Women Are Human shares with our readers the following excerpt from Dr Heather Brunskell-Evans’s newly released book Transgender Body Politics, published by Spinifex Press. More of her work can be seen at heather-brunskell-evans.co.uk, including her paper “The Medico-Legal ‘Making’ of ‘The Transgender Child’,” published by Oxford University Press in the Medical Law Review in Autumn 2019. With Dr Michele Moore, Brunskell-Evans has edited two collections: Transgender Children and Young People: Born in Your Own Body (2018) and Inventing Transgender Children and Young People (2019).

By Dr Heather Brunskell-Evans

Most people think the ‘transgender’ or ‘gender identity’ movements are about accommodating people with a debilitating condition. But they are actually an industry that creates medical identities out of sex, while simultaneously mounting active campaigns to deconstruct sexual dimorphism within the law.

Transgenderism is a multi-billion dollar industry, disguised as a civil rights movement, or what the journalist Jennifer Bilek describes as “big business dressed up in civil rights clothes” (Bilek, 2018a). It constructs medical identities that harm children and steals funding and focus from women’s authentic civil rights (Bilek, 2020).

To follow the money, Bilek takes us to the root of the ‘gender identity’ industry, where she found that exceedingly rich, white men with enormous cultural influence are funding the transgender lobby and various transgender organisations: Jennifer Pritzker, Jon Stryker, and George Soros (Bilek, 2018).

Michael Biggs describes ‘The Gender Industrial Complex’ as receiving lucrative sponsorship from pharmaceutical companies and medical providers (Biggs, 2018b). He, like Bilek (2018), points out that three American billionaires have bankrolled the transgender movement on a global scale. The Open Society Foundations (OSF), funded by George Soros, has spent three million dollars between 2011 and 2013 on trans issues to promote the transgender movement which made it the top funder, followed by Stryker’s Arcus Foundation and Pritzker’s TAWANI Foundation (Open Society Foundations 2020; Bilek, 2018; Biggs, 2018b).

To illustrate the difference that money can make, Biggs asks us to consider the commemoration of the victims of violence. The OSF gave US$500,000 to Transgender Europe in the past two years. Transgender Europe also received one million dollars from the Arcus Foundation from 2010 to 2017. The organisation’s projects include the Transgender Day of Remembrance, which is underpinned by a comprehensive database of victims throughout the world, Trans Murder Monitoring. This database counted 325 victims of violence from October 2016 to September 2017 (Trans Respect Rather Than Transphobia Worldwide, 2017). The great majority of these occurred in Central and South America. There were only three in Western Europe, and thankfully none in the United Kingdom.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the Transgender Day of Remembrance was widely observed in Britain in November 2017. In many universities, for example, candles were lit for each of the victims, the transgender flag was raised, speakers were invited, and services held (Biggs, 2018b).

I can testify to this student commemoration of the Transgender Day of Remembrance with an example from my own experience. I had been invited to the University of Bristol by the University Free Speech Society in November 2018 to give a lecture on the curtailment of free speech in the academy, giving the example of the incipient erasure in universities of any other than an affirmative view of ‘gender identity.’ Trans activist students interrupted my talk, taking over the lecture theatre and attempted to read out all the names of those murdered before eventually being removed by the security guards who had been specifically commissioned to protect me that evening (Ross, 2017).

As Biggs points out, while no transgender person was murdered in the United Kingdom in 2017, 138 women were killed by men, including murders where a man was the principal suspect (Smith, 2017). These data were compiled by Karen Ingala Smith, who receives no funding for her work. She started recording women’s deaths in 2009, under the rubric of Counting Dead Women. This was developed into the Femicide Census―in partnership with Women’s Aid―with minimal funding and pro bono support from two legal firms (Femicide Census, 2016). Despite her diligent research over many years, this has left barely a trace in British universities. More than a hundred women are murdered each year in the United Kingdom at the hands of males, but no day has been set aside to commemorate their deaths.

Transgender murders are exceedingly rare – eight in the past decade (Trans Crime UK, 2017) – and yet they have an institutionalized day of remembrance. Even if we consider the homicide rate rather than the number of homicides, Nicola Williams demonstrates that transgender people are no more likely to become victims than are women (Fair Play for Women, 2017a).

The prominence of transgender victims, compared to the virtual invisibility of female victims, is partly explained by the amount of resources devoted to compiling evidence and promoting commemoration. Thus, as Biggs demonstrates, funding from large American charities like OSF – along with the Arcus and TAWANI Foundations – shapes the political climate in Britain and around the world (Biggs, 2018b).

Transgenderism is a capitalist enterprise driven by the pharmaceutical industry (Bilek, 2018). Over the past decade, there has been an explosion in transgender medical infrastructure across the United States and world to ‘treat’ transgender people. The massive medical and technological infrastructure expansion for a tiny (but growing) fraction of the population, along with the money being funneled into the transgender project by those heavily invested in the medical and technology industries, means that doctors are being trained in all manner of surgeries related to transgender individuals, including phalloplasty, vaginoplasty, facial feminisation surgery, urethral procedures, and more.

Manufacturing puberty blockers for children and young people is another growing and extremely lucrative market. With the medical infrastructure being built, doctors being trained for various surgeries, clinics opening at speed, and the media celebrating it, transgenderism is poised for further growth (Bilek, 2018).

In the UK, lobby organisations have become businesses that receive a substantial percentage of their funding from the UK Government or other statutory bodies (see Stonewall, 2020b). Michael Biggs tells us that Gendered Intelligence started as a company with a grant of £50,000 from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). Now most of its revenue comes from selling training to the public sector, including universities, boosted by monies from BBC Children in Need (Biggs, 2018c).

Stephanie Davies-Arai (2019) informs us that Stonewall is the most powerful and influential LGBT organisation in the UK, with an income of £8.7 million in 2018, including a £233,673 grant from the Department for Education. Gary Powell, Conservative Party Councillor and erstwhile gay rights activist, says that although Stonewall began as a worthy institution fighting for homosexual rights, “its cash registers have become frenetic” (Powell, 2020). In 2018, its most senior employee earned a six-figure salary, and it received £610,000 in grant income from Government sources, with a fee income of £2,731,000 that included payments from local authorities for its workplace Diversity Champions and Secondary Schools Champions programmes (Powell, 2020).

In 2015, Stonewall and similar western charities “bolted trans rights on to their LGB campaigns, even though gender identity has nothing to do with sexual orientation.” With legal equality for LGB people successfully achieved in the west, Powell argues these charities needed new victims and causes to maintain their cash flow. He points out that “‘Gender identity’ ideology was ideal: between 2014 and 2018, Stonewall’s turnover increased by 61 per cent” (Powell, 2020).

In summary, the money invested by rich men, governments, technology, and pharmaceutical corporations effectively normalises transgenderism as a lifestyle choice. The micro-politics and the macro-politics of ‘identity’ interact to form one of the most misogynistic expressions of patriarchy in recent times under the guise of equality, diversity, and inclusion.

Transgenderism is positioned as a social justice movement, a medical condition, and as a minority rights issue needing protection from our political structures. It intersects at every juncture of the global marketplace and is so indelibly tied to the capitalist marketplace and celebrity culture that it is used to sell fashion, makeup, hormones, surgery, films, TV series, mental health treatments, and women’s underwear, while concurrently being invested in by billionaire philanthropists, the technology and pharmaceutical industries, major corporations, and banks (Bilek, 2018a).

Excerpted from Transgender Body Politics, by Heather Brunskell-Evans, pp. 143-148. Copyright © 2020 by Heather Brunskell-Evans. Reprinted by permission of Spinifex Press.