An unfortunate typo by the Arcus Foundation

Zillionaires are getting sloppy about hiding their influence on the UN

Photo by Stephen Harlan

This is the first in a series of articles on how gender ideology is being written into laws all over the world, who is paying for it and - hopefully - why they are doing it.

When Russia invaded Ukraine last year, Yale University put together a shitlist of corporations that had chosen to continue doing business in the invading country. On that list was Stryker, a company that makes things like prosthetic hips and robotic arms for surgery.

Other medtech companies stayed in Russia too, but they very publicly wound down operations as a sign of their disapproval; Siemens loftily cited the fundamental human right of every person to medical care to justify their decision to half-stay. They continued to make bank as others fled, but they also sent out press releases about securing infrastructure, collecting and matching donations, and looking after kids with cancer etc.

Stryker did no such pandering, and Yale accused them of “digging in”; the company currently have multiple job ads on LinkedIn looking for people to help grow their operations in Russia (demonstrating their $ 1 million Mako surgery robot at Russian medtech roadshows, in case you’re in the market for a job).

Very selective human rights interests

All this is only really worth mentioning because Jon Stryker, an architect whose fortune comes from his granddad’s namesake company, makes a big hullabaloo about human rights. Jon and his sisters’ wealth comes from their stake in the company though they don’t work there (though Ronda Stryker is on its executive board). They are worth billions. They even made their very own bank.

A vocal human rights hobbyist, Ronda runs her own philanthropic fund together with her husband. Her kids are involved, too; Meghan Murray is the grantmaker’s executive director, and Michael, who last year pleaded guilty to placing hidden cameras around his home to film his kids’ nanny naked, is listed in IRS documents as one of its directors.

Ronda’s big thing is “health equity” which I think is American for helping poor people. Bizarrely, Ronda is listed everywhere as being a fellow at Harvard Medical School (to whom she pledged $20 million in 2016, for which they named a professorship after her), but the wayback machine shows that sometime between October and December 2022, Harvard took her name off the school’s list of fellows, with no apparent public explanation.

The Strykers are not unlike other rich people in that they put their cash into philanthropic causes because it allows them to pay fuck-all tax. For those who advertise their generosity (which the Strykers like to do), it makes them look good. Crucially relevant for the rest of us, it also allows them to sidestep our democratically elected governments and set societal priorities according to their own personal tastes.

Bill Gates is the most famous modern example of this, of course. Thanks to some software he made in the 80’s, he has more say over whether tuberculosis or RSV is a more pressing public health priority for the next three decades than the health minister you voted in.

Gates absolutely hates malaria, and again, he wrote really good computer code a few decades ago, so that permits him to keep all that money that would otherwise be doled out from the public purse by our elected plebs. Check out this recent story about how his fondness for innovative and expensive vaccines has commodified and commercialised the WHO’s mission.

Anyway, women’s rights are like Jon Stryker’s malaria, which is why he funds “radical gender justice” via the Arcus Foundation. The organisation has been around since 2000 (though some sources say 1997), and was originally set it up with Stryker’s ex-boyfriend Robert E. Schram, a child and family therapist who resigned from Arcus in 2005.

Arcus is a by-word in the TERF world for one of the biggest threats to women, children’s and gay people’s rights. Via Arcus, Stryker has funnelled his stock dividends to myriad LGBTQIA+ organisations (which Jennifer Bilek has heroically itemised), making him a central player in the mainstreaming of gender ideology all over the world. Scratch a transactivist NGO, uncover an Arcus grant.

Stryker is ambitious; he doesn’t want to change your mind, he wants to change the law — and he is using strategic litigation at home and international human rights instruments abroad to get it done.

To give a significant recent example, take the ACLU, an uber-captured American NGO that uses the courts to fight for progressive causes. They named a project after Stryker and his husband when the couple gave them $15 million in 2021: announcing the Jon L. Stryker and Slobodan Randjelović LGBTQ & HIV Project, the ACLU noted that Jon and “Slo” (on very familiar terms!) were in the courtroom when the Supreme Court decided that American employment law does cover “gender identity” in the interpretation of the word “sex”. The court case was over the right of an AGP to wear “appropriate women's business attire” to his job at a funeral parlour. He won, but he sadly died the next year.

