US Politics & Feminist Resistance to Gender Identity Policy-Part 2
US Politics & Feminist Resistance to Gender Identity Policy-Part 2
Origin of the conflict between women's rights and the demands of trans-identified males - and the growth of the transgender lobby.
This is Part 2 of a multi-part series examining the US political environment and feminists’ attempts to resist gender identity policy and law. I began in Part 1 by responding to Julie Bindel’s assertion that we are not effective because Americans do not have a “left” and therefore do not understand structural and class analysis.
In Part 2, I describe the first of two relevant political factions that have developed over the last several decades - the trans lobby. In Part 3, I will discuss the second faction, the Council for National Policy (CNP), a network of think tanks, policy advocacy organizations and media to advance corporate interests and theocratic goals that developed in response to the social movements of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s - and is now poised to implement Project 2025. Part 4 will analyze the emergence of organized feminist resistance to gender identity policy and the direction it took.
The conflict between radical feminists and trans-identified males, then called transsexuals, emerged during the second wave of feminism. An early incident occurred in 1973, at the West Coast Lesbian Conference in Los Angeles. Controversy broke out over a scheduled performance by trans folk singer Beth Elliot, with radical feminist Robin Morgan announcing:
I will not call a male “she”; thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the title “woman”; one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister.
Another pivotal moment occurred in 1976 when it emerged that trans-identified male Sandy Stone was working for the women’s music label Olivia Records as a sound engineer. The label’s lesbian founders created the company in 1973 to provide opportunities for female performers and technicians in a male-controlled industry. An open letter to Olivia records, published in Sister in June of 1977, (the year Rachel Dolezal was born), signed by a number of feminist activists, including Michfest founder Lisa Vogel, asserted:
We do not believe that a man without a penis is a woman any more than we would accept a white woman with dyed skin as a Black woman. Sandy Stone grew up as a white male in this culture, with all the privileges and attitudes that that insures [sic]. It was his white male privilege that gave him access to the recording studio and the opportunity to gain engineering practice in the first place.
(Stone was eventually inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2024, where he is described as “fighting against exclusionary gender essentialism.”)
For the next several decades, the conflict largely played out at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, or Michfest. The event was co-founded in 1976 by Lisa Vogel1, her sister Kristie, and friend Mary Kindig, and held annually on privately owned woodland in Michigan during the summer. The event featured music, stand up comedy, poetry readings, feminist workshops and sales of women’s arts and crafts. Women organized and ran the entire event, including setting up the stage, sound and light equipment, cooking meals, providing childcare and medical support - everything that needed to be done to accommodate between 3,000-10,000 thousand women and children during a five-day event. The goal was to create a feminist separatist lesbian-centered - though not lesbian exclusive - space, where women could experience healing and respite from male-dominated culture and commune with other women in the woods.
Vogel explains that the festival was always intended for “womyn born womyn” but that they relied on the honor system, rather than enforcing the rule by other means, in part, because they did not want to make gender nonconforming women a target of questioning or scrutiny. As more trans-identifying males began attending, tension grew, with some women opposed to including males; others claiming such men as their “sisters.” On one occasion, in 1991, a trans-identifying male was summarily ejected. “From that point on,” Vogel says, “Michigan was an organizing tool for the trans community.”
Though trans-identifying males were informed of the intent of the festival, and asked to honor it, no other effort was made to exclude them. Nevertheless, trans activists set up Camp Trans across the road where they organized demonstrations and other harassment of Michfest-goers and attracted press attention to their cause. Vogel says:
The press covered Camp Trans wildly, and I would try to respond. [The portrayal] was in a way that is straight up misogyny — by the gay press and the straight press. We cannot forget how defensive everybody is about having womyn’s space…
All kinds of things happen within the gay male community that is exclusive of trans people, that is exclusive of womyn, that is exclusive of, for example, anyone except bears. They have complete autonomy of whoever they want to include. It’s frustrating that this [exclusivity] is only held against womyn…
In 2013, trans-identified male and stand-up comic Red Durkin launched a change.org petition that garnered thousands of signatures, calling on Michfest performers to boycott the event due to the “climate of transphobia.” Their demands were that Michfest change their policy to “explicitly welcome all self-identified women;” that organizers “recognize the destructive impact that 20 years of transphobic policy” had on the trans community; issue a “formal statement acknowledging and apologizing for this injustice;” and program at least one trans-identifying male to perform at the festival. Headliners such as the Indigo Girls, Hunter Valentine, Andrea Gibson, and Lea DeLaria bowed to the pressure and declined to perform.
