Sue Donym
This article was originally published on Medium in August 2018. In January 2021, nearly three years after being published, it was removed from Medium as ‘hate speech’. As this is effectively a republishing, I’ve taken the liberty of editing some sections for clarity and updating the original text.
Let me set the stage for you. It is the recent Anchorage municipal elections. It is cold, it is chilly, it’s Anchorage, and there are municipal propositions: one of them is about local cops being able to issue parking tickets. There’s also Proposition 1 (Prop 1), which attracted $900,000 in spending, dwarfing every other election by a country mile.
What’s Proposition 1?
Prop 1 was put forward by an organization called ‘Alaska Family Action’, and the aim of Prop 1 was to make bathrooms, once again, sex-segregated instead of being based on self-declared gender identity. Anchorage’s bathrooms had been segregated by gender identity since 2015. The left-leaning media reacted in cacophony against this new ‘bathroom bill’, and hundreds of thousands of dollars from reasonable people flowed into Anchorage to defeat a municipal ordinance proposal that would harm trans people. Common sense and reason won, and the liberal project continued, with the rights of transgender people to use the bathroom, re-affirmed.
Except those ‘reasonable people’ don’t exist. Not in any great number.
See, after spending a very long weekend combing through campaign filings from both Alaska Family Action and ‘Fairness for All — Vote No on Prop 1’, it became clear that the vast amounts of money spent on the election by Fairness For All didn’t come from normal, ordinary Americans. Even though transgender people are supposedly a persecuted minority that need civil rights, Vote No on Prop 1 out spent and out raised Alaska Family Action by around $710,000. In total, Vote No had $828,000 at its disposal. Its campaign filings reveal that a large majority of this money came from a set of lobbying groups almost from central casting: The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), Freedom for All Americans (FFAA), Planned Parenthood (PP), and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Large, federally based organizations poured money and staff into a small municipal election, all to fight ‘bathroom bills’. They flew in representatives from the National Center of Transgender Equality to help with ‘story telling’, and The Transgender Law Center provided consulting services. They made sure volunteers were well fed — ACLU makes many filings throughout for providing catering at events for volunteers. FFAA paid for a slick website, and a subscription to campaigning software Blue State Digital. A local Anchorage ad agency was hired and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce campaign material. Vote No spent as much on campaigning collateral as Alaska Family Action did on their whole campaign, and even more than that on TV ad buys. While there were many small donors, the clear majority of the money came from large organizations, such as Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign, among others who also provided the Vote No access to their mailing lists and campaign databases, which is also visible in their campaign filings.
Despite outspending their opponent 8 to 1, carpeting Anchorage in television ads, mailers, and phone calls, and the support of federal level political organizations, the result was only 5% in Vote No’s favor. This is indicative of that Vote No bought an election — no one outspent that heavily should even dream of getting within a 5% margin yet Vote Yes got within striking distance having spent an eighth of the money. This came as a surprise to me. I have seen a lot of elections and votes. This was one of the oddest. Because one of the catch-cries of the trans movement is that they are the most ignored and the most marginalized group in America, yet can outspend its electoral opponents by orders of magnitude. That doesn’t sound like the most marginalized group in America. I wouldn’t think the most marginalized group in America would have a well-funded lobby group behind them. One capable of outspending the Christian Right on an 8–1 basis. Something doesn’t add up.
I mean, all this money attention doesn’t make sense if transgender people are the most oppressed minority in all America. Look at the North Carolina ‘bathroom bill’, H.B 2. It was international news. How many other state bills become international news? We watched on TV as celebrities said they would no longer come to the state and sports teams protested. Bruce Springsteen said he wouldn’t play there. Every boycott by some famous liberal was greeted with aplomb. There was a national shaming of the state, on the massive stage that is the mainstream news cycle. Left unmentioned by that same mainstream news were the changes to North Carolina employment laws also in the same bill that negatively impacted working-class Americans, or the fact some of the outcry was defining sex under North Carolina law as
“the physical condition of being male or female, which is stated on a person’s birth certificate”. Bruce Springsteen didn’t refuse to play in the state based on employment law changes. When the ‘bathroom bill’ sections were removed in 2017, the employment sections did not change. There was a collective shaking of heads, a throwing up of hands, a celebration of transgenderism’s victory and the bill disappeared from the national conversation. Class analysis dies in the face of identity politics.
