Is it too much to expect charities to stick to the day job?

[Summer2023hasarrived]

OXFAM 1942 for famine relief. Fast forward to Oxfam today who have sent me an email saying they are campainging for injustice to LGBTQ?+ABCDEFG

• being " other sexual identities such as two-spirit, pansexual, gender fluid, and more" who apparently are more at risk of poverty, unemployment, homelessness, sexual assault and violence.....

I mean seriously. After the Oxfam campaign which basically smeared J K Rowling and other women and also contained racist caricatures on it's video it really needs to just stick to the day job and raise money for say famine? I mean there are enough starving people in the world without raising money for the Them/they/ as well. Is every charity/workforce/business jumping on the gender bandwagon nowadays?

PS the email mentioned LGBTQIA+ not the ABCDEFG bit - although it can feel like that.

A lot of charities are more focused on using you as a recruiting agent. Like it was a massive Ponzi scheme.

Then all this extramural stuff about the pronoun people. I just give ad hoc donations now apart from a local housing charity.

There main website states "Today, we are working in about 70 countries, with thousands of partners, allies, and communities to save and protect lives in emergencies, help people rebuild their livelihoods and campaign for genuine, lasting change, keeping women's rights at the heart of everything we do."

But they don't do they? Do charities get so big that they lose sight of what they originally set up to do.

Separate question I know but millions paid to people at the top rather than a simple structure with an aim to eradicate say famine/make sure people have enough food.

I've started to only support local charities or charities with a specific purpose eg raising funds for CF or Ukraine or Cancer now

Same here. It all feels a bit like they have moved from the original idea and have a bunch of people at the top sat around saying what about the them/those people (they are victims so money for that) or the X Y Z cause and they seem to have lost their way a bit.

"keeping women's rights at the heart of everything we do."
Hmm, I wonder what their definition of 'woman' is.

Charity shops seem to be the ones promoting pride this year. BHF constantly have a video playing loudly about how we need to educate ourselves to provide help to all genders. But the others do tend to be a bit more supportive of the rainbow rather the alphabet soup.

They conflate gender and sex so often it's all a bit blurred from them

"Join the fight for gender justiceGender inequality is when a person is discriminated against because of their sex or gender. Women, non-binary and trans people are confronted by discrimination and inequality. They face violence, abuse and unequal treatment at home, at work,in their wider communities –and are denied opportunities to learn, to earn and to lead.
Women form the majority of those living in poverty. Governments and social institutions increasingly treat women and LGBTQIA+ people unfairly and in a biased way. They have fewer resources, less power and less influence compared to men, and can experience further inequality because of their class, ethnicity and age, as well as religious and other fundamentalism.
Being treated equally and enjoying the same rights no matter your sex or gender is a fundamental human right.
Gender inequality is one of the oldest and most pervasive forms of inequality. For centuries it has caused discrimination and exclusion of women, non-binary and trans people from social, political,and economic life. It has also blocked women from leadership roles and has led to increasing gender-based violence.The Covid-19 pandemic has made this situation worse. Structural inequality has increased as well. Specifically, governments and social institutions increasingly treat women and LGBTQIA+ people unfairly and in a biased way. Intersecting inequality has worsened too. This means, on top of being mistreated because of your gender, you are also discriminated against because of your ethnicity, sexual orientation, race, disability, income, and occupation, etc. As a result, we now have even wider gender and racial gaps.
This is unacceptable and is putting a lot of people at serious risk every day."

Are women in Africa discriminated by due to their chosen gender or because they were born women? It's taking women from very poor countries and mixing in the gender TQ?+ argument into it.

They really are pushing it. I didn't realise that non binary people had been discriminated for 'hundreds of years'.....

Oxfams main mission is to prevent poverty.

It is well known that LGBT etc people face higher rates of poverty than straight people.

https://www.irp.wisc.edu/resource/the-complexity-of-lgbt-poverty-in-the-united-states/ (one study, as an example).

This is literally their day job.

@Flickersy that's in the US. The UK government have commissioned a study which concluded:

"The review finds the evidence base for an effective assessment of inequality and relative disadvantage by sexual orientation and gender identity is deficient and has major gaps. To a large extent this stems from a shortage of robust, representative data, as well as a failure of research to disaggregate disadvantage into single LGB&T groups. In particular, the report identifies a dearth of evidence on inequality by gender identity, and finds evidence on inequality between LGB&T groups to be lacking."

Source: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/539682/160719_REPORT_LGBT_evidence_review_NIESR_FINALPDF.pdf"

So no, in the UK, charities should be focusing on groups who are shown to actually be experiencing poverty not people who might by way of the logical fallacy of false syllogism.

Charities are activists for increasing tax and regulation. They should stop getting tax relief.

Well Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for wearing men’s clothes.

Seriously, there is a problem in Africa with both women’s rights and trans rights. There is a problem in the UK with threatened reversal of trans legally being treated as new sex, with new birth certificates potentially being reversed.

Separately, Charities are lobby groups for increased Govt and should not have tax relief.

Do charities get so big that they lose sight of what they originally set up to do

Some can do, yes; it's why I focus entirely on local ones, where it's at least possible to see where the money's going

Unfortunately it's also too easy for the major players to get hijacked by whatever the latest fad happens to be, and the numbers involved can enable poorer influences to be hidden, so personally I prefer activities and results to be more visible

Joan of Arc was hanged as a witch. Oxfam was set up to fight food poverty , Famine , hence the name. I doubt gay or trans people suffer malnutrition at a higher rate than heterosexuals.

Whether people should be able to Self ID into another sex is hardly the area charities like Oxfam or Action Aid should be spending time , effort and money on.

I agree

I think it's important that they separate the categories out. Which ones are discriminated against the most. Are some of the alphabet hiding behind other minority groups?

I was told that the + included MAPs which are adults attracted to children. If MAP's are included in the huge array of what the LGBTQ?+ then I think many would have a problem

No one is Oxfam is paid millions, that’s just fucking ridiculous. Their CEO salary will be easy to work out from their
publicly available published accounts in the charity commission, in which charities have to report all salaries over £60k.

What you’ve said doesn’t make any sense

In fact they’ve gone one better

This what the children's charity I worked for turned into, deliberately.
The reason being that they felt that they could have a greater impact lobbying rather than doing direct work.
But they couldn't fundraise off lobbying so they advertised a great deal on the increasingly small amount of direct work that they did.
The lobbyists at the center were professional charity lobbyists and little to no idea about child protection.
The organization has been eaten from the inside out by this as the odd child protection scandal shows.
I donate to smaller charities and fume at the wasted expertise that was thrown away. ( I left and moved overseas so it isn't that I suffer from sour grapes)

Some charities ( I’ll give them the benefit if the doubt and say not all) have to think of different angles to push. If they cure what they set out to cure then all their employees , some of them very highly paid executives , would all be out of work and what would they do then? They could found another charity …….

Supporting local charities isnt going to find a cure for cancer though.

No and I'm not against people who work for charities being paid a decent wage ( unsurprisingly having worked for one)

I do think that " The charity sector executives" are an issue though. They aren't good enough to survive the private sector and they don't understand the importance of the individual charity that they are working for in any given year.
When they are allowed to run charities unchecked the expertise in that charity seems to be devalued.

Hopefully cancer focused charities remain focused on their key issues, the child protection charity I worked for certainly didn't.

someone their overseas workers can rape and abuse I think