Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc. is considering a constitutional amendment restricting membership to “any male defined as a human being naturally born male, who remains and continually identifies as a male.” This would potentially make it the first Black Greek-letter fraternity to ban transgender members. The announcement was made during the organization’s Constitutional Convention on July 10 in Chicago, according to GLAAD.
Some organization members reportedly said that the proposed language is not only discriminatory and unnecessarily exclusionary, but politically motivated. According to GLAAD, some members feel that the organization’s national leadership and the amendment don’t reflect a broader Alpha membership that can be more accepting and welcoming.
“Their decision to alienate trans and nonbinary people from membership is reactionary, asinine, and unbecoming of an organization with a professed commitment to human rights,” said Deandre Miles-Hercules, a self-described “gender creative” Alpha who uses they/them pronouns and likely would be impacted by the proposed bylaw amendment.
“It’s ludicrous to be the fraternity of Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King Jr. and come up with a policy that bans trans people.”
Alpha Phi Alpha was founded in 1906 on the campus of Cornell University. It’s the oldest of nine Black Greek-letter fraternities and sororities that emerged in response to racist exclusion. Now pivotal cultural institutions, like the Divine Nine boast a membership of an estimated two to four million largely (though not exclusively) Black people and continue to serve a vital role in the Black community. Central to their legacy, Alpha Phi Alpha’s especially, has been considered a racial uplift.
“After the NAACP, it’s Alpha Phi Alpha, honestly,” said Matthew Shaw, assistant professor of law at Vanderbilt Law School and assistant professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt Peabody College. Noting that many Alpha men were central to the “march to racial desegregation” and the Civil Rights Era, Shaw also questions how an organization “with this legacy” could consider a policy such as the proposed ban.
Entities with similar historical and communal significance — like the NAACP, for example — have expressly affirmed their support of LGBTQ+ communities. “What they’ve understood is what I understand, that the logic of civil rights has got to remain inviolate.”
“If we allow certain discriminations, we have to allow for all of them,” continued Shaw, a lifetime Alpha member. “If Alpha then adopts the logic that White Citizens’ Councils had against Black people desegregating schools in the 1950s and ’60, what’s to say that you couldn’t use that logic against Black people in 2024?”
Nearly a dozen interviews with members of Alpha Phi Alpha — some conducted anonymously out of fear of retaliation or personal and professional safety — reveal a generational and moral split in the 118-year-old organization between national leadership, which is more likely to be older and more traditional, and the general body and collegiate and alumni chapter leadership, which is often more likely to be younger and more progressive.
“Many of these organizations thrive through conservatism, but that’s not necessarily what either the general membership truly wants or what it needs, given the shifts beyond the organization in culture and in reality,” Shaw added. “A fear of change is honestly what’s happening.”
But as one Alpha man based in Philadelphia said, the proposal shouldn’t even be a question. “Trans men are men,” he said. “I just feel like at the end of the day, if you identify as a man and you want to be in fellowship with other men, then you should be allowed to. It doesn’t sit well with me that a white man can be a member of Alpha, this historic Black institution, with no problem, but we’re going to tell Black trans men that they can’t. We’ve got all types of men in this fraternity, so to me, that’s how I look at it. It’s just another type of man.”
A few things still need to be clarified about the proposed bylaw amendment, starting with how it would be enforced. It’s also not known how many members of Alpha it would apply to, if it’s supposed to apply to prospective members only, or if it’s targeting current members who have transitioned and/or come into their not-cisgender-ness since joining. Regardless, trans and nonbinary people are already members of Alpha Phi Alpha. Some have distanced themselves from the formal organization since initially joining. Others are present, either having not disclosed their gender identities or defiantly taking up space, like Miles-Hercules.
While the potential bylaw amendment would specifically impact trans and nonbinary members of the organization, gay, bisexual, and queer members see its consideration as another example of the brotherhood’s refusal to acknowledge the diversity within its ranks officially. For example, the fraternity has never formally recognized Pride month — even after a 16-member collective wrote a letter to national and regional leadership in March calling for the org to “express public support for Alphas and men who are part of the GBTQ+ communities during Pride month and World AIDS Day.”
The letter, reviewed by GLAAD, also called for leaders to revise all institutional documents to be more inclusive (changing “male/males” to “person/people,” “brothers” to “members,” and “wives” to “spouses”) and to strike the language of the proposal, instead defining membership as being for “any cisgender man, transgender man, and/or nonbinary student who identifies with upholding the ‘manly deed’ principles of the fraternity.”
This June, Alpha Phi Alpha did not publicly acknowledge Pride Month on its official social media pages. Three members of the organization confirmed that Alpha’s stance, as communicated to inquiring members from national leaders, is that supporting Pride is a political act. Fearing that their chapters could be de-chartered for defying such a position, more progressive leaders have reluctantly obliged and not posted on their social pages.
The fight for LGBTQ+ inclusion and belonging in Black Greek-letter organizations is not unique to Alpha Phi Alpha. Countless articles, short docs, panel discussions, and presentations reflect what’s historically been termed a “don’t ask, don’t tell” way of regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual, and other queer members in these groups.
For Corey Boone, the current state of these discussions can be described by which organizations officially recognize Pride month and which do not, a recent record of which is kept on his Instagram page Recognize Our Pride. A platform “celebrating the LGBTQ+ members of historically Black fraternities and sororities,” the page’s comment section serves as an archive in and of itself of LGBTQ+ members of these organizations who’ve been clamoring to be accepted in siblinghood as their full, queer, and trans selves.
Since the page’s 2022 founding, Boone, who is also an Alpha, says the sororities of the Divine Nine have led the way in acknowledging their LGBTQ+ members and the broader community. This year alone, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated, Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Incorporated, and Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Incorporated all posted on their official Instagram accounts acknowledging June.
Of the fraternities — which in addition to Alpha includes Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Incorporated, Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Incorporated, Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Incorporated, and Iota Phi Theta Fraternity, Incorporated — only the Iotas acknowledged Pride in a post on their official Instagram. While Phi Beta Sigma has posted about Pride before, their international president posted an acknowledgment on his personal page this year, but the organizational account did not.
Out of all the Black Greek-letter organizations, Zeta Phi Beta is the only one to have formally addressed if trans people can be members. In 2019, Zeta Phi Beta leadership initially adopted a “diversity statement” that restricted membership in the sorority to cisgender women. Weeks later, after receiving backlash, the organization reversed its decision, affirming that membership is open to women, which they define as “any person who continually and consistently lives and self-identifies as a woman.”
To be clear, the law allows for Alpha Phi Alpha and other “single-sex social organizations” to define membership as it wishes, meaning if Alpha wants to say only cis men can be members, they legally can. But, according to Shaw, a leading expert in this field, there could be issues when it comes to enforcement of said limitations by chapters on college campuses that are held to the same nondiscriminatory provisions of Title VII and Title IX as their institutions. A trans ban would likely violate said provisions, putting many collegiate chapters in danger of being removed from their institutions.
*Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. has not publicly responded or provided a statement on this matter at this time.