I first came across investigative journalist Jennifer Bilek’s work in 2020, when her essay “The Billionaires Behind the LGBT Movement” was published in First Things. It was a stunning piece—there are several journalists committed to exposing the transgender ‘movement’ (or industry, as Bilek calls it), but nobody has peeled away the façade of civil rights, pink-and-blue flags, and ‘trans kids’ like Bilek. If we had a mainstream press truly committed to uncovering and reporting the truth about the forces driving our culture today, her work would be cited by them across the board.
Bilek is an artist, activist, and investigative journalist based out of New York City, and her work has been published in Tablet Magazine, The Federalist, The Post Millennial, and elsewhere. Bilek spent her life on the Left, but now she says that she is in the “political wilderness,” reporting on the biggest cultural story of our day while progressives ignore it or cover it up. Bilek also runs the Substack Jennifer’s Newsletter and the blog The 11th Hour, where she explains her focus:
I write at the intersection of humanity, technology, and runaway capitalism. At this intersection stands transgenderism, what I believe is a glamorous ad campaign generated by elites, invested in tech and pharma, to normalize the changing of human biology.
Bilek is doing something that journalists used to do instinctively: following the money. What she has uncovered is a bombshell that reveals the extent to which the transgender phenomenon has been created by super-wealthy LGBT donors who have a dark and sinister agenda. Her journalism supplies the missing pieces needed to complete the picture of how and why the transgender movement so swiftly achieved cultural dominance. Bilek kindly agreed to an interview in which she shared what she has uncovered thus far.
You’ve done groundbreaking reporting on the extent to which billionaires have been quietly backing the LGBT movement behind the scenes. To what extent are the cultural shifts we’ve seen in the past few years astroturfed by big donors?
The cultural shifts we see today regarding gender identity are largely influenced by huge capital inflows from governments, philanthropists, corporations, and investment management and accounting firms like Blackrock and Ernst & Young. While some believe that the ideology originated in universities, funding is directed to these institutions to promote the idea of synthetic sex identities as progressive, which students then carry into the world.
To comprehend the motivations of governments, philanthropists, and big business in this ideology, we must examine its implications. Gender ideology deconstructs human reproductive sex legally, linguistically, socially, and is also attacking mostly young people’s reproductive organs by sterilizing them. It is marketing disassociation from sexed reality presented as progressive, which is especially confusing to young people in using their naturally rebellious youthfulness as a corporate trap.
Both the money and the ideology come out of the medical-tech sector, which is itself being integrated into culture through a philanthropic structure that has been attached to the LGBT civil rights political apparatus. The Arcus Foundation, one of the largest LGBT NGOs, plays a central role in this regard, not only by providing extensive funding to a plethora of institutions but also by introducing a tracking apparatus called MAP and encouraging wealthy philanthropists to invest in the LGBT constituency. Jon Stryker, the founder of Arcus, has a background in banking and is the heir to the corporate fortune that is Stryker Medical. Stryker Medical, with its ventures into the facial feminization surgery market, exemplifies the interconnection between the LGBT political apparatus and the medical-tech industry.
The Pritzker family in Chicago is one of the richest families in America. Though their fortune evolved out of the Hyatt Hotel industry, their predominant investments now are in the medical-tech sector. Their massive philanthropic efforts have made them some of the biggest drivers/funders of the gender industry. Tim Gill of the Gill Foundation—the second largest LGBT NGO in America and connected to Jon Stryker and his family—contributes significantly as well, originally coming from the tech sector and now involved in a home AI platform business. The tech giants—Google, Intel, Microsoft, Facebook, Salesforce, Hewlett Packard, and Amazon—leverage their financial power both to fund this industry in body dissociation and also to browbeat entire states to accept the ideology by threatening the withdrawal of their capital. They did this in 2016, when they signed an amicus brief against North Carolina. After that the state insisted on bathroom privacy for boys and girls in schools.
The rapid proliferation of this ideology is attributed to tremendous financial pressure and mainstream media censorship of critics, which aligns with the media’s ownership by the medical-tech industry. The intertwining of conglomerates like Hearst, Conde’ Nast, and Disney with prominent pharma platforms contributes to the pervasive influence of the techno-medical complex in America.
The tech and medical industries thrive, like all industries, in creating and compartmentalizing new products, a trend seen in the LGBT civil rights movement, which was originally a grassroots movement that became corporatized during the AIDS crisis in the ’80s. American transsexualism, rooted in the medical establishment, dates to the 1950s, with the medical assault on reproductive organs. The LGBT community transformed into a profitable investment and marketing constituency after the AIDS crisis. The addition of transsexualism, rebranded as ‘transgender’ for marketing purposes, introduces a new perspective on sexual identities, further normalizing the detachment of humanity from its foundational roots in sexual reproduction.
How has big money impacted the trajectory and influence of the transgender movement?
I prefer to characterize this phenomenon as an industry rather than a movement. The focus lies on the creation of synthetic simulacrums of human reproductive characteristics, marketed for profit and human engineering. Contrary to a genuine human rights movement for the marginalized, synthetic sex characteristics are a corporate illusion. Those adopting them in an attempt to disown reality are not marginalized, nor are they a subcategory of our species’ reproductive sex.
The term ‘transgender’ doesn’t mean anything in regards to people. It lacks a clear, universally accepted definition, encompassing various and often contradictory meanings. It attempts to cover a broad spectrum, from medical assaults impacting healthy reproductive organs to non-medical expressions of feelings about sex-role stereotypes, sometimes involving surgery and drugs and sometimes not. Is it a sexual fetish or a form of resistance against culturally assigned behavioral norms based on one’s sex? The concept of a cohesive community termed ‘transgender’ is equally as elusive; instead, ‘transgenderism’ emerges as a conglomerate driven by corporate pressures, grooming both adults and, more significantly, children into industrial body disassociation—a thriving business.
Fueled by additional capital from investors and philanthropists, an industry dedicated to dissociation from the sexed body has experienced explosive growth. Individuals who may not fully comprehend the nature of this industry are profiting from it. Notable figures like Whoopi Goldberg are associated with modeling agencies catering to those attempting to disown their sex. Artists capture images of individuals with synthetic sex identities; TV programs feature characters attempting to disassociate socially and medically from their sexed reality; and law firms profit from lawsuits involving those wanting to disown their sex or protect the legal category of sex.
The propaganda generated by this revenue stream has deeply entrenched the ideology of ‘transitioning sex’ into the market. A simple Google search for “transgender magazine covers for 2020” reveals an abundance of magazines conveying a consistent message. It’s noteworthy that these publications are part of conglomerates with medical-tech platforms and investments, enjoying support from asset management firms like BlackRock.
