Emily Garcia: The Billionaire Classes War on Reproductive Sex and the Grassroots Fightback

From Real Left’s Conference ‘Critical Fronts of the Class War in 2026’ on 3 October

Transcript

The title of my presentation is, as you can see, “The billionaire classes war on reproductive sex and the grassroots fightback”. And I’m going to devote most of my time to the war on reproductive sex aspects in making two key arguments. First, through examining the financial and rights frameworks and infrastructure instituted by the top level players of supranational governance and the LGBT+ funding ecosystem that together constitutes the gender identity lobby, I will argue that the gender identity phenomenon is an astroturfed and engineered project rather than an organic development. And secondly, to endeavour to answer the critical question which logically follows for those of us concerned with the exercise of power in the context of class relations: how does the spread of gender identity ideology serve the interests of (at least certain factions of) the ruling class? I will delineate some of the ways in which the deconstruction of the sex binary synergizes with the wider biocapitalist blueprint of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

And in using the term biocapitalism, I refer to that which extends market logic into the very fabric of biological existence, and in so doing necessitates the technological rewiring and rewriting of all living systems. I will conclude my presentation by synopsising the resistance that the gender lobby has met with in so-called TERF Island, i.e. the UK, and the successful blocking of the introduction of legal sex self-identification by feminist activists. I originally planned to also touch on the less cheerful topic of the ensuing co-option and redirection of the gender critical movement by various groups and political currents. However fitting in all of that material proved a little over ambitious for a 30 minute talk.

So, until very recently there was societal consensus about reproductive sex as a material reality. I asked in an online group for gender critical feminists, in which year did you notice that the consensus over the meaning of woman and man had broken?

The modal answer fell between 2012 to 2015, as the specific year this issue began to break through into personal awareness. 2015 was the year the then-LGB national lobby group, Stonewall UK, switched their focus primarily to transgender issues, publicly declaring, “Transwomen are women”, hashtag no debate. This was right after a grant from the US-based Arcus Foundation, who created the LGBT Movement Advancement Project, or MAP, to track the complex system of advocacy and funding that would promote gender identity in the culture globally. I’m going to talk more about Arcus shortly.

2015 was also the year Caitlyn Jenner, formerly known as Bruce Jenner, won the Glamour magazine Woman of the Year Award.

While significant inroads had been made to this end more than two decades earlier through international lobbying by such key players as Martine Rothblatt and Steven Whittle, prior to the 2010s, you couldn’t lose your job for stating “Women don’t have penises”. You were unlikely to get ostracised by your social circle for saying minors struggling with feelings of non-acceptance about their sex should not be subjected to exogenous hormone-induced puberty arrest and development of cross-sex secondary characteristics and genital mutilating surgeries. And “What is a woman?” wasn’t a question that could elicit stuttering panic in politicians to whom it was posed in election debates.

In answering the question of how the dimorphic nature of the human species has become a contested battlefield, in such a short space of time, we need to turn our attention to the gender, or gender identity, lobby. So what is the gender lobby? Investigative journalist and researcher into the gender industry for over a decade, Jennifer Bilek, has defined it as “The network of philanthropists, foundations, corporate alliances, medical lobbies and activist NGOs advancing gender identity and often transhumanist legislation globally.” Elsewhere adding to the picture that, “The banksters like BlackRock managing the capital managed the corporate and institutional capture.” I created this infographic to convey an idea of the sheer scale and power of the lobby and also to illustrate relative degrees of influence of all the individual and institutional actors concerned.

At the apex of the lobby sit some of the owners and controllers of global financial capital, driving the adoption of gender identity by requiring corporations whose stock they own to adopt Diversity and Inclusion, Environmental and Social Governance, and Impact Investing frameworks. The Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity mechanism is especially relevant. Diversity and Inclusion, Environmental and Social Governance and Impact Investing are investment approaches being instrumentalised since the late 1990s and early 2000s to scaffold the incoming era of sustainable capitalism, also known as inclusive capitalism or stakeholder capitalism: the guiding financial philosophy of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Sustainability in this context means sustainable wealth accumulation and concentration amongst the super rich, through the opening of new markets in colonisation, exploitation and extraction of or from biological life through technological means. I am reductively summarising the concept here for the sake of brevity. But I have written previously on impact investing and the transition to a big data economy which necessitates Internet of Things mediated systems of intrusive surveillance and data extraction from digitized living beings.

