How LGBT Nonprofits and Their Billionaire Patrons Are Reshaping the World

In an August 2018 New Yorker article, Elizabeth Kolbert asks, “Are today’s donor classes solving problems or creating new ones?” Kolbert describes a form of charity that aims to not just help people but to improve them. This “improvement” aligns with the giver’s particular vision of what constitutes improvement, of course. And the people who need to be improved are treated as children—for whom the donor, naturally, gets to decide what is best. 

Kolbert describes how this form of giving becomes exploitation. We might add: not just exploitation, but elite-driven, highly self-interested social engineering. We see these characteristics on brilliant display in the philanthropy behind the modern LGBT movement.  

The gay-rights movements and organizations that emerged during America’s sexual revolution in the 1960s bear little resemblance to the behemoth LGBT NGO juggernauts operating today. What started out as grassroots support for the legal and social acceptance of same-sex relations has turned into an effort at full-blown social transformation, with the addition of a fetish of adult men, known as transsexualism, to the LGB human-rights rainbow banner. Along with the rebranding of transsexualism as transgenderism, this movement has also successfully normalized disorders of sexual development, otherwise known as intersex conditions. We have come a long way from Stonewall.

Perhaps the most insidious idea to be advanced under the LGBT banner today is the amorphous concept of “gender identity.” Gender identity refers to the way people see themselves with respect to socially constructed sex-role stereotypes. But is not just a descriptive term; it is also prescriptive—one has the right, according to advocates, to force others to recognize one’s chosen identity. And one has the right to change one’s body medically so that it better maps on to one’s gender identity. Given that the pharmaceutical lobby is the largest in Congress, and given that some of the most important philanthropists behind the modern LGBT movement have close ties to Big Pharma, this medical component is important to note. 

“Gender identity” and “transgender” ideology emerged on the Western cultural landscape not more than a decade ago, but they have spread across the globe with the speed and ferocity of the SARS COVID pandemic—and they have created nearly as much havoc. Yet the massive concomitant changes we have already seen in language, law, medical and crime statistics, women’s safety zones, sports, accomplishments and educational opportunities, the medicalization of healthy children’s bodies, and K–12 curricula have not been driven by grassroots enthusiasm. Quite the contrary. They have been driven by the philanthropic funding provided by billionaires who are themselves invested in this radical ideology’s greatest beneficiaries: Big Pharma. Many of the most important philanthropists behind the transgender and gender-identity movements stand to make huge profits from body dissociation and the commoditization of human sex into medical identities. 

Take Martine Rothblatt, a self-described transsexual and transhumanist who was the first individual to create a legal document supporting the idea that feelings of dissociation from our sexed bodies is normal. This legal document, later to become the International Gender Bill of Rights, legally normalizes body dissociation. Rothblatt later went on to become the top earning CEO in the biopharmaceutical industry, using his money and influence to promote the ideology and normalization of transgenderism. He believes that sexual dimorphism is morally equivalent to South African apartheid and must be dismantled.

Jennifer Pritzker, along with his family, one of the wealthiest in the United States, has poured huge sums of money into American institutions in order to advance the concept of body dissociation under the euphemism of “gender identity.” The Pritzker family has made vast investments in the medical industrial complex.

In 2000, another billionaire, Jon Stryker, heir to a multi-billion-dollar medical corporation, created another mammoth LGBT NGO, the Arcus Foundation. Stryker created such a global goliath of philanthropic funding with the stocks from his medical corporation that he had to create another organization to keep track of it all. In 2006 Arcus funded the creation of MAP, or Movement Advancement Project, to track the complex system of advocacy and funding that had already developed as a way of insinuating gender identity and transgender ideology into the culture.

