Big Pharma, Big Tech, and Synthetic Sex Identities
(Speech given at Hillsdale College July 2022)
Hi everyone, thank you for being here, and special thanks to Douglas Jeffrey and Matt Bell for inviting me to Hillsdale College to speak.
I hope to clarify what’s happening in the name of transgenderism — why it’s happening and who’s profiting from it.
I began researching this issue because of my alarm at the censorship experienced by those trying to critique it. That was nearly a decade ago. What has emerged for me is a clear indication that we’re being manipulated and groomed to accept radical changes to human evolution engineered by those at the highest echelons of society invested in the biotech, pharmaceutical, technological, and financial industries.
First, let’s situate ourselves in time.
As a species, we’re beginning a new stage of human evolution, emerging from the information and digital age. The future will see more developments in human data collection to build greater systems of artificial intelligence and engineering, biotechnology, transhumanism, and the creation of greater virtual systems of reality or synthetic realities.
In the past decade, all our major corporations, international human rights and non-governmental organizations, global investment houses, banks, medical institutions, legal firms, governments, and educational bodies have simultaneously “discovered” that the natural world and hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution via sexual dimorphism somehow got it wrong. It’s been one big mistake. It’s being propagated that science has discovered there are hundreds of, maybe infinite, sexes, and to manifest full potential in the expression of these alternate sexes, humanity needs the intervention of the medical-industrial complex. Further, the medical-industrial complex is so generous that it will silence anyone who gets in the way of its efforts for a diversity of expression.
People, especially politicians, have become terrified to say that women are adult human females, rarely arguing about what men are because that’s not up for question. Simultaneously, manipulation of our DNA and CRISPR technology to control the human genome are well underway. Through the use of in-vitro fertilization, embryo and sperm cryopreservation, embryo transfer, sperm injections, surrogacy, and research into artificial wombs, etc., developing technologies are poised to usurp human female reproduction. This is happening in conjunction with women’s legal and linguistic erasure to promote a spectrum of sexes. The growth of “gender clinics” for children will see many children in the next generation sterilized and in need of assisted reproductive technologies if they choose to have children.
My research has shown that we are starring in a corporate coup to colonize human sex for profit and to engineer the evolution of humanity. Though this is more believable than the idea that Western societies are being overhauled for a fraction of humanity who don’t believe they are male or female, we have spent a decade arguing about and obsessing over gender people.
The word transgenderism is not fit for communication. It does not define anything clearly but obscures the industry manifested in its name. It’s an umbrella term with no borders, under which sit too many conflicting ideas, allowing its definitional goalposts to move whenever anyone critiques its ideology and the markets forming around it. Instituting gender identity as a legal concept deconstructs what it means to be human at its core: a biologically, sexually dimorphic species. This is the point. Gender is an obfuscation. The corporate state is deconstructing sex.
One of the uses of the word transgenderism is as a rebranding of the word transsexualism, which is rooted in transvestic fetishism and is the colloquial term for the paraphilia of autogynephilia, whereby men, aroused at the thought of themselves as females, wear stereotypical women’s clothing, specifically undergarments, to satisfy a sexual compulsion. This used to happen in private. When pharmacology and technology made it possible for the tiny number of men with this fetish to escalate their behaviors to appropriate surgically constructed facsimiles of female biology, or synthetic sex characteristics, transsexualism took root in the medical industry. In 1965, when Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, opened a clinic to manipulate human sex characteristics — the first clinic to do so in the US — it was for experimental reasons, not political ones. It became a model for other clinics, even after closing its doors in 1979 after finding the surgeries were unsuccessful. A 2011 Swedish study, mirroring Johns Hopkins’ findings, found that the risk of suicide was much higher for people who’d had surgeries to change their outward sex characteristics versus the general public.
It should also be noted that these genital mutilations were performed on homosexual men because of modern society’s intense homophobia. This still occurs in other countries, such as Iran. This is how a paraphilia of adult men has come to be associated with people who are same-sex attracted, though they are radically different experiences. Homosexuality is embodied sexual desire grounded in reciprocity. Autogynephilia is an objectifying, compulsive, and dissociative fetish.
It’s forty years since Johns Hopkins closed its clinic doors, and yet The Gender Mapping Project organization estimates there are now thousands of gender clinics around the world, 400 that offer to medically manipulate the sex of children — often children who don’t conform to strict sex-role stereotypes and have been assessed as likely to grow up to be gay. China opened its first clinic last year. There are at least two clinics in California that perform what they call “nonbinary” surgeries on men’s genitalia, creating a cavity with inverted scrotal skin while leaving the penis intact. They also perform nullification surgeries by removing sex organs entirely.
