By Gillian Schutte
The struggle for LGBTQI+ rights, including the rights of trans individuals, has long been a necessary and legitimate fight for equality, dignity, and personal autonomy. It is rooted in the desire for safety, recognition, and the ability to live without fear of discrimination. But history has shown that when social movements gain mainstream institutional backing, they become vulnerable to co-option by elite interests. What begins as a grassroots demand for justice can be transformed into a tool for social engineering, serving the needs of powerful donors, billionaires, corporations, and the governments that do their bidding rather than those it claims to represent.
Over the past decade, trans rights have been institutionalised at an unprecedented scale. No longer just about protection and legal recognition, trans activism emerged as a primary concern for international donors, global corporations, and Western governments. This led to the rise of what can only be described as trans autocracy—a system in which legal mandates, corporate policies, medical practices, and social narratives converged to enforce gender ideology in an uncompromising, non-negotiable form. Dissent was punished, debate was suffocated, and compliance became an expectation.
Justice was never the true aim of this expansion. Trans rights were absorbed into a larger machinery of control that has historically used identity politics to distract from class struggle, weaken social cohesion, and expand corporate and state power. Now, as the very institutions that aggressively promoted trans ideology quietly withdraw their support, the damage left behind—medical, psychological, and social—remains unacknowledged.
At the same time political shifts have allowed the key architects of this regime to evade accountability. President Trump’s decision to withdraw USAID funding for trans initiatives has been framed as an attack on LGBTQI+ rights, permitting Democrats and their donor networks to shift the blame for the growing backlash onto conservative politics. In reality, donor institutions had already begun scaling back their financial support, as they have consistently done with other social engineering projects once their strategic utility had expired.
The timing of Trump’s policy shift provided an exit strategy for those who enforced this wave of trans hegemony, shielding them from scrutiny as they surreptitiously redirected their influence toward new global agendas.
Whichever way you look at it, whether through Republican policy shifts or Democratic narratives of inclusion, the ultimate beneficiaries remain the ruling elite, who engineer and discard ideological projects in service of their broader ambitions.
This piece examines the rise and fall of the trans regime, its enforced orthodoxy, and the broader cycles of donor-funded ideological enforcement that shape and then discard social movements according to elite interests.
The rise of trans autocracy
Trans rights advocacy historically focused on securing protection from discrimination, access to medical care, and the right to self-expression—fundamental human rights. However, beginning in the 2010s, this movement expanded well beyond these core principles. Inclusion gave way to institutional control, as powerful financial and political entities worked to reshape institutions and impose ideological compliance.
Rather than emerging as a natural progression of social values, trans ideology was aggressively embedded within governance structures through deliberate lobbying and elite-driven policy shifts. Laws were enacted across North America and Europe permitting individuals to self-identify their gender without medical or legal scrutiny, often overriding biological sex in areas such as prisons, sports, and public facilities.
In Canada and the UK, criminal penalties for "misgendering" turned speech into a punishable offence. In California, parental rights were undermined by policies that suggested refusing to affirm a child’s gender identity could result in loss of custody. These legal shifts were driven by lobbying efforts from donor-backed NGOs, corporate interests, billionaires, and the governments that serve them, with trans rights framed as a moral imperative while being leveraged to implement wider socio-economic transformations.
Medical coercion and pharmaceutical profits
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of trans autocracy was its entanglement with the medical-industrial complex. While many trans individuals seek medical transition as a personal choice, the aggressive expansion of medicalisation—particularly among minors—revealed the extent to which profit motives hijacked this cause.
Puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical interventions were increasingly positioned as the only ethical treatment for gender dysphoria, despite growing concerns about long-term health risks, sterility, bone density loss, and neurological effects. Anyone questioning this model—whether doctors, researchers, or detransitioners—was swiftly silenced.
The pharmaceutical giants, including Pfizer and AbbVie, capitalised on trans medicalisation by creating lifelong customers. Hormone therapy is not a temporary treatment; it requires continuous maintenance, making transition a highly profitable industry. Marketed as a necessary expansion of human rights, the medicalisation of gender identity overlooked the complex social, psychological, and developmental factors that influence gender distress.