Arcus deploys millions of philanthropic dollars each year to filter gender identity and transgender ideology into American law through their training of leaders in political activism, political leadership, transgender law, religious liberty, education, and civil rights. Some of its favored organizations include the Victory Fund, the Center for American Progress, the ACLU the Council for Global Equality, the Transgender Law Center, Trans Justice Funding Project, OutRight Action International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, Amnesty International, and GLSEN. In fact, Arcus is recorded to have given more than $58.4 million to programs and organizations doing LGBT-related work between 2007 and 2010  alone (it is far more than that now), making it the largest LGBT funder in the world. Jon Stryker gave over $30 million to the foundation himself in that period, through his stock in Stryker Medical Corporation.

Translation: A medical corporation with a vested interest in encouraging people to identify as transgender is directly funneling money and assets to its philanthropic foundation so that the foundation will do that encouraging on its behalf, thereby bringing more money and more clients (for life) to that corporation.

Arcus has funneled millions into other philanthropy organizations, such as Tides, Proteus and Borealis. There is no way to track whether these organizations are using Arcus money for the purpose of normalizing transgenderism, but one might surmise that the cause so dear to Arcus’s heart is not entirely ignored.

Along with the Pritzker family, Arcus has sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to colleges and universities, including Columbia, Yale, Vanderbilt, the University of Chicago, the University of Southern California, the University of Washington, and many others. Arcus grants have gone to black coalitions in the U.S. and Africa, Latino organizations, Native American organizations, youth and teen organizations, the military, and Public Broadcasting Radio. Millions have been given to lesbian organizations, including in Africa, with the lion’s share going to Astrea Foundation for a special focus on its trans fund. Arcus funds sports organizations such as Athlete Alley and Youth Can Play. Hundreds of thousands have gone to Planned Parenthood. Arcus has made a significant grant to Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a dubious character in the transgender arena. The foundation has funded prison projects and immigration organizations with a focus on normalizing transgenderism in children. Arcus funds religious organizations across the world.

In 2015, together with the Novo Foundation, a philanthropic NGO run by Peter Buffet (son of Warren, who helped launch the project with a $90 million gift), Arcus earmarked $20 million for transgender causes specifically. In 2018 Arcus funded the Council For Global Equality, a coalition of 30 U.S. groups advocating for inclusion of LGBT issues in foreign affairs and development policies.

Whew. This is no small operation! And every Arcus grant is contingent upon the recipient’s affirmation of “diversity and inclusion policies”—policies that, of course, very much include the affirmation of gender-identity ideology and transgenderism.

Many more philanthropic actors are working to prop up the transgender and gender-identity movements, including Tim Gill and his Gill Foundation and George Soros and his Open Society Foundation. Like Martine Rothblatt, Jennifer Pritzker, and Jon Stryker, Gill, who is heavily invested in artificial intelligence, and Soros, who has broad investments in Big Pharma, stand to benefit financially from the demand for altered bodies and brains that they hope is the fruit of their philanthropic activity.

It is striking that this conflict of interest has been so little discussed. Even the American Psychological Association (APA), the leading scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States, with more than 118,000 members, is funded by Arcus philanthropy. In 2005 the APA created INET, to help member psychological organizations improve the well-being of sexual orientation and “gender diverse people.” Prior to the addition of gender identity and the arrival of Arcus money, the APA INET was solely focused on LGB issues. In 2008 the APA created the Task Force On Gender Identity and Gender Variance, and in 2015 it developed guidelines to assist psychologists in the provision of culturally competent, developmentally appropriate, and trans-affirmative psychological practice with “transgender” and “gender non-conforming” people. Psychologists were “encouraged“ to modify their understanding of gender, broadening the range of variation viewed as healthy and normative.

Can democracy withstand such philanthropy-driven “encouragement”? Can there be genuine democracy when, via the taxpayer-subsidized fig leaf of philanthropy, billionaires can so quickly and easily dismantle the reality of biological sex by suborning charities, politicians, researchers, and professional associations? We are in the midst of finding out.

Jennifer Bilek is an investigative journalist, artist, and concerned citizen. She has been following the money behind the transgender agenda for six years. She blogs at the 11th Hour.