For the first time in a decade, the seemingly invincible transgender movement is on the run. In the United States, the Trump administration is purging gender ideology from government institutions and issuing a string of executive orders targeting everything from sex change surgeries for minors to LGBT indoctrination in schools. Europe’s medical institutions—in Norway, Finland, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and France—are pushing back against “gender affirming care” for minors or banning it entirely. Populists in Canada, the Netherlands, and Germany have caught the mood and are increasingly unequivocal in their condemnations of aspects of gender ideology. Leaders in Hungary and Poland, of course, were ahead of the curve.
To ensure that recent victories and the frequently unstable positions of politicians bending to public opinion are permanent, it is essential to understand the key sources of the transgender movement’s power.
One of those sources, surprisingly, has been consistently ignored not only by mainstream journalists—who have been selling the fiction that the transgender industry is a grassroots powerhouse rather than establishment astroturf—but also missed by most opponents of gender ideology: Donor cash. Jennifer Bilek, an investigative journalist who has been tirelessly following the money for years, stands out as one of the few reporters who provides a unique context for the rise of gender ideology. Any understanding of this “movement” is, in my view, incomplete without reference to her work.
Much of her investigative research is detailed in a bombshell book published in 2024, Transsexual Transgender Transhuman: Dispatches from The 11th Hour. At this key moment in the fight against gender ideology, Jennifer Bilek detailed her discoveries for europeanconservative.com.
During the first few weeks of his administration, Donald Trump has launched a full-scale attack on LGBT ideology. Your journalism has revealed the extent to which the transgender industry has been bankrolled by incredibly wealthy donors who have poured huge amounts of cash into this industry. Who are these donors, and what kind of financial clout do they wield?
In my reporting, I have focused on a handful of billionaires, bankrolling the institutionalization of gender ideology.
Tim Gill, a gay man living in Colorado, and Jon Stryker, a gay man living in Michigan, feature prominently in my work. In 1994, Tim Gill, the founder of Quark, Inc., a computer software corporation, sold his company and used the money to create the Gill Foundation, the largest LGBTQI+ NGO in America. Gill is friends with Jon Stryker, who founded the second most significant LGBTQI+ NGO in 2020, leaving his position as founding board member at Greenleaf Trust, a wealth management firm.
Together, Stryker and Gill have poured over a billion dollars into LGBTQI+ rights. Jon Stryker founded the Arcus Foundation after the AIDS epidemic was quelled in America, and after gay marriage was legalized.
Simultaneously, Gill and Stryker set their sights on support for a new constituency: Transvestic fetishists, who adopted female attire and mannerisms for erotic arousal, and transsexuals who appropriated female sex characteristics with medical technology, as new sexual minorities needing human rights protections. Gender identity was added to their LGB acronym, adopting the term ‘transgender’ for a fetish of adult men.
The Pritzker family is one of the richest families in America and features very prominently in the funding and institutionalization of gender ideology. Jennifer (James) Pritzker, once a family man and a decorated member of the armed forces, now claims to be a woman. He has made gender ideology a high note in his philanthropic funding through his Tawani Foundation, a philanthropic organization with grants focusing on Gender and Human Sexuality. His Tawani Foundation partners with Squadron Capital, an acquisitions corporation, with a focus on medical technology, medical devices, and orthopedic implants.
He has funded WPATH (an activist organization promoting hormones and surgery as “treatment”), Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and gender clinics for children. JB Pritzker is James’ cousin and the governor of Illinois. He is co-founder of the Pritzker Group, a private investment firm that invests in digital technology and medical companies, including Clinical Innovations, which has a global presence. JB Pritzker has initiated grade school curriculums for his state which teach children they can ‘transcend their sex’ with medical technology and has recently made Illinois a sanctuary state for children claiming a different sex.
His sister Penny Pritzker served on President Obama’s Council for Jobs and Competitiveness and Economic Recovery Advisory Board. She was national co-chair of Obama for America 2012 and national finance chair of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. To say she was influential in getting President Obama elected would be an understatement. Obama made “transgenderism” a pet issue of his administration, holding a meeting at the White House (the first ever) to highlight advancements for so-called ‘transgender’ people.
