Moms For Liberty and Trans Panic Recruiting

Moms For Liberty is experiencing a new rush of membership, and they have trans students to thank.

In the world of culture panic, one brand of panic dominates all others. Project 2025 is absolutely loaded with it. Donald Trump just claimed that schools are performing unauthorized trans surgery on students during the school day. And where better to field test such raw baloney than at a Moms For Liberty gathering, because M4L appears to be investing in trans panic as a way to reverse what of late seems a bit of a downward trend in their fortunes.

Time was that this momwashed group of political operatives was a hot ticket in election season. Okay, that was just one year. Since then, their ability to recruit members and get them onto school boards seems to have dipped. In the past couple of cycles they've even cut back on endorsing candidates, but even so, their success rate just keeps dropping. Even in their home state of Florida, the last round of elections didn't go their way. Not to mention their fervent embrace of Candidate Ron DeSantis, back before they went all in on Trump.

But M4L has scored one big victory, and it seems to be spreading their name. U.S. District Judge John Broomes ruled, in a lawsuit brought by M4L,two other groups, plus four states, that the Buden expansion of Title IX would be stayed. His injunction stopped the feds from extending the protections of Title IX to LGBTQ students. Then in August, the Supreme Court let the injunction stand. 

Broomes is a 2018 Trump appointee. He's a Navy veteran, and logged three years as a project manager for Koch Industries before hanging out his lawyer shingle. Since taking his seat, he has blocked pandemic rules restricting religious gatherings, and he just ruled that there's a Second Amendment right to own a machine gun. 

The tricky part of Broomes's injunction has been the question of exactly where it applies. The four states-- Alaska, Kansas, Utah and Wyoming-- all fall under the injunction. But because one of the plaintiffs is Moms For Liberty, Broomes extended the injunction to cover any school attended by a child of a Moms For Liberty member. M4L asked to expand that to any school in a county where M4L members lived, but he said no. 

However. 

The injunction applies to any "present or prospective" member of Moms For Liberty. In other words, you just have to say you're a member of the group, or that you might someday become a member of the group, and you can block the new Title IX from your child's school.

M4L is responsible for sending the list of schools to the court, but they have won the right to supplement that list as new school names come rolling in. And they have provided the means to keep them coming.

On their website, there is a page devoted to the lawsuit and the ruling. At the bottom are FAQa and a button to push so you can "become a member of Moms For Liberty for FREE today!" Under the news items, there's this:

Join today and opt your school out of the new Title IX! 

Is it working? Well, according to the M4L webpage, my county and one next door do not have M4L chapters. And yet in all but one district, someone has come to school board meetings to announce that they are M4L members and they have added the schools to the list, heading off local school board plans to update local policy to match the new Title IX rules. 

So keep your eyes peeled, particularly if you're in a county without a M4L chapter, for newly minted M4L members that show up at boards to stop trans children from using the wrong bathroom. There are no membership requirements to be a member of M4L, no hoops to jump through, nothing really to prove you belong. Anyone can do it, and lots of folks in the grip of trans panic are doing it right now. Will this improve M4L's fading fortunes? Who knows. Does this preserving parental rights is less important than making sure certain students don't have too many rights? Perhaps. Will it make life more difficult for young LGBTQ human persons? No doubt.