IFA has reported many times on  Freemasons.  They are now in the news as an all-male secret society trying to decide whether to accept transgenders into membership.

From Daily Caller. The Freemasons, an all-male secret society whose history goes back to the Middle Ages, have been struggling to deal with the transgender movement infiltrating their ranks over the past several years, according to members who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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In 2018, the United Grand Lodge of England, founded in 1717 and considered by Masons to be the most senior of all lodges, announced that it would allow transgender individuals to retain their membership at the lodge or be eligible for membership if they were transitioning to a man, according to the BBC. In the U.S., the issue is far from settled, with conservative Masons in states like Texas clashing with the more liberal fraternities on the coasts, and according to several Masons who spoke with the DCNF on the condition of anonymity, the issue is splitting the society with real consequences for those not falling in lockstep. …

In March, the Grand Lodge of Texas, which oversees all the Freemason chapters in the Lone Star State, issued an opinion on the transgender debate directly contradicting the U.K. decision from five years prior. The Texas Grand Lodge said that it was not possible for a transgender individual to be a Mason based on the way the membership rules were originally intended to be interpreted in 1722, five years after freemasonry became a nationally organized fraternity in England and specific rules were established.

“A biological woman (meaning an individual who was assigned female at birth) cannot be a Mason,” the opinion reads. “A transgender man (meaning an individual who was assigned female at birth whose gender identity or gender expression is now male) cannot be a Mason. A transgender woman (meaning an individual who was assigned male at birth whose gender identity or gender expression is now female) cannot be made a Mason nor remain a Mason.”

A longtime Scottish Rite Mason from Houston told the DCNF that despite the decision, however, other lodges in Texas continue to have multiple openly transgender members. …

[Consequences] for not following the directives of England’s Grand Lodge can be extreme, according to the Masons. Chapters deemed illegitimate are barred from Masonic charities, special dorms on college campuses, trips and events and can even be removed as a recognized lodge.

In light of this, one of the Masons told the DCNF that it would not surprise him if the opinion is rescinded in a year or two once leadership switches hands to prevent being excommunicated by the rest of the community. Texas Freemasonry is also experiencing a notable demographic shift as older, more conservative members are slowly growing less common while younger, more liberal men take their place, according to the Masons who spoke with the DCNF. …

“We have a group of Christian extremists who hijacked our fraternity and they want to try to turn it into something churchy … and we’re really pushing back hard on it,” a central Texas Freemason told the DCNF. …

“So I’m a conservative Christian,” another prominent central Texas Mason told the DCNF. “I’m a member of my church, my Boy Scouts and my civic organizations and so forth. So my personal opinion is the same thing that it says in the Bible, which is that homosexuality is a sin and that transgender is still defined by the Merck Manual, which is a physician’s manual, as being a mental illness. So I mean, that’s kind of what I see as reality, [and] that is very divisive.” …

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(Excerpt from Daily Caller. Photo Credit: Rwendland – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=102361865)