The administration quietly applied the power of the executive branch to make it easier for people adopting various sex identities to alter their passports, get cross-sex treatment at Veteran’s Administration facilities, and access public school restrooms and sports programs based on gender identity. These are just a few of the ‘transgender’-specific policy shifts of Obama’s presidency.
Together with the rest of the family they have funded millions of dollars to many universities across America, and at least one in Canada, conspicuously, many with gender clinics. All these funders fund other LGBTQI+ organizations, law centers, media, and other organizations that drive the ideology into the culture.
There are many other funders, but since the network is immense, I try to get people to focus on some key philanthropists and oligarchs, so they understand what is happening. George Soros’ Open Society Foundation created a legal guide for “transgender” children. Warren and Peter Buffet have gifted millions to the LGBTQI+, and Joan and Irwin Jacobs, two longtime ACLU supporters whose estimated worth in 2017 was $1.23 billion, also have heavy investments in LGBTQI+.
Jeff Bezos, and Marc Benioff of Salesforce, have funded enormous sums of money to gender clinics, and have investments in the technological reproduction sector. David Bohnett, another wealthy gay man, funneled a whopping $32 million into creating The Bohnett Foundation, funding LGBTQI+ activism, after selling his social network company GeoCities to Yahoo. There are also many international law firms, corporations, and money management and technology firms pumping millions of dollars into, and otherwise supporting, the indoctrination of society with gender ideology.
These funders often go through anonymous funding organizations such as Tides Foundation, founded and operated by Drummond Pike, another gay man invested in LGBTQI+ rights. Large corporations, philanthropists, and organizations can send enormous sums of money to the Tides Foundation, specify the direction the funds are to go, and have the funds get to their destination anonymously. Tides Foundation creates a legal firewall and tax shelter for foundations and funds political campaigns, often using legally dubious tactics.
Soros and Gill are two major gender industry funders who generated millions of dollars to get Obama elected, and Stryker was one of the top five contributors to Obama’s campaign. Under Obama and President George W. Bush, the federal government also funded the Tides Foundation with $82.7 million, which in turn donated $47.2 million to LGBTQ issues over the last two decades.
Gender ideology took root in nearly every major Western institution almost overnight, from political parties to medical institutions, from academia to the education system. How did mere cash—even the numbers your journalism references—manage to pull this off?
It wasn’t cash alone that helped institutionalize the ideology, but stealth and strategic planning, construction of organizations that would tackle spreading the ideology through the media, like GLAAD Foundation, the world’s largest LGBTQI+ media advocacy organization, and the GLSEN Foundation, touted as an anti-bullying platform for LGBTQI+ in schools, indoctrinates school boards, students, and teachers to gender ideology.
The Victory Institute is another NGO, which finds potential political candidates who identify as LGBTQI+ and trains them for positions within the political arena to change policies that support the ideology. Both Rachel Levine and Sarah McBride, two men who are claiming womanhood, were groomed for and inserted into positions of power in the government.
There are myriad other NGOs that are working in synchronicity to drive policy changes, along with corporate and institutional adherence to gender ideology. Partnership for Global LGBTQI + Equality was launched by the Biden administration in 2019. In collaboration with the World Economic Forum, it convened a group of companies working behind the scenes to push LGBTQI+ policy in business practices. Suddenly there emerged ‘transgender’ organizations to drive body dissociation as another way to be human and de-pathologize it in law.
Out Leadership is the business networking arm of the LGBTQI+, where those in the higher echelons of the LGBTQI+ political apparatus meet with others in the business communities to cross-market gender ideology. Out Leadership boasts a marketing constituency of $4.7 trillion, which they use as a cudgel to get other businesses in line with this ideology.
So, this operation to disseminate an ideology that attempts to convince the human population that sex can be transcended is highly organized by many people in power. The real grift, though, was tying this ideology to human rights. This was the ingredient that cast a spell on most of the population. That, and adding children to the mix. Rebranding transsexualism, a fetish of adult men, to ‘transgender,’ allowed for the corporately constructed transgender child, which no one had heard of prior to 2000. In the span of two decades, they were everywhere, and they needed our support.