Corporate compliance and ideological enforcement
Legal mandates and medical coercion worked in tandem with corporate interests to enforce trans ideology. ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) investment policies pressured businesses to adopt trans-inclusive hiring practices, speech codes, and ideological training.
Social media platforms and tech giants censored voices that questioned the movement’s trajectory, ensuring that only one narrative prevailed. Detransitioners, medical professionals, and feminists raising concerns faced de-platforming, reputational attacks, and, in some cases, job losses. The result was an ideological landscape where disagreement was equated with harm, and critical inquiry was dismissed as bigotry.
Cancel culture and the suppression of debate
Trans autocracy also operated through social intimidation. Cancel culture ensured that anyone who attempted to question trans ideology faced immediate professional and social consequences. Academics, feminists, parents, doctors, and even trans individuals who challenged aspects of the movement found themselves ostracised, blacklisted, and in many cases, subjected to harassment and public shaming.
Discussion about how best to support trans individuals was replaced by rigid, dogmatic enforcement of ideology, with any deviation met by punitive measures. Media outlets played a significant role in marginalising alternative perspectives and vilifying those who dared to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy.
Trans ideology as a geopolitical tool
Beyond domestic enforcement, trans rights were also weaponised in geopolitics. The United States and its allies used LGBTQI+ rights as a soft power tool to exert diplomatic pressure and destabilise governments that resisted Western influence.
In Ukraine, LGBTQI+ activism was promoted during the Maidan uprising, positioning Western-backed forces as defenders of progressive values against Russia’s conservative model. In Venezuela, trans rights were leveraged in diplomatic negotiations even as broader US foreign policy—including economic sanctions that devastated working-class Venezuelans—remained unchallenged.
In Africa, trans rights were tied to international aid, forcing governments to comply with Western ideological frameworks in exchange for financial support, even as global capital maintained its exploitative grip on the continent’s resources. The Fees Must Fall movement in South Africa revealed the contradictions of this donor-backed activism, as corporations and NGOs attempted to steer radical student movements toward identity-based politics rather than economic justice.
Before trans rights became the latest battleground, elite-funded agendas advanced corporate feminism, hollow diversity initiatives, and LGBTQ+ inclusion campaigns not to dismantle power structures but to expand consumer markets while keeping Black and Brown people trapped in economic subjugation. Microfinance schemes and fiscal lending programs targeting African women—such as the World Bank’s Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi), the UN’s SDG gender equality programs, and the Clinton Global Initiative’s "women’s economic empowerment" projects—were framed as liberation but functioned as sophisticated mechanisms of control, burdening the poor with debt while reinforcing the same global hierarchies.
The next manufactured crisis
The green economy, artificial intelligence, and biosecurity governance are already emerging as the next major donor-funded enforcement projects. The same mechanisms that pushed trans orthodoxy—corporate policies, legal mandates, and media control—will soon be repurposed to regulate carbon compliance, AI-driven governance, and digital surveillance.
Each of these movements will be presented as a pressing moral issue, demanding swift enforcement and suppressing opposition. As before, those who challenge the legitimacy of these policies will be cast as reactionary threats to progress.
The Erasure of Trans Rights
The collapse of trans autocracy exposes an uncomfortable reality—social movements are manufactured, deployed, and then discarded according to the strategic needs of billionaires and the governments that do their bidding. When identity politics serves elite interests, it is pushed aggressively; when it becomes a liability, it is abandoned without accountability.
Those left behind—detransitioners, fractured families, alienated communities—will receive no apologies, no reparations. The same institutions that demanded unwavering adherence to trans ideology will reinvent themselves as champions of climate justice, AI ethics, and global security.
An entirely new wave of elite-driven enforcement is already in full swing, and understanding these recurring patterns is imperative if society is to avoid being caught off guard by yet another crisis engineered in the name of progress. Ultimately, the fundamental conflict is not one of conservatives versus progressives or a battle of genders; it is a struggle between the interests of billionaires and the governments that serve them, and the broader collective of humanity.
* Gillian Schutte is a film-maker, and a well-known social justice and race-justice activist and public intellectual. Follow Gillian on X - @GillianSchutte1 and on Facebook - Gillian Schutte.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.