Michael Bloomberg of Bloomberg Philanthropies, who Fourth Industrial Revolution researcher Alison McDowell has described as an “impact investing rainmaker” and pivotal figure in the rollout of the new global techno-fascist economic system, was an early adopter of transgender legal rights. He passed a Transgender Rights Bill during his first year as Mayor of New York City in 2002. Similarly, the Pritzker family, one of the top ten wealthiest families in the USA, who financed the opening of the first gender clinics for children there in 2007, also funded the development of the Heckman Equation through their Pritzker Children’s Initiative. The Heckman Equation is a set of metrics for the character training of young children, key to enabling attractive return on investments in early childhood education through social impact bonds.

The predatory commodification of the bodies and behaviours of children and other vulnerable groups is a common through-thread connecting the financial activities of these oligarchs. As I will set out in this talk, the ideological and political-financial apparatus of the gender identity cult woke washes, embeds, and advances an overarching dystopian bio-capitalist paradigm. Commodifying and institutionalizing the erosion of biological sex boundaries, I argue, is a stepping stone towards the total integration of biological systems from the nano to the macro level into debt-based global financial architectures of technocratic control.

BlackRock, as you are probably all aware, is the world’s largest asset manager. They own almost everything, in fact. In 2018, Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, launched the Environmental and Social Governance Scorecard to rate corporations on their environmental and social impacts. The World Economic Forum, under Fink’s directorship in his role as co-chair, launched The Partnership for Global LGBTIQ+ Equality a year later in 2019, the membership of which constitutes something of a who’s who of big businesses and big banks.

At the next level down of the infographic, we have organisations of supranational governance, such as the World Economic Forum and the United Nations, who produce human rights definitions and standards or instruments; LGBT+ declarations; resolutions and treaty law; LGBT+ strategies; policy initiatives; legislative frameworks and funding programmes; and/or pledges and partnerships to push gender identity adoption by states, corporations and non-governmental organisations.

It’s worth highlighting here how key human rights arguments and frameworks at this level have been in progressing gender identity doctrine. Particularly critical to the advent of gender identity entering the domain of global human rights was the creation of the Yogyakarta Principles in 2006. A group of lobbyists, top human rights lawyers, politicians, the International Commission of Jurists and the International Service for Human Rights got together and created these principles. One of which is Principle 31, added 10 years later, which states that the registration of sex in identity documents, including birth certificates, must be ended.

To be clear, I support both human and inalienable rights for people that reject their sexed bodies, insofar as those rights equivalate to the same rights that we should all be entitled to. And I also support protections against discrimination for people that present socially as the opposite sex through their choice of clothing, name, etc. in cases of, for example, their being denied housing or employment for the specific reason that they do not conform to the social conventions of their sex. Protections against this kind of discrimination against people that identify as transgender already exist in UK law in the 2010 Equality Act. However, I cannot accept that compelling others to pretend that you are not the sex that you are is a legitimate human right.

Philosopher Jane Clare Jones has termed this demand “ontological totalitarianism”, which she defines as a political manifestation of narcissistic entitlement, that is, the refusal to recognise the needs, interests and beliefs of other people.

I think there is a valid comparison to be made between the enforcement of preferred pronouns and that of mask wearing. The rationale and the justification are often the same. Wearing a mask or calling a “he” a “she” costs one nothing personally but ensures the physical and mental safety and well-being of vulnerable others, or so we are told. However, if one does not subscribe to the assumptions of the underlying bio-capitalist logic that spawned these neo-conventions, one experiences submitting to them as an assault on our own personhood, or even a humiliation ritual. The fact that in both cases these practices of supposed empathy or kindness have sometimes been enforced by the steel-toe-capped boot of the state should at least raise questions in the minds of critical thinkers.