Over the past several years, the transgender movement has finally begun to receive more scrutiny. The medicalization of minors with gender dysphoria, the extent to which ‘transgenderism’ is a social contagion, the indoctrination of students, and other aspects have received comprehensive coverage, albeit not in the mainstream press. But the role of billionaires willing to spend enormous amounts of money that you detail has largely been ignored. Why do you think that is?
People have told me they find the conversation about money to be too complicated, that it is difficult for others to understand or believe. This is silly when you think about it. Everyone understands the language of money, as is being seen all over social media, with President Trump’s DOGE department exposures. It is probably more universal at this point than music. I think focusing on the vast sums of money going into this is more terrifying in its implications than focusing on one issue, and this is what accounts for many people’s resistance.
When you understand the breadth of the organization and money that has gone into this agenda, it can leave you with a sense of despair in attempting to stop it. I believe we cannot possibly stop what we cannot understand, or refuse to examine more thoroughly, but I grant that it can be daunting. I think the refusal to bring the money into established campaigns of resistance has slowed things down enormously and unnecessarily.
There is also the issue of wanting to be kind or at least show yourself to be kind to people who are indoctrinated with the ideology. A huge mistake was buying into the concept that there is anything coherent about the term ‘transgender,’ or the ideology that goes with it. Now, two decades on, we are still discussing ‘transgender’ people as if this is something real.
Another mistake, in my opinion, was framing this as a feminist issue. Though I have spent a good chunk of my adult life campaigning for women’s rights, framing this as a feminist issue sets people who are against gender ideology, but who don’t agree with feminist analysis, against each other. Assaulting healthy human reproduction systems and injuring people, is a crime against humanity, not just women.
There have been several significant victories against gender ideology in several Western countries: The UK’s Cass Review and resulting ban on puberty blockers for minors, the Trump administration’s executive orders, and a rejection of so-called “gender-affirming care” by several other European countries, for example. How, in your view, will the funders of the transgender industry attempt to navigate these new challenges, and what are opponents of gender ideology missing in their strategies?
From my perspective, there is nothing those driving this ideology have not thought of in terms of setbacks, so though I am thrilled with the executive orders Trump has signed against this ideology, I am extremely cautious about calling this the end of the madness. The attack on children’s healthy reproductive systems was obviously insane and was bound to be rolled back eventually. However, what has not been rolled back at all are these macabre surgeries and experiments on the healthy reproductive systems of people over 18 years, and the idea that this is healthcare.
The nonsense of ‘gender dysphoria’ has not been rolled back, and the idea of a ‘transgender’ person is more solidified than ever. The concept of a ‘transgender’ person normalized within the culture, our institutions—and more dangerously, the market—has already proved to be a huge success, and quite possibly was the goal all along. The men with this fetish of deconstructing womanhood for their erotic pleasure, are now walking the halls of power, miming womanhood, and speaking not only for women, but as women. A very dangerous precedent has been set with the development of ‘reasonable transsexuals,’ which seem to be on the rise if you follow this issue on social media. The ‘reasonable transsexuals’ in positions of power are there to change policy.
The one hundred top-earning international law firms all have LGBTQI+ platforms of support for this ideology and they are already preparing for battle against Trump’s executive orders. They knew this was coming.
How can politicians and activists fight the influence of these donors to ensure that long-lasting, consequential victories against the transgender industry can be achieved in the years ahead?
When you have an ideology that denies reality forced on the public, into all our institutions, the law, and social spaces by the most powerful, monied people in the world, with obvious and detailed organization, this is not a social contagion. It is social engineering. To keep insisting it is a social contagion, leaves it floating around in space, doing its damage by osmosis, and removed from the organized power that is generating it. Politicians and activists must confront power, and why this is happening.
I think we have been offered a small window of opportunity with Trump’s election, because financial corruption at the highest levels of government and society are being exposed. It forces people to stop and think in terms of business instead of fighting with each other over who started what in terms of ideology. Money and business are, unfortunately, the universal language. If we can see what is happening, we have half a chance of resisting it. If we don’t take this opportunity to push hard against this ideology, I shudder to think where we will be in a decade from now.