Transgenderism, as a movement, has experienced a rapid rise compared to any other civil rights movement. Sex change surgery only went beyond experiments or the unfulfilled whims of Roman Emperors until the 1950s, a decade that brought us the term ‘transsexualism’ courtesy of those that treated Christine Jorgensen, who was still unable to marry men because their legal sex was still listed as male despite their sex reassignment surgery. In that time, it has gone from a freakshow curiosity and the surgical treatment for the homosexuals (who were popularly believed, into the 1960s to be a sort of ‘third sex’, and often still are outside of a Western context), to America’s most pressing civil rights movement, with hundreds of millions of dollars being poured into the issue across the fifty states.
By contrast, other civil rights movements have not enjoyed such a rapid rise. Women, oppressed since the creation of private property, have endured patriarchy for thousands of years. It took a hundred years for the United States to abolish slavery, and another hundred to abolish segregation. It seems it will take another hundred for people to abolish what Colin Kaepernick kneels over. Homosexuals have been increasingly marginalized in Western society since late antiquity and after the Stonewall riots and the collective awakening in the 60s and 70s, have waged a 50-year long fight for equal rights — one that has not yet been won, as homosexuals have no federal civil rights protections. Yet transgenderism, a term itself coined barely twenty years ago, and included in ‘LGBT’ since only the mid-90s has money to burn and victories seem to come easily .
Does this add up to you? I can’t remember everyone boycotting Missouri over Ferguson. All I can think of is possibly the revocation of Super Bowl XXVII in Arizona over Martin Luther King Day. Hell, no celebrity is refusing to play states that are attempting to criminalize abortion. How are transgender people the most oppressed minority in America, again? Why the sudden focus on this issue? I decided to find out, and doing that in modern America requires following the money.
The trans movement, separate to the gay and lesbian movement, has built itself an entire political infrastructure over the past ten years, mostly through cannibalizing gay and lesbian organizations and altering their original purpose, leaving lesbian and gay people behind in the process at best, or deriding them as outdated, outmoded, and needing to ‘get over their genital fetish’ at worst. ‘LGB’ has morphed into ‘LGBTQI+’. One Canadian school district managed to morph the ‘LGB’ acronym into ‘LGBTQITTIPASFDASFAARP’ (or something similar) which led to a healthy round of internet mockery. The transgender movement is not marginalized voices finally being heard; it is a case of large amounts of money being heard - because these changes weren’t possible without an enormous influx of cold hard cash. According to Funders for LGBTQ Issues (FFLI), funding specifically earmarked for transgender causes began rapidly increasing in 2012; by 2016 it outstripped the ring-fenced funding for gays, lesbians and bisexuals combined (a total of $13.2m), at a cool $22 million total in funding, specifically earmarked for transgender causes only. That’s over 10% of the total LGBTQI funding tracked by Funders in 2016, which is $202m total.
By 2017, the latest data from Funders For LGBTQ Issues(FFLI) shows that that trend continues, as we can see in their
2017 Tracking Report. The amount of money in total given internationally to LGBTQ issues increased to $183 million, excluding donations and grants for the Pulse nightclub shooting. The top donors are still organizations like Arcus Foundation, Ford Foundation, Gilead Sciences, the Gill Foundation, and the Open Society Foundations. Gay men received 6% of ring-fenced funding specifically for them, and lesbians 3%. Transgender funding increased from $22.4 million dollars to $32 million dollars, a huge increase — almost a fifth of all LGBTQ funding is specifically ring-fenced for transgender issues, which is highly disproportionate to their actual numbers in the LGBT community. Domestically, the numbers look worse for lesbians — in terms of domestic funding from these organizations, lesbian funding decreased from $3 million to $2.3 million, receiving only 2% of ring-fenced funding, while gay men had an increase from $5.9 million to $8.2 million, from 4% to 6% of ring-fenced funding. But both are dwarfed by transgender funding, which increased from $16 million to $22.5 million spent domestically.
That the money comes from a wide range of philanthropists: names such as George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, Arcus (run by gay Stryker Corp heir Jon Stryker) and Tides come as little surprise to anyone following money on the center left of politics. But other names stand out: Jennifer Pritzker, (formerly Col. James Pritzker) who came out as a trans woman in 2013, donates millions of dollars through their Tawani Foundation. Pritzker outside of transgender causes, is a far-right Republican and supported Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections. This has come as specifically earmarked funding for gays and lesbians has declined in the same period — philanthropic funding for lesbians was a not-so-cool $4 million in 2016, despite being a far larger population than transgender people.
The other problem is much of this funding is simply a donation to organizations who campaign for a ‘broad’ variety of issues. 39% of funding goes towards ‘Advocacy’— given the huge focus of LGBTQI+ organizations on transgender issues, they are likely getting a more disproportionate slice of the pie than the figures show. As funding specifically for gay men and lesbian women has stagnated or declined in the same period, transgender funding has increased year on year, from $3m in 2010 to $22m in 2016 to $32 million in 2017.
