isn’t as big as these legal powerhouses of the Left (yet!), but it will present different legal arguments to the public, through lawsuits, media, congressional testimony, and other forms of advocacy. Mailman has the resume to make her the perfect representative of IWLC’s principles.

May grew up in Goodland, Kansas, the daughter of a doctor father with New Orleans roots and a mother who came from Korea. Like many rural kids, May was active in the 4-H. “I had pigs and sheep, I was president of 4-H,” May recalls. “It was a very small community, probably around 4,000 people, fewer than 100 kids in my grade in the whole city. You knew everybody.” As a town girl, May felt her piglet was inevitably inferior to the pigs of farm kids.

“When it came time to show your pigs at the fair,” May recalls, “you could tell the farm kids. They worked with their pigs and they knew how to walk them without a leash, so they could follow their pig as their pig circled around a judge in a livestock ring. My brothers and I didn’t know how to work with our pigs. So, my pig always came barreling out there trying to fight all the other pigs.”

Although May looked at a number of colleges, she settled on the University of Kansas. “I just loved it when I visited,” she says. “It’s just so beautiful, and they have a culture I thought was great. It’s a big sports school, there’s just a positive energy there. And they have a really good honors program where the honors kids can take very cool classes and also pick their classes before the athletes and before everyone else, so you do get treated specially there.” In reply to a question, May admits that she never made anything below an A at Kansas. She was student body Vice President and served in the student senate all four years.

May was the top student in journalism, her major, but with a recession on, it was not the right time to get a journalism slot. Teach for America had long interested her. Willing to go anywhere, she was assigned to a school in Kansas City.

“Teach For America might sound like a funny choice for me because it’s viewed as a lefty organization, but I really believe in the mission,” says May. “I’m a big believer in individual responsibility, as I think most conservatives are. But it’s hard for me to demand that adults be responsible for themselves when no one has given them the tools to do so. If you don’t have basic skills, then it’s hard for me to demand that you do the things that require basic skills. I had always thought that Teach For America would help me equip people to be responsible for themselves.”

“Teach For America became apologetic about its mission right when I was there, and so there was a shift to teaching DEI principles and why racism is the cause of a lack of achievement. I thought that a really good teacher could change the trajectory of a kid’s life, and maybe a really, really, really good teacher could. But my kids didn’t have the home environment necessary to do school, and they were moving around all the time. Given this experience, I became much more focused on what we can do to build families than what we can do to have better teachers.”

May had “always known that the law was for me.” She had gone to a law “camp” at Georgetown University. She loved mock trials. She was accepted at Harvard Law. “I know Harvard is coming under attack right now, but Harvard Law is the first place where I really felt that this is where I was meant to be,” May says. “The people, the things that I was doing every single day, the things that I was learning—it was genuinely enjoyable from top to bottom. I went to a Federalist Society event early on my first year.” She was eventually President of the Harvard Federalist Society.

After Harvard, Mailman clerked for a federal district judge in Denver, who got “great cases,” but also took his whole staff skiing—which was okay with May. She then worked for the firm of Wheeler Trigg O’Donnell. While there, “I got a text from my friend basically saying, ‘Do you want to work in the center of the universe?’ And I responded that I was not interested in working in New York. And he said, ‘No, no, not New York. I mean in the White House.’”

“And so, from there, the conversation went on and, all of a sudden, now I’m interviewing for a position in the Staff Secretary’s office, which I’d never heard of. I got the job on a Tuesday, packed up my house on a Wednesday, flew to D.C. on a Thursday, and started work on Friday, which was the day President Trump was inaugurated. I was in the first van to enter the White House right after noon, which is when you can start.”

Mailman served as a legal advisor to President Donald J. Trump, where her portfolio included health care, immigration, and social issues. With other lawyers involved in impeachment, “I got to do a lot of the early work on trying to figure out novel legal questions like whether we can ban flights from China. How does that look? How can we get more masks in production? How can we get more parts flown into the United States? How can we get emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine? So, I had all these crazy legal issues pop up, and that was a lot of fun, but then at some point, the fun is over.”

At the end of the Trump administration, May had several enticing job offers. Then January 6 happened. “Literally as people were storming the Capitol,” May says, “I called my first-choice employer, who was the Ohio Attorney General, and I said, ‘yes, I’ll take that job now,’ because I anticipated that a lot of my colleagues were completely un-hirable for a very long time following January 6, even though working in the White House is very different from storming the Capitol.”

Coincidentally, a White House colleague knew a suitor in Cleveland, Ohio, she might like—the only problem was his last name was Mailman, which could deliver all sorts of mirth. May thought, ah well, it was just a date, she wasn’t going to marry him, she’d give him a tour of the White House and that would be it. He flew from Cleveland to Washington for a blind date with May. Three months later, May and David Mailman were engaged. David was a professional baseball player for five years and then graduated from the University of South Carolina and Rice Business School. He has worked for Goldman Sachs and is in the corporate development business in Cleveland. The Mailmans have one child and another imminently on the way.

May served as Deputy Solicitor General of the State of Ohio and was Vice President of Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE), founded by Karl Rove and whose board includes such heavy hitters as former U.S. Attorney General William Barr and former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy.

May is determined to shift the balance of influence between women’s legal centers on the right and left. She believes that IWLC is the vehicle to do that. Some of the issues IWLC will address go back to our founding (the so-called sex-based pay gap and Title IX misinterpretations), while others—men participating in women’s sports competitions—are more recent. “I really want to get more into the lawsuit game because women’s rights are being eroded because the Left can no longer define ‘woman.’ I think that IWLC is the perfect group to do it. So, even though there are other organizations out there on the right who are bringing suits and they’re all great groups, we have this really robust cross-partisan coalition built up, and we have this fantastic media wing.

“We are the right group. And so, what I want is for IWLC to become the go-to place where, if you are a woman and some man has exposed himself to you in a YMCA, if you are a woman and some man has slammed a volleyball in your face, or whatever, you know that you can come to us to talk and that we will have then the resources to bring your fight public. I don’t want IWLC to only be a women’s space litigation place, but I think that that is the starting point to build our litigation even while we do education on a lot of the other issues that matter to people, but which the Left hijacked as a leftist women’s issue without remembering that women have their own brains. So, anyway, a lot of hopes for the law center, but we’re small yet. We’re not the ACLU yet.”

Not yet, but May Mailman sounds like the right woman to get IWLC there.