As someone who was involved in Greek life in college, it is sad that I am not surprised by this. The amount of times I heard “better dead than coed” as a half joke was just sad. And I was part of a coed fraternity that had active members who were women. They always complained when we had problem members who were women, using it as an excuse as to why we shouldn’t Be coed, but turned the other way when we had male members who were an actual detriment to the chapter.

I don’t think Greek life is inherently a bad thing, as it really helped me come out of my shell during college, and I made some lifelong friends from it. It really needs a cultural shift though, because they still have some pretty dated ideas

I can understand there being some amount of value in gender specific communities, but I don’t see why including nonbinary people really has to be in contradiction with that. It seems like, by and large, the members of the sorority actively wanted the person involved to be a member. Having a higher authority come in and tell them that they can’t do that seems pretty dumb.

If the members themselves decided they wanted to keep the organization exclusively female, I wouldn’t really fault them for that; not every space is for every person, and that’s okay. I wouldn’t want to intrude on a Black social group, nor would I exactly want women to be in a space explicitly designated as being for gay men, for instance. But since the members do want the nonbinary person be in their group, I don’t see any real justification for it other than bigotry from the governing body.