But some gay and lesbian critics contend that there has been too much focus on the T. John Aravosis wrote a
Salon article in 2007 entitled ‘
How Did The T get in LGBT?’, criticizing the decision to refuse a version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that didn’t include gender identity by LGBTQ+ lobbying groups. That version of the bill in 2007 had the chance to pass in a Democratic majority Hill — it died in the Senate because of the gender identity provisions. As of 2021, no similar bill has been passed and millions of gay and lesbian Americans do not have federal civil rights protections. Aravosis is confused: he does not know why the transgendered have to be included the gay and lesbian movement as he believes that gender identity and sexuality are two very different things.
If we are to look at the state of other things today, this confusion over the ‘T’ has turned into a clearly articulated critique, a critique whose articulators are often derided as ‘radical exclusionary gays’, or more popularly, ‘Trans-Exclusionary-Radical Feminists’. This argument has turned violent.
In 2018, a young lesbian in a gay bar was removed and assaulted for being a ‘TERF’. Sometimes, the application of that deadly-four-letter acronym, which often serves as a scarlet letter in the ‘queer community’, the relabeled version of ‘gays and lesbians’, can simply come from a lesbian stating she is not into penises. The harsh way these critics are treated — and turned on for having an opinion that often amounts to ‘lesbians don’t like penis’ is ridiculous. This insane level of criticism is not some asshole in a gay bar or on trans activists on Twitter either, but is often instead published by large media outlets, supported by political and civil society infrastructure of the left. That reaction to criticism, combined with the large amounts of money flowing to the transgender cause, is a symptom of a political disease.
That political disease is astroturf. The transgender movement promotes becoming your authentic self, whilst being inauthentic itself. Let me explain this to you.
THAT’S ONE HELL OF A LOBBY GROUP
To figure this out, we’ll look at a few lobby groups.
For our first example, let’s look at the organization
Global Action For Trans Equality (GATE).
You might not have heard of it, but it is the prototypical example of trans astroturf. I picked it out of a Funders For LGBTQI Issues list. It is a small organization, yet despite it’s size, it somehow made a presentation to the UN. Odd. It also didn’t think to conceal its donors in its IRS 990 forms. So, I combed through them. Their Wikipedia page tells me it’s executive director is Mauro Cabral, a trans and intersex activist, who was a signatory to the Yogyakarta Principles. Sounds totally organic and not artificial. Its mission is, supposedly,
“GATE’s mission is to work internationally on gender identity, gender expression, and bodily issues by defending human rights, making available critical knowledge, and supporting political organizing worldwide. GATE envisions a world free of human rights violations based on gender identity, gender expression and bodily diversity, and transformed by the critical inclusion of those historically marginalized on those grounds. We will contribute to building powerful, expert and well-resourced political movements, able to have meaningful participation in global processes and to transform the landscape of socioeconomic justice worldwide.”
The Wikipedia page also tells me that the organization was founded in 2009. The Wikipedia citations for both that, and the mission statement lead to dead links. A quick perusal of the GATE IRS 990 forms reveals a focus around ‘depathologization’, which it describes as:
“Coordinating an international initiative focused on the ICD-11 revision and reform, supporting processes of legal depathologization and advocating for the identification of pathologization as a ground for human rights violations”
What this translates to, in other words, is a goal of considering gender dysphoria no longer a mental illness — and for considering gender dysphoria a mental illness as a ground for violating a trans person’s human rights. This could mean that with no diagnosis - gender dysphoria is no longer medical condition, remember, doctors cannot be sued for malpractice for prescribing transition. Do you see an issue with that? Other focuses of GATE include “Movement building”, which is described in its 2015 IRS 990 form.
“MOVEMENT BUILDING — ADVOCATING FOR TRANS, GENDER DIVERSE AND INTERSEX ACCESS TO AVAILABLE FUNDING AND FOR THE CREATION OF NEW FUNDING SOURCES” [sic]
The goal: making funding available to trans people in order to achieve these goals. Where does that money come from? Who are the funding sources? How will they be created? The 2015 form also mentions aiding in international HIV response. But crucially, I have saved the best for last. GATE betrays its actual astroturf nature with this admission in its 2015 IRS 990.
“Global Action for Trans Equality INC does not have program service activity to report on for 2015 due to receipt of its first round of funding into the organization mid-December”.
The organization was not founded in 2009 like the Wikipedia page would like to tell us. The earliest publications on its website date to 2013. It received its first round of funding in 2015, and the organization was set up that year, according to its tax returns. Where did that money come from? Its 2016 IRS 990 illuminates us. Unlike many organizations I investigated, GATE did not bother hiding who its primary donors are on its publicly available IRS forms. On its website(which is literally transactivists.org), it proudly states it is sponsored by two large philanthropic organizations: The Open Society Foundations, and The Arcus Foundation.
