Helen discusses billionaire funding in her chapter
Behind the Scenes - Transactivism's long march through the institutions.
This is an excerpt.
A movement that focuses on the levers of power rather than building grassroots support is one in which a few wealthy people can have considerable sway. They have shaped the global agenda by funding briefing documents, campaign groups, research and legal actions; endowing university chairs; and influencing health-care protocols. One is an American transwoman billionaire, Jennifer (James) Pritzker, a retired soldier and one of the heirs to a vast family fortune. Pritzker’s personal foundation, Tawani, makes grants to universities, the ACLU, GLAAD, HRC and smaller activist groups. To cite a couple of examples, in 2016 it gave the University of Victoria $2 million to endow a chair of trans-gender studies, and throughout the ‘bathroom wars’ it supported Equality Illinois Education Project, which is linked to a group campaigning for gender self-ID in the state.
Two other billionaires, neither transgender, also spend lavishly on transactivism. One is Jon Stryker, another heir to a fortune. His foundation, Arcus, supports LGBT campaign group ILGA, and Transgender Europe, which channels funding to national self-ID campaigns. Arcus funds the LGBT Movement Advancement Project, which tracks gender-identity advocacy in dozens of countries (and partners with President Biden’s personal foundation on the Advancing Acceptance Initiative, which promotes early childhood transition). In 2015 Arcus announced that it would give $15 million in the next five years to American trans-rights groups. Among the recipients were the ACLU, the Transgender Law Center, the Trans Justice Funding Project and the Freedom Center for Social Justice, which campaigned against North Carolina’s bathroom law. In 2019, it gave $2 million to found a queer-studies programme at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, and it funds Athlete Ally, the group that dropped Martina Navratilova as an ambassador when she opposed trans inclusion in female sports. In March 2021 he gave a further $15m to the ACLU, to be spent in part on pressing for legal change.
The third billionaire funder of transactivism is George Soros, via his Open Society Foundations (OSF), a network of independently managed philanthropic institutions. OSF has made multi-million-dollar donations to both the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, and in 2010 gave $100 million to the HRC, the largest donation the campaign group had ever received. OSF pays for the production of model laws and ‘best-practice’ documents on trans-related issues. To highlight just one example, in 2014 it supported ‘License to be Yourself’, a guide to campaigning for national gender self-ID laws. This argued, among other things, that children of any age should be able to change their legal sex at will. This pattern of funding helps explain the gap between trans campaign groups’ rhetoric and the policies they pursue. The talk is about the world’s downtrodden: poor, homeless trans people forced into survival sex work, lacking health care and harassed by the police. But the money comes in large part from the world’s most powerful people: rich, white American males. The two groups’ needs and desires barely overlap at all.