Billionaires
and Big Pharma Are Bankrolling the Transgender-Industrial Complex, by Tyler
O’Neil, 1/27/20.
Many
Americans are absolutely flabbergasted by the sudden rise of the transgender
movement. Immediately after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage
in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015),
Olympian Bruce Jenner was calling himself "Caitlyn" and activists
were preaching a new understanding of gender that rejected age-old wisdom and
basic biology. By 2016, Barack Obama was foisting this ideology on broad swaths
of American society, as his Justice Department threatened North Carolina for
protecting the privacy of women in public restrooms.
Last
week, Jennifer Bilek shed some much-needed light on the situation in a
tour-de-force article published in First
Things. As it turns out, the transgender movement did
not come out of nowhere. In fact, this juggernaut has been bankrolled by the
heir to a massive medical device fortune and helped along by veterans of
notorious liberal billionaire George Soros's Open Society Foundations. Rich
LGBT activists allied to turn a state blue and collaborated with the U.N. to
foist transgenderism on countries across the world.
Bilek
noted that people who identify as LGBT have long been the underdogs in a
majority heterosexual culture. Yet the LGBT movement today "looks nothing
like that band of persecuted outcasts... Its advocates stand at the top of
media, academia, the professions, and, most important, Big Business and Big
Philanthropy."
She
drew attention to Jon Stryker, grandson of Homer Stryker, the orthopedic
surgeon who founded the Stryker Corporation. That corporation sold $13.6 billion in
surgical supplies and software in 2018. Jon, the heir to the fortune, is gay.
He created the Arcus Foundation to serve the LGBT community. Between 2007 and
2010 alone, Arcus gave more than $58.4 million to
pro-LGBT programs and causes. Stryker himself has given more than $30 million
to Arcus in that three-year period, through his stock in Stryker Medical
Corporation.
Jon's
sister Ronda Stryker is married to William Johnston, chairman of the wealth
management firm Greenleaf Trust,
where Jon Stryker served as a founding board member. Ronda is also the vice-chair of
Spelman College, which received a $2 million Arcus
grant for a queer studies program. Johnston and his wife have given Spelman $30
million overall, the largest gift from living donors in its 137-year history.
Ronda is also a trustee of Kalamazoo College, which received a $23 million Arcus
social justice leadership grant in 2012, and a member of the Harvard Medical
School Board of Fellows.
Pat
Stryker, another sister of Jon's has worked closely with gay megadonor Tim
Gill. In 1999, Gill sold his stakes in his computer software company Quark and
went to work running the LGBT group the Gill Foundation in Colorado. Along with
Pat Stryker and two other wealthy philanthropists, the four launched a strategy to
turn Colorado from red to blue. It has enjoyed stunning success. They
poured half a billion dollars into
small LGBT groups.
Tim
Gill's most notorious statement — that he would "punish the wicked," referring to social
conservatives like Jack Phillips who refuse to lend their artistic talents to
celebrate same-sex weddings — dates to the 2015 GLSEN Respect Awards. He introduced Jon
Stryker, saying that he and Jon have "plotted, schemed, hiked, and skied
together," while "punishing the wicked and rewarding the good."
In her
expose, Bilek drew attention to Stryker's efforts to push transgender ideology
— dating long before 2015. The Big Pharma heir donated millions to small and
large pro-transgender groups. He sent hundreds of thousands to ILGA, an
LGBT organization for equality in Europe and Central Asia, and Transgender Europe, an
organization in Europe and Asia that has funded smaller organizations in
specific countries.
In
2008, Arcus founded the Arcus Operating Foundation to organize
conferences, leadership programs, and research. At one meeting that year in
Bellagio, Italy, twenty-nine international leaders committed to global
philanthropy to support LGBT issues. Michael O'Flaherty, one of the rapporteurs
for the 2006 Yogyakarta Principles on
the Application of International Human Rights Law in Relation to Sexual
Orientation and Gender Identity, attended the event with Stryker. The
Yogyakarta Principles planted the seeds "to bring in and attach gender-identity ideology to our legal structures,"
Bilek explained.
O'Flaherty
has been on the United Nations Human Rights Committee since 2004. United
Nations member countries formed the LGBTI Core Group to
push LGBT issues at the U.N. Group members include Arcus-funded organizations
like Outright Action International and
the U.N. Human Rights Commission. Core Group member countries include Albania,
Australia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, El Salvador, France,
Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Montenegro, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Spain,
the United Kingdom, the United States, Uruguay, and the European Union, as well
as the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Also
at the Bellagio meeting, Arcus created MAP, the LGBT Movement
Advancement Project, to track advocacy and funding promoting transgender
ideology in culture.
Transgender
initiatives press into political activism, law, religious liberty, education,
civil rights, and many spheres of influence. Bilek listed the Arcus-supported
organizations pushing transgender activism: Victory Institute,
the Center for American Progress,
the ACLU, the Transgender Law Center, Trans Justice Funding Project, OutRight Action International, Human Rights Watch, GATE, Parliamentarians for Global Action (PGA), The Council for Global Equality, the
U.N., Amnesty International, and GLSEN.
"The
Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS), in
partnership with Advocates for Youth, Answer, GLSEN, the Human Rights Campaign
(HRC) Foundation, and Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), has
initiated a campaign using a rights-based framework to inform approaches
in reshaping cultural narratives of sexuality and reproductive health,"
Bilek added. "Sixty-one additional organizations have
signed a letter supporting an overhaul of current curriculums."
In
2013, the Arcus Foundation named as director of its international human
rights program "Adrian Coman, a
veteran of George Soros’s Open Society Foundations (a driver of transgender ideology that
has begun initiatives to normalize transgender children)."
Two years later, "Arcus worked closely with and funded NoVo
Foundation programs for transgenderism. NoVo
was founded by Peter Buffett, son of billionaire Warren Buffett."
These
programs push transgender ideology by backing faith organizations, cultural
associations, police department training, and educational programs at all
levels — grade schools, middle schools, high schools, universities, and medical
institutions. Arcus funds guide the American Psychological Association (the
leading psychological organization in the U.S.) to develop guidelines
enshrining transgender identity and undermining any therapy that might resolve
unwanted gender dysphoria.
As
Bilek wrote, "Psychologists are 'encouraged' by those monies to modify
their understanding of gender, broadening the range of biological reality to
include abstract, medical identities."
This
web of powerful donors helps explain how the transgender movement seemingly
captured the commanding heights of American culture overnight. For instance,
while endocrinologists (doctors who specialize in hormone glands) like Dr.
Michael Laidlaw have warned that transgender "treatments" like
so-called puberty-blockers and opposite-sex hormones actually introduce a disease into the bodies of
healthy children, the medical establishment has rushed to embrace these
"treatments" as "best practices."
Tragically,
the medical establishment arguably benefits from the transgender movement, as
transgender ideology creates a demand for expensive hormone
"treatments" and surgeries. This may create a perverse cycle
entrenching dangerous standards in transgender medicine. While donors like
Stryker may have begun this process with the best of intentions, it has
arguably become something of an industrial complex, rushing people through
experimental "treatments" when they really need therapy to help them
accept their biological sex.
While
it is good that Americans have become more understanding of LGBT people in
recent decades, this rush to embrace transgenderism has been horrifying — and
not just to conservatives. Many liberal radical feminists have spoken out
against it as well, even in the face of threats to their safety.
Jennifer
Bilek deserves immense credit for drawing attention to the muscle of LGBT
philanthropy, and conservatives should join with feminists in mustering their
charity to counter this dangerous force.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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