Open Society donated $523,000 to GATE, and Arcus $130,000. This was followed up by a grant of $150,000 by the Fidelity Charitable Trust, which often handles anonymous charitable donations for people of largesse. It then received a $103,000 grant from the US State Department during the Obama administration.
Does this sound like an innocuous, grassroots organization to you — or is there an astroturf rat abroad the GATE ship? I smell the astroturf rat. It stinks, so I’m surprised you can’t smell it. GATE offers a raft of publications for the keen reader, including its ‘Joint Trans Language Submission to UN Independent Expert SOGI.’ (SOGI: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity). An astroturf group, presenting evidence to the UN, purporting itself to be representative of the wider community, is not ‘activism’. But it’s done in the name of the LGBTQI+ community. Those endless articles and research? Another marker of astroturf. By the way — you will see the names ‘Open Society’ and ‘Arcus’ repeatedly throughout the entire article. Why? Because GATE isn’t the only organization they fund. Their tentacles are everywhere.
Another example is the
National Center For Transgender Equality, with its widely-cited US Transgender Survey. But the NCTE isn’t exactly a grassroots organization either. Founded by Mara Keisling, a trans woman, in 2003, Keisling’s biography on the website specifically states it was founded to provide a
“professional activist presence in Washington for transgender people” and was started with the aid of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Keisling herself became an activist after transitioning in her early 40s, after working in social marketing and public opinion research, and is the child of Bill Keisling, who is a former chief of staff to former Pennsylvania governor William Scranton. Keisling’s biography also credits Keisling with leading a coalition of ‘400 LGBT rights organizations’, called ‘United ENDA’, which prominent transgender activist Dana Beyer,
interviewed in the Washington Blade, credited with making sure
“there have been with few exceptions […] no instances of any gay activism or legislation that did not include trans people.” Why is a bad thing for gay and lesbian people to organize without trans people? They’re two distinct demographics.The biography then goes on to outline NCTE’s more recent work: the US Transgender Survey, which is forming the basis of transgender policy around the world, and then lists her media appearances. It is notable that NCTE recently face allegations of racism, outlined
in Jezebel, stating that the organization had a ‘culture of racism’ and fought the unionization of employees. Class analysis always wilts when faced with identity politics, it seems.
Let’s drill further into the NCTE, shall we? Looking through the NCTE’s 2016 tax return, we find that it received a total of $1,066,962 in contributions and grants, and a similar number for the 2015 financial year. It paid $897k of that in salaries, and $335k in ‘other expenses’ leaving the organization $175k in debt. It gave the IRS the following mission statement
“THE NATIONAL CENTER FOR TRANSGENDER EQUALITY IS A NATIONAL SOCIAL JUSTICE ORGANIZATION DEVOTED TO ENDING DISCRIMINATION AND VIOLENCE AGAINST TRANSGENDER PEOPLE THROUGH EDUCATION AND ADVOCACY ON NATIONAL ISSUES OF IMPORTANCE TO TRANSGENDER PEOPLE.” [sic]
It describes its survey to the IRS with the following:
“SURVEY: THE U.S. TRANS SURVEY IS THE NEW NAME OF THE LARGEST SURVEY EVER DEVOTED TO THE LIVES AND EXPERIENCES OF TRANSGENDER PEOPLE. THE USTS IS A SURVEY FOR ALL TRANSGENDER IDENTITIES, INCLUDING TRANSGENDER, GENDERQUEER, AND NON-BINARY PEOPLE, AND WILL BE THE LARGEST AND MOST DIVERSE TRANSGENDER SAMPLE TO DATE. THE USTS IS OUR COMMUNITY’S SURVEY: THE USTS DATA SET AND RESULTS WILL BE AVAILABLE TO COMMUNITY ADVOCATES, ORGANIZATIONS, AND RESEARCHERS FOR YEARS TO COME.” [sic]
The IRS form lets us know how much that survey cost — $318,154. It also let us know that nearly a third of the NCTE funding went on two executive director salaries, those salaries being of Keisling and Lisa Motett, both of whom are paid six-figure salaries. No contributors are listed on their tax returns for financial years dating back to 2014, but it received $711,000 from ‘foundations’ in financial year 2015. Why cover up donors who are supposedly donating to a human rights cause?