“We will use Jon and Slo’s generosity to change the law,” the ACLU said in no uncertain terms.

Slobodan Randjelović and husband Jon Stryker

When Arcus released their 2021 annual report, they listed among the recipients of the legacy orthopaedic cash the United Nations’ SOGI Independent Expert. That’s the official title given to a Costa Rican lawyer called Victor Madrigal Borloz (or sometimes just Victor Madrigal or here, VMB), who was tasked by the UN in 2017 with reporting on and discouraging two distantly-related but very different things: violence based on homophobia, and violence based on non-acceptance of the loopy fringe academic theory that males and females can be born in the incorrect body.

They also claimed to have “supported” him via something called the UN Foundation, a charity that takes donations to help support the work of the UN.

I tweeted out a screenshot of the Arcus publication boasting the UN SOGI grant, and it took off. This was mostly because VMB himself had recently beseeched Scotland’s parliament, via Zoom, to pass a law that would allow any man to legally declare himself a women (self-ID), a central Arcus mission. This made him a known entity among euroterfs, and the question had been circulating in the Twitter town square ever since: who is this guy, and who the fuck is paying him?

Maya Forstater @MForstater

Victor Madrigal is speaking to the Committee of the Scottish Parliament today. Will the @EHRC please step up to rebut the false claims by the UN expert? @Marcial_Boo ⁩@EHRCChair

Sex Matters @SexMattersOrg

UN Expert calls for "act of compliance" from Scottish Government. His claims do not stack up. We call for EHRC to step in. https://t.co/zbpzFJH9eP

With the Arcus report, many presumed that they had found the smoking gun. A Twitter follower immediately wrote to VMB’s UN office asking about the grant. You got it all wrong, they replied. That money was for something called the Harvard Human Rights programme. The person immediately deleted their accusatory tweet, fearing, rightly, that you shouldn’t mess around with powerful lawyers. I didn’t see anything libellous in my tweets, so they stayed up. (Anyway, they can’t put a bomb under my car because I can’t afford to buy one, so joke’s on them.)

VMB’s office lackies All-Capsed me this: “the Independent Expert is the Eleanor Roosevelt Senior Visiting Researcher at the Harvard University Law School Human Rights Program.” Indeed, back in July 2022, prolific muckraker StillTish published a whole thing about the Arcus-UN axis, including this screenshot from the Arcus website boasting of a $200k grant to “Harvard President and Research Fellows.”

VMB’s office also indignantly told me that all this is public knowledge via his annual reporting, but they declined to elaborate on the nature of the deal (or where one might find the report). When I eventually found his official declaration of activities for 2021 I saw that alongside the Arcus grant, the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund also paid Harvard as part of the same programme. That’s another well-endowed (but incredibly secretive) LGBTQIA+ and general social justice funder (more on Wellspring in a future article).

There’s another donor on the list - the US government’s very own LGBTQIA+ rights fund (USAIDS’ Global Equality Fund) which is a public-private partnership between the US, a bunch of western countries, and private corporations and banks. Again no amounts, conditions, or details of the grant are provided in the HRC report. The USAID site doesn’t list any financials.

UN SOGI (voluntary) declaration of private funding for 2021 to the Human Rights Council

Arcus teamed up with VMB for the first time in 2020 when they gave him $30k, without going through a sanitising intermediary like Harvard. They didn’t list this donation in their online grantee database (but that’s just transparency theatre, anyway). Harvard have apparently been supporting VMB since 2019, though they have never revealed the monetary value of their “in-kind” assistance, either.

I contacted Arcus’ long-term comms director Bryan Simmons, and when he refused to answer me thrice, I dug around and found out that he’s also on the board of a Harvard Medical school teaching hospital network. He’s the chair of the network’s strategic planning committee. Apropos of nothing: a casual reminder that Ronda Stryker gave Harvard Medical School $20 million in 2016.