For this talk, and for the industry side of this issue that I intend to highlight, transsexualism as a paraphilia that compulsively and specifically objectifies female reproductive biology needs a more vital examination. Exacerbated by the escalation of the porn industry and made possible by the growth of powerful technologies tied to profiteering, this fetish of adult men aroused by appropriating synthetic female sex characteristics has created a perfect storm that’s manifested into a new industry: The gender industry.
Autogynephilia reduces women’s sexed humanity to parts available for purchase, as all aspects of the sex industries do. Support is flourishing for this development under a human rights framework, while women are being erased in language and law, and the men with this paraphilia are given more prominence.
As the technology and pharmaceuticals to perform more realistic synthetic sex surgeries advance, society is forced to accept this paraphilia and accept the ideology that’s developed around it, which denies our biological reality, raising us above the natural world, where we thrive in a living tapestry.
The “gender lobby,” or the techno-totalitarians as I consider them, and their insane assertions that human sex is not binary but exists on a spectrum, are not just a political movement invested in virtuousness run amok. Influential people with money drive this ideology — not just for profit, of which there is plenty — but for engineering human biology toward a transhuman, and eventually a post-human, evolution. Transhumanism is the movement of humanity toward a more integral fusion with technologies and artificial intelligence. Post-humanism is the transformation of our species into something beyond human. Eventually, or so those working toward this goal hope, we will live in virtual reality without the need for reproductive sex, genetic families, or even food, and women will become obsolete. This ideology is being engineered into children’s and young adults’ social media and television programs and is taught in their schools. Children and young people are the target market for this new industry and for biotechnological intrusions into their anatomy, which is why they’re being taught to dissociate from biological reality and their sexed bodies.
Girls are lining up for elective double mastectomies, thinking they can be boys and creating funding campaigns for their surgeries on the GoFundMe app (42,000 of them at last count). Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical giant markets these surgeries as liberating. In 2018, at the Ronald Reagan Medical Center at the University of California Los Angeles, the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology advertised several options for young females who think they can be men to have their reproductive organs removed, a procedure termed “gender-affirming care.”
Women are losing the language specific to their biology and are now called birthing people, menstruators, and chest feeders to be “inclusive” of men. This is dehumanizing, and that’s no accident.
Before looking at a few of the key individuals driving the idea that sex exists on a spectrum, and their interconnections within the techno-medical complex and the LGBT nongovernmental organizations building the framework of a human rights movement, let’s look at the profiteering of the techno-medical complex around creating synthetic sexes regardless of the harms it breeds.
Journalist Sue Donym, reporting on the market in puberty blockers for children, chronicles the cost of Lupron, a drug used to stop children’s puberty, compared to its use for treating adult conditions in men and women. Pediatric versions of Lupron are far more expensive than adult versions. Lupron for treating endometriosis in women is $4,800 for a three-month dose, while its pediatric version is $9,700 for the same dose. A subcutaneous implant for delivering the drug to children is $35,000, whereas a subcutaneous adult implant to administer Lupron for the treatment of advanced prostate cancer costs $4,400. And the costs of those drugs run to hundreds of thousands of dollars when children use them for up to seven years. That amounts to $9,700 per child every three months for up to seven years, adding up to $270,000. for one patient. If even one hundred children took these drugs for seven years, that’s $27 million in drug sales.
Global Market Insights, a research firm, reported on the market for genital surgery for identity purposes, putting 2019 profits at $316 million while projecting a 25% growth rate in surgeries by 2026. This amounts to profits of $1.5 billion for the United States alone. The firm concluded that growth drivers for synthetic sexes are favorable government policies in the United States, greater awareness of the surgeries, technological advancements coupled with increasing effectiveness of the surgeries, and accessibility to sex surgical centers. It should be noted that although these surgeries were created by men, for adult men, the largest demographic choosing these surgeries now are adolescent females. We don’t hear much about the demographic of middle-aged women choosing these surgeries.
Opening markets in sexual identities could have only happened by violating the sex boundary between males and females. The paraphilia of transsexualism, rebranded as “cool” for today’s youth and added to a human rights umbrella of sexual identity, accomplishes this. The market in sex manipulation surgery now has a new consumer base.
The small civil rights movement of lesbians, gays, and bisexuals became a global purchasing juggernaut once the medical-industrial complex infiltrated it during the 1980s AIDS crisis. Out Leadership, the business networking arm of the LGBT market, currently reports $3.7 trillion in buying power. By 2000, when the AIDS epidemic was brought under control, the two most powerful LGBT non-governmental organizations in America emerged. One was the Gill Foundation, started by billionaire Tim Gill. Gill is an American philanthropist and LGBT rights, activist. He was among the first open homosexuals to be on the Forbes 400 list of America’s richest people. As of 2019, he was the largest individual donor to the LGBT rights movement in US history. Gill is also the founder of the pioneering computer software company Quark. He now owns an artificial intelligence company called Josh ai.