It takes looking at the
lauded NCTE survey, the National Transgender Discrimination Survey(NTDS) which is downloadable from their website, to put the puzzle pieces together over where their funding comes from. While the largest share of funding came from an ‘anonymous donor’, the rest are standard names: The Arcus Foundation, the Gill Foundation, the Human Rights Campaign, and the Tides Foundation among others. The survey has become one of the most cited trans studies in the world. It is regurgitated to politicians by professional activists, forms the basis for governmental and health policy, has its stats posted in Twitter arguments, and is regarded as sacrosanct among the trans community.
Except the survey, despite its six figure costs, contains numerous methodological flaws. It is a survey where the sample was built on self-selection. The sample isn’t random. Amusingly, the survey, which was run online, had as its first question ‘have you already taken this survey before?’, and warned that taking the survey repeatedly would not increase the number of entries into a prize draw (you can view a screenshot
here). That meant the survey could have been taken over and over again by the same person. It was also meant to provide US-based statistics, but had no restrictions on of which country the survey could be taken from. That’s not a valid dataset. That’s not even going to pass an undergraduate statistics course. Supposedly NCTE cleaned the dataset, but I am not sure how you can clean a survey with such flaws. It should only serve as an indicator for further research at best, not a bible or a reason to bring about legislative change. It brings into question every statistic in the survey. Other criticisms were that it tried l
eading participants into a particular response.
It is an issue because the survey has gone on to shape public policy and be cited by numerous other organizations. The survey, which is incredibly flawed, has been cited numerous times by other associated transgender lobby organizations — the Human Rights Campaign, the Transgender Law Center, the National LGBTQ Task Force, a litany of other lobby groups and the Democratic Party, all groups that use its statistics as crucial evidence for their argument that transgender people are the most oppressed minority in America. Despite its methodological flaws, it was published, and proudly sponsored and cited by a number of corporate and philanthropic foundations. This was also used by groups funded by these organizations as electioneering material, and for lobbying purposes — to
advance an agenda. But if the survey is flawed as it is, why not try and find better statistics? And why use bad statistics to advance an agenda? And this is not the only example of bad transgender statistics. After all this is not the only statistical error that is commonly cited. For example, you may read that trans women are more likely be assaulted in a men’s prison. or example, you may read that trans women are more likely be assaulted in a men’s prison. This comes from a
2007 California study, which used a convenience sample of transgender women in California’s prison system, and then compared that convenience sample to a sample of the general prison population, which is to put it mildly, is um, not something you should do.
There are plenty of astroturf groups to tell you about, so I’ll tell you about some more.
The National Centre for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) was one of the biggest receivers of philanthropic funding in 2016, receiving $2.6m. Displayed prominently on the NCLR website is its legal director, who now identifies as a man (Shannon Minter), and a pledge towards transgender service members. In fact, outside of the name, I saw nothing specifically lesbian when I loaded up the webpage. I even tried using ‘Ctrl-F’ which showed me one total mention of ‘lesbian’ on the entire homepage that wasn’t part of the name of the organization. According to its 2016 IRS 990, it received $4.6m in grants. It spent most of that on salaries and wages. The NCLR annual report has no donors listed, leaving their identities unknown. Given that the supposed ‘National Center For Lesbian Rights’ mentions lesbians once on its entire page, and not at all in its subsections, but has three different sections for transgender legal cases, the phrase ‘lesbian erasure’ and the word ‘subverted’ come to mind. Perhaps that is needlessly suspicious?
Maybe not. The NCLR organized its first ever boycott in the history of the organization, of the Michigan Womyn’s Festival (or Michfest), a musical festival which made clear it was for people with female anatomy only and excluded transgender women. After criticism from a range of lesbian sources,
it backed down. But Michfest bowed to the pressure, and unable to continue, now no longer exists.
NCLR is not the only national gay and lesbian organization that seems to have forgotten the ‘gay and lesbian’ part.
GLAAD, which has been criticized for lacking members born and socialized as female,
no longer stands for ‘Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation’. It’s just ‘GLAAD’ now, an acronym that stands for absolutely nothing, which is not good imagery. This removal of meaning is to be more inclusive. If we look through
GLAAD’s Annual Report, which opens to a photo of its president and CEO, Sarah Kate Ellis, staring directly into the camera like a blonde, well-coiffed Ted Bundy (it’s a really bad photo), it thanks its foundation funders, which include the Tawani Foundation, Arcus, and a collection of Silicon Valley companies, such as Google, Salesforce, and Comcast. These are all the same or similar groups and corporates funding every other LGBTQI+ organization — like our astroturf friends GATE and NCTE. That’s a far cry from the anti-AIDS campaigners of 1985 that scrabbled around for change under the sofa while going to their third funeral in a week.
The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force is
now the National LGBTQ Task Force. The National LGBTQ Task Force has been criticized for ignoring lesbian issues by lesbian commentators, including conferences with only few or no lesbian events — like the NCLR.
