In the past a multitude of shareholder proposals from liberal investors have called upon companies to re-examine their employee compensation practices, alleging that they are inequitable across race and/or gender categories.
The impression these activists want to convey is that corporate leaders engage in pay discrimination against minorities, women, and other “marginalized” workers.
It's identity politics in the business world, pressuring corporate decisionmakers to recognize the fringiest outliers of racial subclassifications and sexual “identities” as aggrieved parties. This creates Alinskyite chaos, which undermines what should be common-sense human resource practices.
But rather than push back, corporate leaders seem only too happy to cooperate. Consequently, the DEI/ESG paradigm is entrenched.
So as conservative-leaning shareholder activists, my organization decided to use the progressive investors’ construct. In the process, we are coming to the defense of a truly damaged class of individuals: de-transitioners.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) forbids discrimination by employers “in the payment of wages or employee benefits on the bases of race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information.”
De-transitioners are individuals who have suffered gender dysphoria, and were steered by their medical and psychological practitioners to drastic, body-altering procedures and surgeries in attempts to change to the opposite biological sex. After enduring such mistreatments, they regret their decisions and desire to go back to their normal, God-designed conditions.
However, they find there are no remedial options – much less insurance to cover them. Among them are Chloe Cole, patient advocate for medical community watchdog group Do No Harm, who is a de-transitioner who is still trying to recover from the damage done to her. “I reached out to every physician, every therapist who is involved with this, and I haven’t really gotten any help at all,” she said.
What were big corporations’ role in it all? They’ve been scoreboard-watching – the Human Rights Campaign’s scoreboard, to be exact.
Among the top left-wing activist groups’ ratings treasured by public companies is HRC’s Corporate Equality Index (CEI). If any company gets less than a 100-percent grade, it is considered a failure.
In order to reach this achievement, there are several criteria established by HRC that businesses must comply with. Chief among them is for human resources departments to provide full coverage for any and all gender-transitioning (or “-affirming” in the LGBTQIA+ parlance) “care.” Failure to do so costs a company points on the CEI.
Having been mutilated or disfigured, de-transitioners consider the sex-change “affirmation” policies in corporate culture to be deceptive and destructive. And because de-transitioners are protected classes under “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” in the eyes of the EEOC, and cannot get care or insurance coverage, they have been discriminated against.
Hence our organization’s shareholder proposals, which call upon three companies – Disney, Johnson & Johnson, and PepsiCo – to re-assess their discriminatory pay and benefits practices that exclude de-transitioners from the care that they need.
All three companies responded in their proxy statements that the analyses required by our proposals are unnecessary, and ask all their shareholders to oppose them. Johnson & Johnson and PepsiCo do so with predictable corporate-speak, but don’t deny that de-transitioners have no benefits. But Disney’s dismissive response to our proposal is especially odious and offensive, alleging that our organization has a “narrow focus” and that we are just trying to get attention.
But groups like HRC and their allies in Corporate America have constructed this discrimination paradigm, with its would-be victims under a multitude of LGBTQIA+ “identities,” and its associated regulatory language, all on their own. Their leaders consider themselves enlightened and altruistic because of it.
Except with de-transitioners, we have identified a category of human beings that these companies are not fair to – a group that has suffered irremediable maiming and scarring, due to the LGBTQIA+ advocates’ own standards.
HRC, companies like Disney, and their political allies all built this edifice. Now they project their own conduct and attitudes upon those they scorn. But we are only following the rules they created.
