WomenAreReal
by cristina_izagui
Next week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in two landmark cases: Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J. The plaintiffs are challenging state laws that protect women's and girls' sports by barring biological males from competing on female teams. The challengers, both transgender women, are backed by a powerhouse coalition with near-unlimited resources, led by the ACLU and private law firms, and supported by amicus briefs from the National Women’s Law Center, Lambda Legal, and others in a massive, coordinated campaign. This effort is fueled by organizations boasting nearly one billion dollars in combined annual revenues and endowments. The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation alone reports $220 million in revenue (excluding state chapters and ACLU Inc.), while the National Women’s Law Center has $41.4 million. Lambda Legal wields a $285 million "Unstoppable Future" war chest, with annual revenue of $58.5 million, enabling endless litigation to push transwomen inclusion at the expense of female athletes' fairness and safety. Per their website, Lambda Legal is litigating on behalf of K-12 transgender athletes in West Virginia and Tennessee, and authored an amicus brief on behalf of the Women’s Sports Foundation, and Athlete Ally in other challenges to transgender athlete bans. Democracy Forward, essentially a Democratic Party extension with $17.7 million in revenue, joined via an amicus for the National Women's Law Center, highlighting deep ties between Democrats and these nonprofits. Former White House chief of staff Ron Klain, who served under President Biden was a board member, and the organization spent $300,000 on NEWCO Strategies, a firm with LGBTQ+ leadership linked to Kamala Harris's campaigns and other Democratic efforts. Other key players include the Trevor Project ($71.2 million), Transgender Law Center ($15.6 million), and Human Rights Campaign ($45.9 million). Executive compensation at these organizations underscores their financial might. At the ACLU, Executive Director Anthony D. Romero earns over $1.3 million annually. Lambda Legal's CEO Kevin Jennings receives over $730,000, Chief Legal Officer Jennifer Carol Pizer $413,522, and CDO Joshua Pushkin $386,760. The Trevor Project's former CEO Amit Paley was compensated $719,423 before departing in 2022; current CEO Jaymes Black's salary is not yet publicly reported in 2024 filings. These executives and managers rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars, sustaining a machine that stokes crises, like alleged discrimination against trans women, then leverages philanthropy (and often taxpayer dollars such as Trevor Project) to defend policies undermining protections for women and girls in sports. Fueling this machine are billions from mega-donors like MacKenzie Scott (former wife of Jeff Bezos), who has poured over $200 million into LGBTQ+ causes since 2019, including $16 million to Lambda Legal, at least $10 million to the ACLU across chapters, over $2 million to the Transgender Law Center, $3 million to the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), and contributions to the Trevor Project and Human Rights Campaign as part of broader LGBTQ+ funding rounds. These unrestricted funds have supercharged their budgets, enabling relentless legal assaults on sex-based protections. These organizations have shaped the legal interpretation of “gender identity” in schools, sports, healthcare, prisons, and employment. After receiving Scott’s gifts, they dramatically expanded their litigation portfolios; they hired more attorneys, filed more lawsuits, more amicus briefs, more coordinated challenges, and ultimately generated more influence over how federal and state agencies interpret existing law such as Title IX.
These issues are not decided in the open but in secretive grantmaking meetings, donor strategy convenings, and legal offices bankrolled by obscure philanthropic capital that most Americans have never heard of. These well-funded groups consistently outspend and outmaneuver their opponents defending women's rights, including Attorneys General from states like West Virginia and Idaho, who are battling in court to uphold Title IX as a safeguard for female athletes based on biological sex, ensuring fairness and safety in women's sports. In recent years, the rapid rise of gender identity theory and the push toward transitioning youth have been rightly attributed to medical associations, academic endorsements, the role of media, and complicit policies within school districts and government authorities like Healths and Human Services and the Department of Education under Joe Biden. Yet there's another crucial pillar that often goes underappreciated: the role of nonprofit advocacy and philanthropic funding. Together, these interconnected institutions form a powerful ecosystem that has embedded these theories deeply into societal norms and institutions. Nonprofit organizations, supported by major philanthropic donors, have played a pivotal role in advancing these ideas. Groups like the ACLU and the Human Rights Campaign push for policy changes and help create a self-reinforcing cycle of influence. They advocate, litigate, and shape legal frameworks that normalize concepts such as “gender identity” and “gender-affirming care,” which in turn attracts more funding and broader institutional buy-in. Academia provides the intellectual backing, the media brings cultural acceptance, medical associations offer the supposed science, while nonprofit advocacy and philanthropy fuel the social, governmental, and legal implementation. These institutions create a robust engine that drives cultural and policy changes, and understanding this ecosystem is key to seeing the full scope of their influence. Most people in the United States probably believe that nonprofits usually pursue worthy causes such as helping people living in poverty or supporting the most vulnerable. However, the reality is more complex. Millionaires and billionaires are often complicit in promoting harmful ideas in the name of equity and social justice. While organizations like the Open Society Foundations (aka the Soros Foundation) receive significant attention from the media and many conservatives, they represent only a fraction of the story. There is a vast network of institutions with 501(c)(3) status receiving billions of dollars from our nation's wealthiest individuals and corporate foundations who have led and shaped debates in our country about many social topics. One of those issues is the idea that children can change their gender with harmful medical interventions and biological men should compete against females and share changing rooms, even when men are intact (which is the majority of transwomen, who decide to keep their penises even if they call themselves girls or women). These wealthy people have the power to eliminate these harmful practices or at least stop igniting the fire that enables armies of lawyers to draft and defend legislation in the courts. It is, of course, their right to donate their money wherever they choose. However, billionaires must start asking themselves if the money they are investing in these foundations and nonprofits is causing more harm than good.
In the end, Scott, other billionaires, and corporate donors are fueling and funding the systematic erosion and outright abolition of sex-based distinctions, to the profound detriment of girls and women everywhere. By bankrolling this agenda, they are dismantling hard-won protections for female rights in sports, locker rooms, and beyond, prioritizing radical ideology over biological reality, safety, and fairness. It's time to hold these elite funders accountable for the real-world harm their dollars inflict on women and girls.