I decided to verify this and looked at their
2018 Creating Change conference schedule. Out of hundreds of events, there are a total of four events for lesbian women, which consist of a session on age, ‘femmes, studs and stems’ (terms used by the black lesbian community), the lesbian caucus, and I quote directly, ‘Sexversations, Pussy Politics and Top/Bottom/Switch Culture’. The conference has four lesbian events (perhaps lesbians only have four concerns, including pussy politics?), but twenty on the topic of ‘sexual freedom’, including both a beginners and an advanced course on ‘Polyamory/Nonmonogamy’, a course on ‘Sex Positive Trans Sex’, the essential ‘Kink 101: Let’s Get Visual’, and ‘
A place for polyamorous/non-monogamous communities in the LGBTIQA movement” (which doesn’t seem to discriminate against the heterosexual polygamist going by the description), nine sessions for ‘Transgender Justice’ alone, seven for bisexuals, and eleven for self-care (including on how to deal with Donald Trump being president), and ‘activism for introverts’.
The Task Force didn’t give its donors away in its tax returns, but its annual report tells me it received donations in the hundreds of thousands from the Arcus Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Evelyn and Walter Hass Jr. Fund, followed by Horizons, Marguerite Casey, the NoVo Foundation, as well as from two anonymous foundations. It tells us those anonymous donors donated more than $100,000 — by how much is an exercise left to the reader. The annual report also thanks its corporate partners, which include the liquor company Bacardi, pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences (which manufactures PrEP drug, Truvada), a gaggle of banks, cable channels or providers as well as Hilton Hotels. With such large donations, that would clearly influence the Task Force’s policy direction — so why don’t we know about who they are? If the Task Force wants to represent a community, it needs to be honest with that community.
But it’s not the only organization that changed its name and direction almost overnight.
The Gay-Straight Alliance is now the ‘Gender and Sexuality Alliance’. To be more inclusive. Even the Washington D.C police department, bastion of liberalism,
even changed the ‘Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit’ to the ‘Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Liaison Unit’.
Or take famous volunteer organizations like PFLAG, which used to stand for Parents and Friends of Lesbians And Gays, but is now just ‘PFLAG’ to be ‘inclusive’. It’s 2018
financial statement claims 400 chapters and 200,000 members and supporters (that’s 500 members per chapter). But it’s 2015 report said the same thing, while saying it had added new chapters. In 2014, PFLAG reported 385 chapters across the country.
In 2009, it reported approximately 500 ‘affiliates’. This is the same in their 2010 financial statements, and 2011, 2012 and as far back as 2007. The statement about affiliates disappears in their 2013 financial statement, and instead PFLAG now has ‘400 chapters’.
Are affiliates the same as chapters? Did PFLAG lose members overnight, and are they masking a slow decline? To be honest, trying to get numbers on how many chapters there are is actually quite difficult. I am told there are affiliates, chapters, all sorts. But the numbers seem to have declined over the past ten years, as PFLAG has striven to become more ‘inclusive’.
Everyone is becoming more inclusive — but of who? Are gay and lesbian lobby groups now the lobbying version of The Blob? And as they become The Blob, are they hollowing out internally too, husks of what they were?
This isn’t just a problem in US organizations. Stonewall, the largest LGBT organization in the UK, has the same problem. A view through of it’s
annual report reveals similar problems. Stonewall’s income was £8.7 million (US$10.8 million), yet they can only train 118 ‘police, prosecutors, and policy makers’ with their ‘Access For Justice Program’, and they only hosted 243 activists at their international events and programs in four countries in ‘East and South East Europe’. Only 250 young people attended their Pride events, and they supported only ‘40 more’ to become ‘young campaigners and host Youth Pride events’. These events were held in Birmingham, UK Black Pride, Bristol, ‘Trans Pride Brighton’, Wales, and Manchester. This is supposed to ‘foster camaraderie and common purpose’ and create a ‘UK wide network of skilled activists’.
Which leads to another problem - many of these longstanding organizations have seen a complete loss of membership or grassroots engagement over the past ten years. Ta
Lesbians are often the LGBT canary in the coal mine. There are now books being published by lesbians such as
The Disappearing L that discuss lesbian erasure. Lesbian erasure, like major LGBT organizations having four lesbian events out of hundreds at multi-day conferences. This is something that isn’t unique to the Task Force’s conference, and it is becoming an epidemic across Pride festivals and organizations.
Protests have taken place internationally, such as in London. Queer and transgender critics have hit back at accusations of lesbian erasure with name-calling, marking critics with the dreaded four-letter ‘TERF’ word. In
The TransAdvocate an
opinion writer characterized discussion of lesbian erasure as such:
“What this is REALLY about, of course, is hatred: hatred for trans women, hatred for sex workers, hatred for third wave feminists, and hatred for sex-positive and sex-radical feminists. We have, it seems, stolen their thunder, and they are very, very bitter about it.