Many countries where sex self-ID has been legalised have simultaneously criminalised so-called misgendering: meaning that people are being fined, or even imprisoned, for speech that accurately names a person’s sex. The recent case of French feminist Dora Moutot is one such Orwellian example.

Another is that of Isabel Cepa from Brazil, another feminist activist who in 2025 was granted political asylum in a European country on the grounds of state persecution because, incredibly, she faced up to 25 years in prison for referencing the fact on social media that a trans-identified male politician was male.

The prosecution pressed the charges on grounds of social racism, an argument disseminated by influential lawyer, lobbyist and tech entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt several decades earlier in his book, “The Apartheid of Sex, A Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender”. Rothblatt is a co-author of the first ever International Bill of Gender Rights which laid the groundwork for all future international legal trans rights frameworks. In his book he argues that sex-based categories and definitions are akin to the South African racist apartheid system, and should be dismantled for all purposes except strictly medical ones.

More on Rothblatt later, who is included on my infographic as one of the billionaire funders of the lobby. This category constitutes the billionaire philanthropists who have built the synthetic sex identities market worth a significant percentage of the estimated 4 to 5 trillion LGBT total market through the establishment of an ecosystem of international LGBT+ lobbying organisations and think tanks; investments in biotech and pharma companies; funding of medical and academic centres; and forging of media partnerships, amongst other activities.

The Arcus and Gill foundations have been particularly prolific in their scope of activity. Arcus funds the Astrea Foundation, which runs the Global Philanthropy Project, a major donor coordination organisation for LGBT+ grants in the Global South and East. Arcus are active in England through their Cambridge branch and have funded Stonewall UK, as I previously mentioned.

A number of these billionaire funders also have financial interests in Artificial Intelligence systems and artificial (assisted) reproduction technologies. Children who are sterilised by having their natural puberty permanently arrested represent a cohort of prospective potential future consumers of artificial reproduction technologies. There is a worldwide push right now to legalise commercial surrogacy, and that’s happening in the UK as well, to enable growth of this multi-billion dollar industry. Like many feminists, I view this as exploitation of the reproductive labour of poor women for the purposes of baby trafficking.

You may have also heard of research into gestation via ex vivo uterine environments or artificial womb substitutes. The cutting edge of the future of reproduction technologies though is in vitro gametogenesis or IVG. This is the creation of gametes from stem cells. Because IVG allows gametes to be made from just a single cell from anyone’s skin or blood – as sci-fi as this may sound – it potentially opens the door to two men genetically reproducing, or a single person, or even more than two biological parents.

The method has successfully been used to procreate mice from two male mice in Japan. And in June, the US biotech startup ‘Conception’ announced that they had generated the first early human egg cells from stem cells.

A number of barriers remain to harnessing this technology for human reproduction, including worldwide legislative frameworks prohibiting the growth of human embryos beyond 14 days for the purposes of scientific research. I suspect though that deregulation in this area is likely to face less resistance if enough people are already habituated to ideas like ‘men can become pregnant’ and ‘not all mothers are women’, as propagated by gender identity ideology.

There are clinics in various countries, including here, that offer “non-binary surgeries”: that is customized genital surgeries that may involve nullification or non-traditional reconstruction for those who “wish to affirm their gender identity surgically without conforming to male or female binaries.” Advances in Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (or CRISPR) gene editing technology, make interference with the development of sexual organs from the time of conception a possibility in the near future.

Transhumanist global thought leader Zoltan Istvan, who has commanded platforms by the likes of the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, and the UK Parliament, has written about the potentials of CRISPR technology for human germline editing. He has suggested that parents may choose to have designer babies which lack certain sexual organs within the next several decades. “Is a uterus necessary if you have ectogenesis?” he asks in his article, “The Future of the LGBT Movement may involve Transhumanism”.