Harvard are not revealing how much the dark-money pit Wellspring gave, nor are they revealing any details about what’s in the grant agreement. But they invited someone who has worked on “partnerships” for Wellspring for 11 years to come do a fellowship at the same time as VMB. Godfrey Odongo’s LinkedIn says his thing is “new frontiers in human rights”, but his published work and past engagements seem to largely be about children’s rights in law and his Wellspring job seems to be all about “leveraging” partnerships and programmes.

So it’s kind of nice that Wellspring has someone on the ground. Did he have any say, for example, in this terrifying new document on sex education? Who drafted - or whose idea was it to draft - the UN experts’ letter to Spain that praised their erasure of women as a sex class as a feminist victory?

Another report revealed that Wellspring gave an additional $100k to the OHCHR in 2021, earmarked for something very specific: “support for review of criminal codes in compliance with international human rights standards”. Well that’s scarily vague.

You will notice that the guy on the right of this photo above also comes from the UN. I tried to find out if his fellowship is being “supported” using the same Arcus, Wellspring or USAID’s LGBTQIA+ funding, but none of the grantmakers would answer. I couldn’t locate any Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) committee members’ annual financial declarations.

This is concerning because there is evidence that transactivists are targeting the UN’s CRC to establish gender ideology in law (children’s right to health, autonomy, best interests, to be heard…). All the way back in 2017 the committee in charge of the CRC (which included Mr Mezmur, possibly as its chairperson), called for gender affirming medical care for kids.

What’s happening at Harvard

So what is Harvard doing for the UN mandate holder? It’s his workplace, I guess. Harvard have reputational heft, a huge network, nice facilities, and lots of enthusiastic young woke legal geniuses to help out, part of the school’s Lambda Legal group. Lambda Legal work on litigation for LGBTQIA+ causes; its current CEO is the former head of Arcus, while the former CEO of Arcus was also head of Lambda… You get the incestuous picture.

Harvard seem to be tasked with a lot of the heavy lifting in VMB’s workplan for his mandate, which they helped put together via consultations.

It’s possible to follow VMB and Harvard’s social media accounts to track at least some of what the Arcus/Wellspring/USAID money is being spent on. For example, here is the religious confab they held last week, which is part of his next trick: reconciling SOGI with religions, the subject of a report due out in June.

IE SOGI, Victor Madrigal-Borloz @victor_madrigal

This week I have gathered scholars, faith leaders & civil society representatives at @Harvard_Law to participate in an expert consultation that will inform my upcoming Report on Religion. #IESOGI The final report will be presented soon: in June, at the next #HumanRightsCouncil.

I laughed out loud when I saw all these religious people had to put pronouns on their name plates but then I looked them up and they’re all human rights academics, activists and intersectional theologians, not the real deal. I wonder if they flew any fire-and-brimstone homophobic pastors to Massachusetts on his budget? Probably not.

Harvard kindly supplied VMB with an assistant fresh off an internship with ILGA

What does the UN rulebook say about all this?

The special procedures of the UN, which is the collective name given to the independent experts (of which there are 59 at last count) don’t get a salary. The budget for carrying out their work comes from the general OHCHR budget. And to get anything done, they certainly need it.

Countries donate to a common budget that is then dished out the the experts. However, the states can dictate which expert gets it. Countries can also give straight to the mandate holder. You can see this in the table above. France gave VMB $64k but half of it they gave directly to him, the other half they gave to the UN human rights piggybank but put it in an envelope with “gay stuff” scrawled on it (not literally).

But what about external private support? Is this all kosher?

Consider these contradictory statements: a UN Code of Conduct document dated 2007 says the experts and rapporteurs must not “accept any honour, decoration, favour, gift or remuneration from any governmental or nongovernmental source for activities carried out in pursuit of his/her mandate.”

But another document called Manual Operations says the mandate’s independence is “in no way inconsistent with mandate-holders right to engage in dialogue with, and to seek information, and financial and other support from, a wide range of actors.”

In 2021, the ECLJ (a right-wing think tank) secured interviews with a number of UN independent experts and issued a 90-page report on their findings. It’s a fascinating look at how the sausage is made, and I recommend you read it all. They cite evidence that the mandate holders have become increasingly dependant on external private funding, as has the OHCHR itself.