I could list more examples of dismissing lesbian concerns as ‘transphobia’. Outside of lesbian erasure, many gay men are feeling pushed out of their movements, and the name changes don’t help that perception of being erased out of a movement that used to be their own. A recent proposed change to the classic rainbow flag features a black and brown triangle, with the trans flag in the middle, placed on top of the rainbow. It looks like an invading force establishing a beachhead.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
Money is constantly flowing down the donation pipe for trans issues:
a glowing Inside Philanthropy article on a
Funders For LGBTQ Issues (FFLI) initiative details the creation of
Grantmakers United For Trans Communities or GUTC. GUTC’s goals are supposedly capacity building, increasing the number of funds available for transgender people. The article actually contradicts FFLI’s own studies on the issue, saying that transgender funding forms a ‘small part’ of overall funding, despite the fact it outstripped the gay, lesbian, and bisexual combined in 2016, and has done so since 2014. The philanthropic gears are beginning to turn on this issue.
Outside of GUTC, a $20m endowment was announced in 2015 by the Arcus Foundation specifically for transgender issues. A glowing
Buzzfeed article on the endowment tells us that the Arcus Foundation is giving $15m towards the endowment, and NoVo Foundation which ‘focuses on girls and women’ will give $1m. “A coalition of other foundations will give the remaining $4m”, the article reports. We are told by an Arcus representative, Jason McGill, the vice-president of Arcus’ social justice programs, that “Transgender leaders and their movement have been dramatically underfunded.” This is despite clear evidence that compared to other LGBT groups, they are not.
Suspiciously, the article chooses to cherry-pick its statistics. Despite the 2014 and 2015 reports from Funders For LGBTQ Issues being available, which show dramatic increases in transgender funding, Buzzfeed cites the reports that date from 2011 through to 2013. Cherrypicked statistics are very much a repeating pattern when it comes to transgenderism. The article tells us that transgender people “have been used as scapegoats” by “conservatives” who oppose “LGBT non-discrimination laws” and bring up the dreaded “men in women’s bathrooms”. It tells us that this is happening while
“homicides of transgender women in the US have doubled in the past 12 months”.
Doubled? What did it double from? I decided to verify this, and GLAAD (remember an acronym now devoid of meaning) gave me the answers. So, how many homicides of American transgender people were there in 2016? I am sure you are waiting with bated breath for some kind of titanic, earth shattering number that will have you click ‘exit tab’, and bitch about my bullshit article on Twitter. Okay, here it is:
27.
That’s not a typo. It really is 27. The number of total murders in the US in 2016? 17,250, and disproportionately trending black and male. 27 is 0.15% of murders in the US. In terms of figures, the Williams Foundation did a survey and estimated the number of trans people at 0.6% of the US population. The US population is estimated at 325 million at time of writing, which results in a figure of 1.95 million trans people across America.
We’ll take 1.95 million Americans. If we figure how many trans people are victims of murder a year as a percentage, that figure is
0.0013%. Per capita,that’s a ratio of 1.3 trans people murdered per 100,000. The murder rate of women in the US is triple that, and of men, quadruple. Even with an extremely conservative estimate of 0.1% of the US population (or 325,000 trans people), we have a murder rate of 8.3 per 100,000. The murder rate of Chicago is twice that conservative figure at 16.02 people murdered per 100,000. In terms of gross numbers — that’s 11,535 murders of male Americans, and 3,292 murders of female Americans in 2017. 27 is small potatoes. That is not a murder epidemic — in fact it’s a murder rate per capita lower than Canada. It certainly doesn’t mean that there’s an ‘epidemic of transphobic violence’. That’s not something to campaign about — you’ve got it better than literally everyone else. Even if we use the Human Rights Campaign estimate of 750,000 trans people, which is half the 0.6% number, we get a murder rate of 2.7 per 100,000. That’s not a high murder rate. That’s lower than every other demographic in the US.
There are more bad statistics though. That same article tells us that
“globally 1,700 transgender murders have been reported, in the past seven years, according to Arcus data” [emphasis mine].
Your eyes immediately drift to the ‘1,700’ figure, and don’t see the 7 years, do they? That’s why I bolded it. If we take the 0.6% estimate of trans people in the US and apply it globally to a population of 7 billion people, we get 42 million people. 1,700 divided by seven years gives us a grand total of 242 murders a year. That amounts to 0.003 murders per capita of trans people, worldwide, every year. That’s definitely not an epidemic. In fact, that’s a global murder rate lower than every other category on earth. The murder rate per capita of unicycle-riding clowns is probably higher. To #StopTransMurders would be to eliminate the homicide of an entire group of people, which no nation has been able to accomplish. Ever.
