Sisterhood of the Traveling Pronouns

Riddle me this: How does someone become the president of a renowned women’s sorority without actually knowing—or caring—what a woman is? It’s like hiring a nudist to run a tailoring shop: the cuts will be too close to the skin, and no one’s getting properly covered. Or the Beef Council electing a vegan as Chair. Confusing? Sure. Self-destructive? Absolutely. But in the age of “lived experience” and Ivy League gaslighting, it practically makes you qualified.

Enter Cindy Menges—CEO of Delta Zeta, who oversees a sisterhood where the first requirement for membership is abandoning any attachment to biological reality. In the new DZs, even the word “sister” may soon be declared a construct of gender oppression, pending approval from the DEI committee and an emergency rebranding initiative.

Menges may not identify as a hypocrite—but she’s undoubtedly living her truth as one.

Which brings us to Payton McNabb—who, unlike those redefining the term, actually knows what a woman is and has paid the price for saying so. Once a gifted volleyball player, Payton suffered a traumatic brain injury after a biological male cosplaying as a woman athlete spiked a ball into her face during a high school match. The result? Partial paralysis, the end of her athletic future, and a brutal introduction to the real-world cost of ideology.

But Payton didn’t sit quietly. She became a national advocate for women’s sports and women’s safety. Payton testified before the North Carolina legislature. She went public.

She’s become a voice for women who refuse to be erased. And in March 2025, she sat in the gallery of the U.S. Capitol as President Trump delivered his Joint Address to Congress, where he declared:

And Payton, from now on, schools will kick the men off the girls’ team—or they will lose all federal funding.

But there’s more to Payton’s story—because in today’s world, surviving a traumatic brain injury isn’t enough for the radical crowd determined to spike their agenda straight into the public square. 

Here’s the backstory: While at Western Carolina University, Payton encountered a biological male in the women’s restroom inside the campus dining hall. Given her past trauma, she did what any sane, safety-conscious young woman might do—she recorded the encounter. She posted it online, thinking that people might actually care that a man was in a women’s restroom.

Instead of offering concern—or supporting a young woman who has now endured two traumatic encounters with biological males in women’s spaces—Delta Zeta expelled her.

The charge? Violating their “Anti-Bullying” policy and engaging in “Moral-Prejudicial Conduct.” Translation: she made someone feel seen—in a way that didn’t align with the cancel culture narrative.

Despite video evidence and direct documentation from McNabb herself, Delta Zeta CEO Cindy Menges has tried to reframe the incident as something it wasn’t—suggesting that Payton was not actually expelled over transgender issues. However, as The Daily Signal reported, McNabb provided receipts, including communications from the sorority confirming her dismissal after the restroom incident. Menges may be spinning, but she’s not fooling anyone who can read an email.

Let’s be clear: the national Delta Zeta leadership issued the pink slip—but Western Carolina University provided the stage, the sink, and the stall. The bathroom was not in a sorority house or private facility—it was a public, university-owned, taxpayer-funded space. And while ultimately dismissed, WCU opened a Title IX investigation—against Payton McNabb.

And that raises several inconvenient questions for WCU:

• Did the university coordinate with or enable Delta Zeta’s expulsion of a student for recording a man in a women’s restroom?
• Has WCU updated or even acknowledged the policies that allowed this confrontation to happen in the first place?
• What steps has it taken to hold a recognized student organization accountable for punishing a woman who objected to the invasion of female spaces?
• Does WCU believe this aligns with its Title IX obligations—or is it waiting for a lawsuit and a line-item audit to clarify that point?
• Why did Western Carolina University launch a Title IX investigation against Payton McNabb—not for violating anyone’s safety, but for defending her own by recording a biological male in a women’s restroom?
• How exactly does upholding the rights of women under Title IX turn into grounds for accusing a woman of violating it?

Because if Title IX can be twisted like a pretzel to protect men who identify as women at the expense of women who are women, then it has ceased to be a mechanism for equality and become something else entirely—an Orwellian funhouse mirror, warping the very law meant to protect women into a weapon against them.

And if Western Carolina’s administrators can’t distinguish between a women’s restroom, the rights of those rightfully present, and the affirmative steps women are entitled to take in the interest of their safety, then they’ve lost the plot—and possibly their compliance with Title IX, and their duty to protect students from retaliation.

At a minimum, the university should ensure that any student who takes reasonable steps to ensure her safety in a designated women’s space must not be punished. If a recognized campus chapter acts on orders from national leadership to discipline such a student, WCU has both the authority and the responsibility to say: not on this campus.

And if they still don’t act, the UNC Board of Governors and the state legislature need to step in and explain it to them in a dialect they’re guaranteed to understand: Dollar$ and Cent$.

Basic biology appears Greek to the DZ national leadership. This might explain how they’ve turned a sorority into a tragicomic Greek play—equal parts identity politics and self-parody.

When Payton dared to tell the truth, DZ’s leadership became a full-fledged KGB. They skipped the double secret probation and ran her out of the DZ house on a rail. There was no due process, no second thoughts, just ideological expulsion, swift, shameless, and sanitized.

Menges and Company have morphed into a discordant Greek chorus-slash-morality-police, more concerned with Payton calling out the invasion of women’s spaces than with the people invading them. This is from an organization built on sisterhood. SMH, as the sisters say.

And what about all those Delta Zeta alumnae watching this unfold from the sidelines? Indeed, some among them must recognize this for the betrayal it is. They should start expressing their views in the one currency national leadership still values: their pocketbooks. If the sorority wants to become a tool for ideological conformity, it can do so without your money.

At this rate, Delta Zeta must start offering its signature sweatshirts in both men’s and women’s sizes, along with a disclaimer about ideological dress code compliance.

If any bullying happened here—and it did—it wasn’t Payton McNabb doing it. The bullies carried titles, tightly clutched weaponized policy manuals, and wrapped themselves in the language of “inclusion” while silencing any woman who dared to speak the biological truth.

Overall, the national leadership would’ve been better served sitting this one out—quietly, in the corner of their most remote chapter house, with an illustrated anatomy textbook, a crib sheet on stranger danger, and a long-overdue meeting with common sense.

So we bid farewell, Delta Zeta. Keep your Greek letters, self-parody, monogrammed headbands of conformity, forthcoming gender-blind rituals, and a laminated glossary of approved terms and pronouns. The joke is officially on you. In your rush to appease the Woke mind virus, you’ve even reduced sisterhood to a relic of the past—something now too “exclusive” to survive.

Payton McNabb may have been expelled from your membership roll, but she left with something infinitely more valuable: her voice, dignity, and a spine of steel.

And besides—if men are now welcome, it really does bring new meaning to a sorority mixer.

Charlton Allen is an attorney, former chief executive officer, and chief judicial officer of the North Carolina Industrial Commission. He is the founder of the Madison Center for Law & Liberty, Inc., editor of The American Salient, and the host of the Modern Federalist podcast. X: @CharltonAllenNC

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