The following year the LGBT advocacy group Equality Michigan organized a petition calling for a boycott of Michfest to “end transgender exclusion” that garnered signatures from hundreds of individuals and dozens of organizations. Vogel later said of the many LGBT groups that signed the petition:
[N]ow that gay marriage is done, their best fundraising tool is their sharp focus on trans liberation. There’s a ton of money, there’s a tremendous amount of legislative support…
I was told off the record by more than one, ‘We can’t take our name off that petition because that will affect how we look and that endangers our funding’ – they signed up for this petition and made these type of comments so they could be on the right side of this issue. Because there’s also a very aggressive element in the trans radical community that attacks and goes for blood on anyone who doesn’t agree with their essential premise. And their essential premise is very focused on trans women and never on trans men. That very one-sided focus is also something no one wants to tease out.
In 2015, the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the LGBT Task Force withdrew their names from the petition, announcing they had decided to ”seek other ways” rather than boycott, to advocate trans inclusion. By then Vogel had decided to end the fest, with its 40th anniversary in 2015. Although she says the boycotts and petitions against the “womyn born womyn” intent were not the only reason for her decision, it is generally accepted that these pressures were a major factor.
Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, was unsympathetic:
[T]hey still refused to open their hearts to transgender women fully… They have finally become extinct, like dinosaurs. But with the dinosaurs, it wasn’t something they did to themselves.
Over the decades this drama played out, two powerful and well-financed political factions developed: a trans lobby with connections in government and virtually all feminist and LGBT institutions; and the Council for National Policy (CNP), a network of think tanks, policy advocacy organizations and media to advance corporate interests and theocratic goals - what author Anne Nelson (Shadow Network (2019) calls a “pluto-theocracy.” This essay will focus on the trans lobby. Part 3 will take up the CNP.
Transgender Lobby
Reed Erickson, a trans-identified female, is credited as the earliest wealthy philanthropist to fund LGBT issues. Born in 1917 to a German Jewish family, Erickson was the first female to earn a mechanical engineering degree from Louisiana State University in 1946. Erickson was a successful businesswoman, working both in her family’s lead smelting businesses and starting her own company, Southern Seating, which manufactured stadium bleachers. After her father’s death in 1962, Erickson inherited a major interest in the family enterprises. The following year she became a patient of Harry Benjamin and began her “transition.”
Erickson made millions through investments in oil-rich real estate and the sale of her family’s businesses. She created the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF) through which she “provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants for research, services, and educational programming on transgender issues.” Through EEF, Erickson funded many early research projects including the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic and the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA) that later became the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).
Erickson’s “funding strategies are now widely considered best practices in philanthropy.” She listened to researchers and community leaders, identified promising leaders and organizations early in their development, provided them seed money and sustained multi-year partnerships.
By the final years of Michfest, wealthy philanthropists, through their foundations, as well as governmental organizations, were distributing hundreds of millions of dollars annually for LGBT advocacy. Between 2013-2014 $424 million in philanthropic and multilateral agency (multi-government organization) funding was distributed to LGBTQI organizations around the world, 51% of which was distributed in the US and Canada. Top philanthropic funders in 2013-2014 included Arcus, Ford, Gill, and Open Society foundations, while top government and multilateral agency funders included the Netherlands, Sweden, European Union, and the United States.
Unlike the 2013-2014 Global Resources Report cited above, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Grantmaking by U.S. Foundations series of reports from 2002-2022 does not include funding by government and multilateral agencies, nor does it include “re-granting” (funds distributed to an organization that, in turn, “re-grants” the money to other organizations). However, those reports document primary foundation funding for LGBT organizations over a 20 year period, providing a useful snapshot of growth over time. Trans persons benefit from funding for LGBT as a whole, for example, for advocacy and education. However, some funding is granted specifically for trans persons and issues. Over a twenty year period, that funding increased from $373,000 in 2002 to more than $48 million in 2022. The chart below graphs the increase in funding between 2012 and 2021.
Of funding earmarked for subcategories of LGBT, such as people of color, disabled, violence survivors; it is interesting to compare percentages allocated for gays, lesbians, and trans persons. It will surprise no feminist to learn that lesbians received a smaller percentage of targeted funding, every year but one, than gays and trans persons.
Over the years, top recipients of grants have included National LGBTQ Task Force, Lambda Legal, National Center for Lesbian Rights, and Transgender Law Center. The image below displays the top 20 grantees during 2022.
