Corporations That Pushed Gender Ideology Owe America An Explanation

As the human costs of selling “gender-affirming care” en masse continue to rack up, the zeitgeist has decidedly shifted against activist organizations like the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). Only a few short years ago, the tenets of the HRC were considered an indispensable part of the conversation for any politician or corporation looking to claim the mantle of ‘inclusivity.’ 

“History will be brutal to those responsible [for gender ideology]. But almost certainly not brutal enough,” wrote Andrew Sullivan last year, in a withering assessment of how sharply the cultural tides turned on the extremes of the transgender movement. He’s right. Sullivan’s assessment of the HRC now seems far more descriptive of many Americans’ perspective: a “morally bankrupt institution … using the scarred bodies of gender-dysphoric children to fundraise.”

But what’s to be our tactical response to organizations like the Human Rights Campaign, who focus much of their efforts on pressuring private companies to adopt radical activist agendas to avoid being deemed bigoted? The significance of the gender ideology debate is only growing — and the tides have mercifully turned away from narratives like the HRC’s, and back toward sanity and normalcy, President Trump’s recent executive order being one such example. It’s a huge win for the public sector — but how bad is it in the private sector, where activists have been hard at work implementing gender ideology for years?

It’s bad. The incursion of gender ideology into the workplace is perhaps most obvious in the healthcare sector. When it comes to the Human Rights Campaign, and their requirement that companies cover puberty blockers as part of their healthcare plans for a perfect score on their Corporate Equality Index, many of the biggest names in healthcare have bent the knee. Walgreens, UnitedHealth Group, Novo Nordisk, McKesson, and many more have perfect scores on the Index — in the absence of any information to the contrary, they’ve complied with activist demands and allowed gender ideology into their corporate policies.

And that’s not even addressing companies like AbbVie (a company my firm’s currently engaging with), that dodge scrutiny regarding the off-label use of their products as puberty blockers. Dodging scrutiny is a common pattern when it comes to the extent of corporate participation in the radical demands of gender ideology — but it’s a pattern we have the ability to break.

There’s no solution aside from a full-court press when it comes to corporations that kowtowed to gender ideology. The notion of ‘gender-affirming care,’ be it hormone blockers, cosmetic procedures, or sex ‘reassignment’ surgeries, performed on literal children, many of whom were not properly informed about the irreversible risks of their choices, is no longer culturally in vogue — and it’s a damnable shame that it ever was. Now is the moment to retake culture ground for sanity and morality in corporate healthcare policy. Shareholders and customers alike need to leverage their various influences to push companies who are involved with the Human Rights Campaign, or accepted WPATH guidelines, for answers: now that the most radical narratives of gender ideology have crumbled in the face of scrutiny, isn’t it far past time for the biggest names in business to ditch such discredited activist groups?

We cannot, and will not, settle for half-answers or dodgy responses. The tragic and irreversible bodily damage done to generations of Americans in the name of inclusivity and affirmation will one day be viewed as one of the great moral stains of the past century. In the name of good governance, business success, and the basic morality of not mutilating children to appease activist demands, it’s time for companies to not merely right the course on ‘gender-affirming care,’ but recommit to the path of political neutrality and activist-free corporate policies to ensure that such widespread corporate complicity can never happen again.

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Isaac Willour is an award-winning journalist focusing on race, culture, and American conservatism, as well as a corporate relations analyst at Bowyer Research. His work has been featured at outlets including USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Opinion, C-SPAN, and The Daily Wire. He is a member of the Young Voices contributor program and can be found on X @IsaacWillour.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.