​90-year-old volunteer claims she was ousted from MS Society after 60 years of service for questioning pronouns

Fran Itkoff, 90, has been volunteering for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society for roughly six decades, helping multitudes of people who suffer from the disease that plagued her late husband.

The elderly volunteer recently told Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok that her days with the MS Society have been unceremoniously brought to an end because she allegedly dared to question the organization's social construcivist virtue signals — the provision of gender pronouns in particular.

While ostensibly an organization committed to fighting disease, the MS Society has in recent years become infected by identitarian and LGBT ideologies.

In 2020, the MS Society began prompting employees to recite its DEI statement before all meetings; it removed Columbus Day holiday and added Juneteenth as a paid holiday; and it started having race-based summits. The next year, the MS Society added "pronoun options" to standard email signature templates and ramped up its obsession with racial politics.

By 2022, it began holding Hispanic summits extra to its annual black summit and established a zero-tolerance inclusion policy underscoring it is "committed to embedding diversity, equity and inclusion in everything we do."

Many decades before this institutional degeneration came about, Fran Itkoff's husband took over the Long Beach Lakewood MS support group in California, looking to help others with his affliction.

Itkoff told Raichik, "I helped him, of course, all the time. When he passed away, which is 20 years ago, I decided to keep the group going because everyone wanted to continue it."

According to the elderly volunteer, everything went swimmingly until a representative of the MS Society recently reached out, allegedly asking her to employ her pronouns.

"I was confused. I didn't know what it was, what it meant," said Itkoff. "I'd seen it on a couple of letters that had come in — after the person's name, they had the pronouns — but I didn't know what that meant. So finally when I was talking to her, I thought I'll ask, 'What does it mean?' and let her tell me."

"She said it meant they were all-inclusive, which didn't make sense to me because it sounds like you're labeling for females and not males if you're just putting in she/her," continued Itkoff. "A few days later ... I got an email from her saying that they were sorry but had to ask me to step down as a volunteer for the MS Society."

A copy of the letter Itkoff reportedly received from Kali Kumor, a pronoun-providing California-based MS Society community engagement manager — who appears to have recently deleted her LinkedIn profile — states, "As we discussed earlier during our phone conversation, after a thorough review of our guidelines and standards, it has come to our attention that there has been a failure to abide by our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion guidelines during your time as a volunteer."

"Unfortunately, based on the situation, we have made the difficult decision to have you step down from your volunteer position, effective immediately," wrote Kumor.

The letter suggests that Itkoff is free to continue meeting independently with her self-help group but that it will no longer be formally affiliated with the MS Society.

Itkoff's group does not presently appear on the MS Society's updated list of local support groups.

"I was completely shocked as I read that," Itkoff told Libs of TikTok. "I couldn't believe that. I had to read it a couple of times to see if I'm getting what she said."

Itkoff's daughter Elle Hamilton stressed that the apparently ideology-driven ouster was especially surprising given her mother's decorated service to the cause, for which the New York Post indicated she received the Volunteer Lifetime Achievement award in 2008.

Raichik summarized the situation thusly: "So you're volunteering for 60 years. You gave your life to this organization. You honored your late husband. And ... they just take it away from you in a split second and throw you under the bus just because you did not understand why someone who is a woman needs to have the words she/her in their email signature."

"It's just sad that they're discriminating against her," said Hamilton. "I mean, MS does not discriminate. Can happen to anybody. Anybody can get the disease and yet they're discriminating against her ... trying to help, just because she asked a question to explain what the pronouns were."

Hamilton wonders whether the MS Society is too "focused on these words and these pronouns and they've lost their focus on finding a cure for MS and helping the patients and all the programs that go along with that."

The New York Post indicated that it had reached out to the MS Society for comment but has not apparently received word back yet. However, Libs of TikTok obtained an internal email from Feb. 9 concerning Itkoff's termination.

"Yesterday, a video was posted online about a National MS Society self-help group leader who was recently asked to step down from her position," says the email, ostensibly sent by a pronoun-providing "Executive Vice President, General Counsel."

"We expect National MS Society volunteers to uphold the values outlined in our Inclusion Policy," continues the email. "We celebrate learning and personal growth. We would not dismiss a volunteer because they asked questions about the Society's inclusive practices."

Itkoff made expressly clear that while the MS Society tangles itself up further in woke ideology, she'll keep doing the necessary work on the ground.

"I'm going to keep this group going like I have all these years, anyway, because I want to keep it going and the patients that come want to keep going," said the 90-year-old volunteer.

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