Over the last ten years, at least, one-third of funding has been allocated to advocacy, which includes “governmental advocacy, community organizing, public education efforts, and/or litigation to influence policy.”
This funding does not include that raised for political action committees (PACs) or “bundling.” Victory Fund, which raised about $2 million in 2022, is the largest LGBTQ PAC. Founded in 1991, the PAC provides financial and technical support to elect LGBTQ people to political office and provide them with professional development training. Victory Fund boasts having helped elect “several hundred out LGBTQ+ candidates to Congress, state legislatures, school boards, and city councils.” Danica Roem, a beneficiary of the Victory Fund, was elected to the Virginia Senate in 2023, making Roem the second trans-identified male to hold a state senate seat.
“Bundling” is the practice of combining individual campaign contributions into a “bundle” in order to get around limits on contributions and create a large donation from a particular constituency. In 2012, “769 bundlers directed over $186 million to the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee.” Chad Griffin, former head of Human Rights Campaign, has been a major bundler for LGBTQ advocacy, raising more than $500 thousand for former President Barack Obama during his second presidential campaign.
Griffin’s primary mission was to get same-sex marriage legalized. Although Obama had repealed the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, and his administration stopped supporting the Defense of Marriage Act, he was holding out on same sex marriage, saying that his views on the issue were “evolving” and that “he believed marriage to be the sacred union of a man and a woman.”
Privately, however, he wasn’t opposed; he was instead concerned about the political fallout. In particular, his political advisers were worried that his endorsement could splinter the coalition needed to win a second term, depressing turnout among socially conservative African-Americans, Latinos and white working-class Catholics in battleground states.
His then vice-president, now current president Joe Biden, ultimately forced his hand. At a gathering of prominent gay Democrats, held in the home of two married men and their children, Griffin asked Biden to talk about marriage equality. Moved by the children, who had given the vice-president flowers and a note, Biden talked about the importance of family and indicated the time had come. Top aids and President Obama were taken by surprise. Michelle Obama reportedly saw the pre-emption as “a blessing in disguise.” She told her husband, “You don’t have to dance around this issue anymore.”
Ultimately, Obama became something of a hero to the LGBT community. In addition to repealing Don’t ask Don’t Tell, and withdrawing government support for the Defense of Marriage Act, he championed same-sex marriage and signed an executive order protecting LGBT employees working for government contractors from discrimination. Infamously - for feminists opposed to gender identity policy - Obama also issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to federally funded educational institutions directing them to allow trans-identifying persons to use the restrooms that correspond to their gender identity.
As with same-sex marriage, Biden came to support trans lobby goals through personal relationships. Sarah McBride, the first trans-identified male to be elected a state senator, has been a family friend of the Bidens for 18 years. In 2006, when he was still in high school, McBride worked on the late Beau Biden’s attorney general campaign. In 2012, while still in college, McBride “came out” as trans. Beau Biden assured McBride that he was still a “part of the Biden family.” Joe Biden asked McBride whether he was happy and gave him a hug.
In addition to millions for advocacy and lobbying efforts, millions have also been provided to medical institutions, for medical research and technology, and to universities. Trans-identified male and billionaire Jennifer Pritzker is a primary source of funding, but other major funders include the George Soros family, Warren and Peter Buffett, Tim Gill, and Martine Rothblatt. Priztker alone has:
Donated $1 million to endow the first chair in transgender studies at the University of Victoria in Canada;
Supported the University of Minnesota Foundation Transgender Oral History Project with $387,940
Granted $500,000 to Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago for its gender and sex development program;
Provided Williams Institute at UCLA Law School $275,000 for work in transgender research and judicial training.
Those are just a few Pritzker grants that are specifically earmarked for the transgender cause. Indirect benefits accrue through grants for items such as endocrinology research at Baylor University and for University of Minnesota Medical School’s Program in Human Sexuality.
Over the last several decades, transgender activists have been the beneficiaries of billionaire sponsors who have financed political lobbying, medical programs, litigation in support of policy goals, as well advocacy and education programs to promote gender identity ideology. They have effectively established the idea throughout the culture that any criticism of trans ideology or policy is “transphobia;” making objection taboo, deplatforming women’s meetings to discuss the matter justified, and violent threats against their critics permissible. Although they have positioned themselves in the public discourse as an oppressed class, they have powerful and monied backers, and so have been able to impose their agenda at women’s expense. Fortunately, that is starting to change.
Lisa Vogel’s memoir of Michfest, We Can Live Like This, will be published in August.
Excellent analysis. Ought to be shared widely!