The other largest LGBT rights NGO in the United States is Arcus Foundation, founded by Jon Stryker, heir to his family’s $130 billion medical supply corporation, Stryker Medical. Jon Stryker is also a founding board member of Greenleaf Trust, a privately owned bank in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Stryker and Gill are not your typical grassroots activists.
Stryker Medical owns 54 companies in 36 countries and sells its medical supplies to 100 countries across the world. Of the top ten countries outside the US using Stryker Medical supplies, at least eight are hotbeds of gender activism and political pressure driving gender identity laws, including the UK, Ireland, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, and Australia. America is home to Stryker Medical and Arcus Foundation and is its largest consumer base. Their next largest consumer base is the UK, where Arcus Foundation has another branch at Cambridge University.
Ireland, home to Transgender Equality Network Ireland (TENI), is a boiling cauldron of synthetic sex rights activism. TENI is funded by Transgender Europe, which is heavily funded by Arcus Foundation (read: Stryker Medical). Transgender Europe was established in 2005. It has 195 member organizations in 48 different countries. Ireland is home to three branches of Stryker Medical and 19 of the top 20 global pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical companies.
Arcus Foundation poses as a human rights organization, but it subsists on millions generated by Stryker Corporation stock. Jon Stryker has built the political scaffolding to drive synthetic sex surgeries as positive human progression and normal human expression — into our cultures, our institutions, our laws, and more importantly and dangerously, the global marketplace via philanthropic funding to LGBT NGOs, universities, churches, sports, legal firms, and other organizations. Having successfully helped to drive gender ideology in Western cultures, Arcus Foundation is now sowing the seeds for normalizing synthetic sex identities in the global south with millions of dollars in funding to the International Trans Fund.
Who else in the world besides the American medical-industrial complex — by some estimates bigger than the American military-industrial complex — could wield so much global power as to have the media, international corporations, global banks, investment houses, the largest law firms in the world, and the armed services do their bidding selling synthetic sex identities?
We must also take seriously the ideology of Martine Rothblatt, a renowned American entrepreneur who identifies as transsexual and a transhumanist, and who has appropriated the female sex with technology and drugs. He co-founded Sirius Satellite Radio, owns United Therapeutics — a major biopharmaceutical corporation — worked on the Human Genome Project at the UN level, and was mentored into transhumanism by Ray Kurzweil of Google. Rothblatt created a robot replica of his wife, developed by Hanson Robotics. He has written and spoken about transcending flesh and is a strong presence at Out Leadership, the business networking arm of the LGBT lobby. He believes transgenderism is an on-ramp to transhumanism, and he created a technological transhumanist religion called Terasem, whose credo is we are making God as we are implementing technology that is ever more all-knowing, ever-present, all-powerful, and beneficent. Rothblatt is also a lawyer and the author of the very first gender bill. He worked with several other transsexual lawyers to give legal structure to physical dissociation from the sexed body. He has written extensively on the need to overhaul our system of labeling people as male or female based on their genitalia and the future of creating humans with new reproductive technology.
It should be noted here that many who fund the current gender industry that sterilizes young people are also invested in the technologies of assisted reproduction. Amazon launched its first fertility center in 2019, while the Bezos family has invested $166 M in a hospital performing gender surgeries in Brooklyn, N.Y. Marc Benioff, owner of Time magazine, Co-CEO, and Co-Founder of Salesforce, and a pioneer of cloud computing, funds clinics to medicalize children’s natural puberty and has simultaneously invested in Overture Life, an embryology lab, making in-vitro fertilization more accessible than ever.
Jennifer Pritzker and his family should not be overlooked in the development of synthetic sex identities. The Pritzkers are one of the richest families in America. They made their fortune founding the Hyatt hotel corporation but have since moved their investments to the techno-medical sector and now push synthetic sex as an identity. The Pritzkers have sent hundreds of millions of philanthropic dollars into educational, medical, cultural, military, and legal institutions in America, Canada, and Israel, to drive the concept that human reproductive sex exists on a spectrum and is part of the human rights frame for the same-sex attracted. Jennifer Pritzker was born James Pritzker. After marrying and fathering three children, he decided in middle age that he was a woman. He adopted a synthetic female identity and has sent millions of dollars via his philanthropic organization, Tawani Foundation, to institutionally change our ideas about sex. Tawani Enterprises, the private investment counterpart to the philanthropic foundation, invests in and partners with Squadron Capital, a Chicago-based private investment vehicle that acquires medical device companies that manufacture instruments for surgical use, mirroring Jon Stryker’s trajectory. Jennifer’s cousin, Penny Pritzker, who sits on the board of Microsoft, was hugely influential in getting President Obama elected and was later chosen as his Secretary of Commerce. Obama became the first “trans” president, meeting at the White House with the higher-ups in the LGBT lobby, and he drove bills through the government to support synthetic sex as identity.