Maybe you think 42 million trans people on this earth is too big a number. So, we’ll make the figure 5 million people. A murder rate of 242 per year of a group of 5 million people is still a per capita rate of 4.84 — roughly similar to the US overall murder rate of 4.7. And that’s with a hugely conservative number that I literally pulled out of thin air. All these figures say the same thing —
there is no trans murder epidemic — and philanthropic groups and their funded organizations supporting trans rights and sympathetic media have to perform statistical sleight of hand to even make such a proposal look even the slightest bit true. For comparison, the highest murder rate in the world belongs to Honduras, which had 90.4 homicides per 100,000 in 2017. That’s a violent epidemic. To add — the majority of those 27 killed? Black prostitutes. No middle-aged white trans women were killed at all (
though some did commit murders) yet they are the ones bleating about #StopTransMurders and working in activist organizations. And the sex-work and transgender lobby does not seem to care about those vulnerable prostitutes, beyond using their names and deaths as a political prop.
If you’re wondering about the gay and lesbian side of things, rather than the transgender epidemic that doesn’t exist, yet is talked about so heavily, the FBI reports in its latest Hate Crimes report state that 16.7% of hate crimes were motivated by sexual orientation. 1.7% were motivated by gender-identity bias. Of the 1,255 victims targeted by sexual orientation, 62.7% were anti-gay male, 21.6% were LGBT (mixed group), and 11.7% targeted towards lesbians. There were 131 victims of ‘gender identity-bias’, 20 of whom were simply ‘gender-non-conforming’. In terms of hate crimes (which is criminal offenses carried out motivated by bias, not necessarily violent) gay men are disproportionately over-represented among the LGBT. That’s an actual disproportionate epidemic of violence — rather than the trans murder epidemic that doesn’t exist.
When was the last time you saw
that on BuzzFeed?
But this is not the only ‘transgender murder epidemic’ article on Buzzfeed. The author of the article on the $20m endowment, Dominic Holden,
wrote a feature entitled
Why Are Black Transgender Women Getting Killed In Detroit that uses the same sleight of hand, saying that the murder rate has ‘ doubled’ yet doesn’t give you a number. I looked into the source it cited, and the murder rate doubled from 12 murders to 24 murders. That figure comes from ‘The National Coalition Of Anti-Violence Programs’, counting between Transgender Days of Remembrance. That’s an even lower figure than the GLAAD data! And it is not just Buzzfeed. LGBT news sites, the left-leaning media, the list goes on — a quick Google search leads to more repeating of the meme ‘trans murder rate is high’. In fact, I googled ‘trans murder epidemic’ and got 535,000 results from Wikipedia, to the Human Rights Campaign, to ‘America’s transgender murder epidemic: why is nothing being done?’ from a UK website called ‘
Blasting News’. It even appears as the beginning of the National LGBTQ Task Force’s 2016 annual report, highlighting its #StopTransMurders campaign. But the facts and figures say there isn’t an epidemic. Rather the opposite — trans people have the world’s best murder statistics, as a group. The ‘epidemic’ is easily debunked using LGBTQI+ groups’
own statistics. The trans murder rate is a false meme worthy of inclusion in a late 90’s chain email promising you the truth about Bill Clinton and Whitewater. It’s literal fake news. Why do this? Why frighten a small minority more, and why use it as a brickbat to obscure violence against gays and lesbians?
Where does the money come from, the money that keeps up a healthy supply of this fake news?
RICH MAN’S WORLD
As I’ve gone through organizations, I’ve pointed out who provides them with funding. The primary funders of the transgender movement are large philanthropic foundations. Political lobbying often comes from them. One issue with identifying donors is that they are often not listed on IRS forms given to the public, nor identified in annual reports. Occasionally you will find a donor celebrated in a press release. I have tried to be as true and accurate as possible in my reporting despite these obstacles. Another issue is that a lot of money comes through the Tides Foundation, which has been accused of being ‘charity money laundering’.
Effectively, what Tides Foundation does is receive funding from corporations, people of largesse, or philanthropic foundations, and then donates that funding for those groups or individuals, but in the name of The Tides Foundation. This effectively anonymizes those donations. If you see ‘Tides Foundation’ on a charity return, that money could have come from the Aliens of Epsilon Beta — and you’d have no idea. When you can’t find out who is funding your supposed community organizations, that should be a cause for concern. With that said, let’s dive into the names we can know.
archive.ph
archive.ph