But in case anyone is thinking the connections that I, or indeed Zoltan, are making may be rather tenuous, I draw your attention to the current Wellcome Trust funded “Future of Human Reproduction” project at Lancaster University. It sets out three technologies as its major focuses, that is ectogenesis, in vitro-derived gametes, and genome editing – and in a “Future of Human Reproduction Timeline” video explicitly references the UK Gender Recognition Act 2004: this as a key milestone along with the 2008 repeal of previous legislation banning human cloning. The video also mentions the Supreme Court judgment that under the Equality Act 2010, the terms “man”, “woman” and “sex” refer exclusively to biological sex, adding a worried face emoji and exclamation marks to illustrate.

The Wellcome Trust, as you are probably aware, is a subsidiary of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, And I don’t think I need to explain to the present audience just how influential Gates and his funding apparatus was in catalyzing the COVID event or “the deep state going viral”, to paraphrase Debbie Lerman.

So returning to the infographic, at the fourth layer we have global law and management firms who have drafted model statutes that erase female specific language and sponsored, founded and collaborated in advocacy with, LGBT+ lobby groups.

In 2019, Denton created an advisory report in collaboration with the Thomas Reuters Foundation and IGYLO – that is the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Youth and Student Organisation – to help international lobby groups win changes in the law, by stealth, to allow children to legally change their sex without adult approval, or authorisation by any authorities. The report recommends that both public campaigning and press coverage and exposure be limited to avoid attracting opposition. It also advises, “Tie your campaign to a more popular reform”, stating that, in Ireland, Denmark and Norway, “Changes to the law on legal gender recognition were put through at the same time as other more popular reforms such as marriage equality legislation. This provides a veil of protection.” Gender identity lobbyists do not favour free and full discussion and debate of their ideas and policies.

On that note, moving down to the next level, we have what I’m defining as the propaganda and marketing arm. Big Tech companies and media corporations disseminate sympathetic narratives and stories about transgenderism and censor and deplatform critical voices. Academia has produced the theoretical undergirdings of gender identity ideology, particularly in the gender identity essentialism and sex denialism of academics like sexologist Anne Fausto-Sterling and queer theorists such as Judith Butler and Gail Rubin. Critics of queer theory have argued that queer theory itself borrows from the material reality deconstructing foundations of poststructuralism and postmodernism.

At the next layer down, we reach the official gender identity lobby groups like Stonewall. I’ve also included unofficial lobby groups such as trade unions, political parties, and equality bodies and national human rights organisations, as where captured, these also become active agitators for so-called trans rights.

Disgracefully, at the September Trade Union Congress, a motion was passed to campaign for sex self-ID in law and to campaign against the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s guidance on upholding single-sex spaces. Tellingly, the word woman was not used once in the wording of this motion.

And finally, at the very bottom level, we have ‘useful idiot’ activists providing the facade of a grassroots liberation movement to the top-down orchestrated manoeuvrings. Now obviously not everyone who claims a gender identity belongs to this category of what I’m calling trans rights activists. But as is well documented, TRAs have frequently engaged in fascistic tactics against political opponents, including property damage, assault, rape and death threats, doxing, reporting to authorities and mounting pressure campaigns to have sex realists excluded from civic and political participation and employment. And it’s the women who uphold boundaries around entry to single sex spaces and services etc. who are most likely to be targeted. Unsurprisingly for a movement so deeply connected to female erasure across multiple spheres of life, there is a definite colouring of overt misogyny to these campaigns.

Martine Rothblatt, who has been credited as a founding father of the transgender empire and whose mentors include transhumanists William Sims Bainbridge and Ray Kurzweil, is also a pioneer in CRISPR-Cas9 research. His biopharma company, United Therapeutics, are genetically modifying pigs to overcome immunological barriers to cross-species organ transplants. In 2025, in a world first in trans-species xenotransplantation, United Therapeutics implanted a heart from one of their (technically chimera) pigs into a male recipient who lived two months post-transplant.

Rothblatt claims that “The basic transhumanist concept is that a human need not have a flesh body just as a woman need not have a real vagina.”

In his 2016 keynote presentation, “Moving Trans History Forward”, Rothblatt argues that the technologically transgendered, that is, those who have undergone surgeries and or taken cross-sex hormones, face similar challenges to the technologically transhuman. And therefore, the same strategies for social acceptance should be operationalised. Rothblatt’s idea of the ultimate stages of technological transhumanism, as he explains in the talk, entails downloading the contents of your mind into a virtual operating system replica, undergoing a medically assisted euthanasia, and then, theoretically, continuing to exist as the virtual you in the virtual realm.