In 2019, Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker, Jennifer’s cousin and Penny’s brother, issued an Executive Order titled Strengthening Our Commitment to Affirming and Inclusive Schools to welcome and support children with manufactured sex identities. It established a task force to outline statewide criteria for schools and teachers that recommended districts amend their school board policies “to strengthen protections for transgender, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming students.”
In 2021, Governor Pritzker signed into law a new sex education bill for all public schools in Illinois, the first of its kind designed in accordance with the second edition of the National Sex Education Standards to update sex ed curricula in K–12 schools. The bill will be implemented on August 1, 2022. National Sex Education Standards, which teach children about gender ideology and the medical manipulation of children’s sex for identity purposes, were funded by the Grove Foundation, whose fortune comes from the now-deceased Andrew Grove, former CEO of Intel Corporation.
Visions of transhumanism, and a post-humanity where we fuse with AI, might be the reason new legal rights are demanded by those who promote synthetic sexes. Robots and AI don’t have a reproductive system. They are assigned synthetic sex when they are created, which mimics the language of gender identity ideology. Chile passed a law last year to protect the rights of genetically modified humans, the first country to do so. The world's first genetically modified babies were born in Hong Kong in 2018.
The tech sector supports the synthetic sex industry by funding various LGBT organizations and using their collective financial weight as a threat to change policies.
In 2017 our major tech organizations, including Apple, Intel, Amazon, Google, Salesforce, Tumblr, Twitter, and Yahoo, filed an amicus brief to support synthetic sex identities at the expense of boys’ and girls’ rights to physical privacy in public bathrooms. Google recently funded the largest LGBT youth organization in America, the Trevor Project, with millions of dollars to build an artificial intelligence system. The Trevor Project has also recently partnered with Astellas Pharmaceutical, makers of puberty-blocking drugs.
As well, the tech sector is highly invested in the development of augmented humans and synthetic realities.
Beyond Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity, Elon Musk created the first neural implant device for humans, called Neuralink, to help people navigate computers with their minds. Mark Zuckerberg has his own brand of virtual reality system, called Metaverse. Yuval Harari, working closely with Klaus Schwab at the World Economic Forum, is considered one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals. He believes the most important challenges facing the world are technological disruption, ecological collapse, and nuclear threat. He thinks that within a few decades, or a couple of centuries at most, humanity will upgrade itself into a different type of species through our technological advances. He also makes the connections between synthetic sex identities and transhumanism and speaks about a coming virtual reality for humans overlaid on the biosphere. We have become compulsively addicted to that which does not reciprocate and the rapid advancement of fetishes to express our sexuality is representative of this.
Humans are connected to the biosphere by sex. The deconstruction of sex in language and law, and the manipulation of young people’s sex characteristics, seem to pave the way for further encroachments into our biology and our more complete melding with technology. Synthetic sexes work as a grooming process for the public to accept more violations of our physical boundaries while also providing young, healthy, resilient bodies to experiment on.
Putting these developments into the context of unfettered corporatism, an economic system that pursues profit like a heat-seeking missile that is destroying the planet, treating our home like a bottomless well of resources to feed itself, it appears that humanity is next in line for colonization.
Our technologies, sutured to this market, have created glorious cathedrals of civilization, but the planet’s coral reefs are disappearing, and there are Texas-sized islands of plastic in the oceans that we don’t know what to do with. We have obliterated and tortured so many other species to grow our magnificent technologies, and the radioactive waste at Fukushima is still growing. Our planet’s water has been poisoned and sold back to us in plastic bottles that wind up as gyres in the ocean. We have extraordinary Towers of learning that are teaching the next generation that allowing this system to devour them, too, is the zenith of freedom.
The market has finally come for humans, dressed up as “gender expression,” with its eye on our genetic codes. Gender ideology opens the door. The market is standing there dressed to the nines, and we’re inviting it in for a full-course meal. It will probably be our last — unless we can understand what we’re looking at and use whatever free will we have left to organize and resist synthetic sex identities, institutionally, legally, and politically.
Author and Journalist, Jennifer Bilek, has been researching the money and power behind the gender industry for over a decade. Her work can be found in myriad publications, on her blog, on Twitter, Gettr, LinkedIn, Spinster.xyz, at this Substack, and in her new book: Transsexual Transgender Transhuman/Dispatches from the 11th Hour.
Your support for my work has been crucial and so appreciated. If you would like to continue supporting my research and analysis you can do so with a one off donation, by purchasing my book, or with a subscription to my substack. Thank you for your engagement.
Brilliant and terrifying. Thank you
Brilliant work Jennifer.
Yes, so many countries bringing this ideology in at roughly the same time was not a coincidence. Makes sense that corporations and tech combined saw a whole new human Gold Rush.
Scary times.