The rules have been revised and agonised over at different periods during the past decade, but the fact of the matter is this: there’s no obligation to report external funding, and no reason to think that what you find in their annual reports is a true reflection of the real amounts.

So Arcus abandoned the respectability buffer between the ostensibly neutral expert and the zillionaire activist. Or it could have been a typo, a moidian slip… or they just don’t care what you think. Did anyone think VMB was a neutral unaffiliated observer? Doesn’t the existence of the mandate suggest it has generally broad support? Nope and nope.

Winners and losers

How can the UN experts/rapporteurs operate on such wildly different budgets? Some are minted and others are practically broke. Are the under-funded ones happy about this arrangement? No, they’re not. The ECLJ cited above reported: “Many experts complain that they do not receive UN funding to cover their basic operating costs (office, printer, telephone, and internet), while others hold all-expense-paid conferences in luxury hotels or on tropical islands, according to one expert.”

It adds:

“Some mandates… seem almost doomed to remaining poor, as their themes do not interest donors who are all part of the Western liberal bloc.” And worryingly, they found evidence that external funders were participating in mandate activities, such as preparing visits, drafting reports, or responding to communications. One former rapporteur called direct funding “silent corruption” calling out the “industrial” or “extreme” fundraising his colleagues.

Others have no such qualms, of course. One mandate that really stands out is the Special Rapporteur on disability rights, which is currently held by Irish lawyer Gerard Quinn. He’s received an eye-watering $1.3 million in private grants from the trifecta of lavish funders: Ford, Open Society, and Wellspring.

I’m a single-issue voter with a broken brain so I’m going to venture somewhere dark and unsubstantiated with this disability funding revelation.

There are whole brigades of legal experts looking for gender ideology’s way “in” to our laws. We’ve seen the way they are gearing up to argue the CRC guarantees legal gender recognition for kids (as well as surgeries and hormones); meanwhile the EU’s violence against women law will probably end up placing trans-identifying men higher in the oppression ladder than actual women, thus making men a special protected class in a law intended for women. Sex discrimination laws are going to be increasingly used to ensure they have access to our spaces, the right to declare themselves mothers, to play on our sports teams etc., and here’s a whole bunch of legal instruments that can be used to outlaw hate speech based on gender identity (deadnaming, misgendering etc.)

Wrong body, right mind

After reading about the money being poured into disability rights, I remembered a Brussels-based TERF telling me that the disability lobby goes really hard on trans and intersectionality stuff. I WhatsApped her when I saw the Quinn money and asked her if she was surprised by the exorbitant amounts he’s getting. No, she said, and she added that she thinks they are getting ready to argue that that transgenderism is a disability. I replied: but they have spent years fighting for depathologisation (getting gender dysphoria out of the mental illness category).

Biological sex is the proposed disability, she told me. The wrong body. It took me about two and a half days to even figure out what she meant. When the penny finally dropped, I did a quick search, and there it was: last year, in August 2022, a team of transactivist legal genuises (including Lambda) argued successfully that “born in the wrong body” is a disability and thus transgender people are entitled to protections under the country’s disability act. It seems to square the unsquarable circle: how can you get your transition covered by insurance if it’s not a mental illness? It’s a physical disabilty whose treatment is transition. Genius, to be fair.

Here’s how that was described in a Harvard Law Review article: “The growing medical evidence demonstrates that gender dysphoria derives from an uncommon interaction of the endocrine and neurological systems, which results in a person being born with sex characteristics that are inconsistent with the person’s gender identity.”

Williams v. Kincaid, as the case was called, was a “massive win” “for gender affirming care.” And of course, it’s an equal treatment win, too: if you have a disability, you can’t be excluded from the services and facilities you feel entitled to use, I guess?

Anyway, that’s all just wild speculation but these people play a long game.

That’s all on this for now.

The next part in this series will talk about the VMB-torture-conversion therapy-Sam Brinton-NCLR timeline, and how the SOGI mandate came into this world kicking and screaming. I will continue to go backwards from there.