Rothblatt decries the discriminatory attitudes that exist in society about being virtually human and regrets that there are no human rights for the cyber conscious, who he also refers to as “trans-bemens” or “transitional bioelectric humans” and imagines their dilemma as, “I’m a trans-beman trapped in a human body.” He sees the need for a World Professional Association for Transgender Health equivalent to produce guidelines advising that if an individual wants to have surgery to, “do something to their body that’s not contained in their DNA”, then they should be permitted to carry this out if the desire has been present in the individual for over a year.

Under the slide heading “Medicalisation and/or Science Leads to Social Acceptance”, Rothblatt sets out a proposed model to follow for geno-dysphoria lifted straight from the gender dysphoria medical template. The formal procedure would entail two psychologists agreeing that the cyber conscious analogue is equivalent to you, and thereafter authorising the cyber conscious analogue to assume your legal identity upon bodily death. Elsewhere Rothblatt admits doubts as to whether consciousness of self can really continue beyond bodily death. But apparently the extinguishing of other people’s lives is a risk he’s willing to take for a euphoric future of human transcendence.

One could dismiss this specific application of transhumanist values as a perhaps rather transparent attempt at grooming ‘useless eaters’ for assisted suicide through an enticing story (at least to some) about cyber immortality. However, I think in view of the accomplishments to date of Rothblatt and other transhumanists of the 1%, it would be a mistake to underestimate his strategy to repurpose the transgender model to undermine and override potential objections to an incoming era of human augmentation, human germline modification, and bio-hybrid life creation enabling technologies.

However, in the UK, an obstacle was placed on any transgenderism to transhumanism roadmap, when sex self ID failed to enter law, following the government consultation in 2018 on the proposed changes to the 2004 Gender Recognition Act. The USA under Trump’s administration has also begun to reverse the Biden administration’s attacks on sex-based provisions.

The legislative changes proposed in the UK advanced recommendations put forward at the 2015 Trans Inquiry which had excluded women’s groups from giving verbal evidence and entirely disregarded the impacts of sex self-ID on other protected groups, including women and children. In response to the proposed rule changes, a network of campaigning organisations – some of which formed expressly to counteract this threat – was established to defend the interests of women, children and homosexual people. This network included For Women Scotland, Woman’s Place UK, Fair Play for Women, Transgender Trend, Safe Schools Alliance, the LGB Alliance, the Gay Men’s Network, Filia Conference, the Lesbian Rights Alliance, Resisters United, Labour Women’s Declaration, Southall Black Sisters, Trans Widows Voices and Women’s Declaration International.

The resistance was secular, broadly feminist, pro-LGB rights and leaned to the left. It was also comprised primarily of women-led or all-women groups. The pressure worked. Trans lobby groups failed to preserve the climate hitherto maintained of total silencing and vilification of dissenters. A public debate was had, and after a consultation which attracted an unusually copious 100,000 responses, sex self-ID was shelved.

The myriad tentacles of the gender lobby are pernicious and deep-rooted though, and battles continue as alternative legal approaches from the same playbook are tried. A conversion therapy bill which could criminalise doctors, teachers and parents for having conversations with children that do not validate and affirm the child’s rejection of their biological sex is now in the draft stages.

In closing, in my talk today I have presented research which illuminates some of the connections between the manufacture of widespread dissociation from one’s sexed body and the dawning era of technologically reimagined synthetic everything.

My hope is that moving forward more feminists and leftists will show willing to engage with these kind of integrated – as opposed to compartmentalised – critiques. I believe that such dot-joining analyses are the crucial theoretical foundation on which to build a subversion-proof, sound and radical resistance movement to the biophobic system that spawned all of the gender lobby, the Covid deep structural event, and the settler colonialist project of Israel. And on that note, I’m looking forward to Heather’s elucidation of this theme next.