A former senior Trump administration staffer with extremist connections and the legal director of “radical feminist” group the Women’s Liberation Front (Wolf) are now partners in a Wisconsin law firm exclusively focused on anti-transgender litigation.
The firm, Jackson Bone LLP, unites Candice Jackson, who rolled back Title IX protections for complainants in college sexual assault cases under Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos, and Lauren Adams Bone, co-author of a “Women’s Bill of Rights” that has shaped anti-trans bills currently before several state houses.
The partnership and the cases it is currently pursuing reveal the close collaboration between far-right and “gender-critical” anti-trans activists in waging legal warfare on transgender rights – through legislation and litigation.
Jackson Bone formed last September, according to Wisconsin company records. Current cases listed on Jackson Bone’s website are all aimed either at transgender rights, or those providing gender-affirming care to transgender people.
In Chandler v California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the complaint argues that California law SB 132, that allows transgender women and intersex and non-binary individuals to be transferred to women’s correctional facilities is unconstitutional. But the complaint also portrays transgender women prisoners as male rapists, and denies transgender identity.
LGBTQ+ rights legal nonprofit Lambda Legal is part of a legal team including the ACLU of Southern California that is representing a group of transgender women prisoners that is seeking to intervene in that case. “The Chandler complaint and the legal arguments made by WoLF and their attorneys are based entirely on anti-trans distortions and sensationalized ideas about incarcerated trans women,” said Nora Huppert, an attorney at Lambda working on the case.
In a second current case, Kiefel v Ruff, Jackson Bone is suing two professional counselors and their employers in Oregon, on behalf of a woman who had a double mastectomy as part of a gender transition she later reversed. The complaint accuses the counselors of “abusing their positions of trust and authority as mental health professionals” by “recommending that plaintiff undergo … gender surgery”.
Both of the cases are sponsored by Wolf, and heavily promoted on that organization’s website.
Jackson Bone’s activities go beyond litigation. In January, they wrote a letter of demand to the National College Athletics Association (NCAA), which demands that transgender women be excluded from women’s sport.
The firm’s website also links to the 2022 “Women’s Bill of Rights” Lauren Bone co-wrote with members of the rightwing Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) in her former role as the legal director of Wolf.
The Guardian emailed Jackson and Bone for comment, and received no response.
Wolf’s website boasts about the way that document was used as the basis of anti-transgender rights legislation passed in Kansas this year, which among other things legally restricts individuals to the gender they are assigned at birth, effectively legislating transgender rights out of existence.
Wolf is a self-described “radical feminist” organization founded in 2014 by Lierre Keith, who is still its president.
Before Wolf, Keith had a divisive history in radical feminist and environmentalist circles due to her avowedly anti-industrial agriculture and anti-transgender politics.
In 2013, Deep Green Resistance – co-written by Keith, Derrick Jensen, and Aric McBay – was published. It advocated dismantling industrial civilization with tactics including underground organizing, sabotage, and violence. Keith and her collaborator Derrick Jensen co-founded an organization of the same name to promote the ideas the book espoused.
From 2013, Keith and co-author Derrick Jensen’s anti-transgender politics became a focus of criticism on the radical left, with even their co-author McBay denouncing the pair’s “transphobia”.
Since 2014, however, Wolf’s influence has grown through an ever-closer collaboration with anti-LGBTQ+ actors on the right of the US political spectrum.
Earlier this year, leaked emails showed former Wolf board chair Kara Dansky participating in a 2019 “working group” which was helping Republican legislator Fred Deutsch frame and defend anti-transgender legislation he had proposed in South Dakota.
Reports on those emails credited Dansky with “bringing terfs into the right wing” while she was the organization’s director and public face. “Terf” is a widely used acronym for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”.
While Dansky was on Wolf’s board between 2016 and 2020, she openly advocated cooperation with rightwing groups, and raised the group’s profile in dozens of media appearances in venues including Tucker Carlson’s since-canceled Fox News program.
The organization’s tax filings to the IRS show how the raised profile benefited them to the degree that they are able to sponsor litigation. Nonprofits who make less than $50,000 are not required to make full IRS 990 filings: Wolf was under the threshold from 2014 until 2019, when it just cleared the bar with $58,613 in earnings.
In 2020, it more than quadrupled those takings by making $263,901. In 2021, its last publicly available filing, it declared $1,090,723 in total support for the organization, and said it spent $320,710 in program expenses on “legal argument”.
The Guardian emailed Wolf for comment but received no immediate response.
While Bone transitioned from working at Wolf to partner in the law firm that serves it, Candice Jackson has a long history on the political right, including in the Trump administration. Although Jackson Bone’s litigation is preoccupied with the possibility of sexual assault by trans women, Jackson’s professional history reveals shifting perspectives on the issue of sexual assault that appear to accord with the changing demands of partisan politics.
In 2017, she was appointed deputy assistant secretary of the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in the education department, then led by Betsy DeVos. She served as acting assistant secretary throughout her 14-month tenure.
Within weeks, Jackson attracted criticism for claiming campus rape accusations that “90% of them … fall into the category of ‘We were both drunk,’ ‘We broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation.’”
Though she soon after apologized for those remarks, Jackson’s rewrite of DoE rules governing how educational institutions handled sexual assault accusations suggested a persistent belief in pervasive false allegations.
The changes included removing universities’ obligation to investigate off-campus assaults, removing time limits on investigations, removing requirements that faculty and staff report accusations when they hear of them, and raising the evidentiary bar at which schools were compelled to take action, and allowing those accused of sexual assault to appeal against Title IX decisions.
In the process, Jackson took input from anti-feminist “men’s rights activists”, including some who contend that campuses are subject to an epidemic of false rape accusations.
In May 2017, according to emails obtained by nonprofit Democracy Forward, Jackson actively solicited policy advice from the academic psychologist Gordon E Finley, who wrote of the Obama-era provisions that Jackson rolled back that “Obama and the progressives are launching a war on men to get the votes of women and advance their political base”, and in another specifically called for DeVos to repeal them.
During the previous decade, however, Jackson determinedly pursued allegations of sexual assault against Bill Clinton, and accompanying allegations that Hillary Clinton had worked to cover those allegations up.
In 2005, Jackson published a book entitled Their Lives: Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine, which detailed the experience of women said their lives and reputations had been adversely affected after encounters – including sexual assault – with Bill Clinton. She later used her connections with the women featured in the book to benefit the Trump campaign, arranging for their presence at an October 2016 presidential debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton in St Louis, Missouri.
Jackson was hand-picked for the DoE job by Peter Thiel, and boasted “express endorsements” from far-right figures including anti-Muslim extremist David Horowitz, according to her own account in application materials obtained by BuzzFeed News in 2018.
And from 2002 to 2004, she worked as a litigation counsel for Judicial Watch, founded by Larry Klayman, an organization that been tireless in promoting conspiracy theories about the Clintons, including the allegations that they were involved in the murder of Vince Foster, and that Hillary Clinton or the Democratic party had been involved in the killing of DNC staffer Seth Rich.
