Who Funds the Redefinition of Sex?

How Private Philanthropy Influenced Sex Discrimination Law in Australia

This is the fourth piece in a series that began, in some ways, as a question about biology.

In March I published What Is a Woman? A Christian Response on Truth, Compassion and Reality, prompted by a moment in Brazilian politics that revealed how difficult it has become to speak plainly about biological sex in institutional settings. That piece introduced Tickle v Giggle briefly, a case that had not yet reached its final resolution.

Then came Who Shapes the Child?, a response to a serious academic paper arguing for the displacement of parental rights, which traced how legal arguments aligned with institutional incentives travel from journals into policy.

Then, most recently, I published From Philosophy to Federal Court, which traced the full intellectual pipeline: from undergraduate philosophy essays and senior academic papers through to the Full Federal Court judgment handed down on 15 May 2026, a judgment that confirmed that the 2013 gender identity provisions make the exclusion of a transgender woman from a women-only service unlawful, even where that exclusion turns on perceived sexed appearance.

That third piece closed with a question I had been sitting with throughout the research: ideas do not travel on their own. The pipeline from philosophy seminar to Federal Court judgment spans three continents, more than two decades of coordinated advocacy, a Commonwealth legislative amendment, and a body of legal precedent that now shapes how Australian courts interpret sex discrimination law.

None of that happens without resources. Towards the end of writing From Philosophy to Federal Court, I began pulling on a thread, looking at who had funded the organisations, frameworks, and institutional positions that appeared repeatedly in the pipeline. What I found was more documented, more direct, and more traceable than I had expected.

This piece follows that thread. It is written so that someone who has not read the earlier pieces can follow it, but it will reward those who have. The findings are drawn entirely from primary sources: foundation websites, government funding announcements, US State Department records, disclosed grant databases, and the public record.

A Private Room and a Public Record

In 2008, a private meeting took place at the Bellagio Center in Italy. Twenty-nine international leaders gathered to make a commitment: to expand global philanthropy in support of LGBT rights. The host was the Arcus Foundation, a private American charitable organisation founded and funded by Jon Stryker, heir to the Stryker Corporation medical devices fortune.

Among the attendees was Michael O’Flaherty, one of the principal architects of the Yogyakarta Principles, a framework drafted two years earlier by a group of private legal experts in Indonesia, designed to apply international human rights law to questions of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Neither fact is contested. Both are in the public record. Arcus’s own website documented the Bellagio meeting. O’Flaherty’s role in drafting the Yogyakarta Principles is a matter of published biographical record. And the Yogyakarta Principles, a document created by a private gathering of experts, never ratified by any United Nations body, carrying no binding force in international law, are cited across Australian parliamentary submissions, state government policy documents, and advocacy materials as though they constitute binding international legal standards.

These two facts, sitting side by side, are the place to begin. Because the story of who funds the redefinition of sex, and specifically of ‘woman’, in Australian law is not speculative. It is drawn from disclosed grant records, published foundation reports, government funding announcements, and the public record. The pipeline traced in my previous piece had sponsors. Who they are, what they funded, and what they said their goals were, in their own words, is a matter of documented fact.

None of it has been hidden. That is perhaps the most important thing to say at the outset. The organisations described in this article have published their grant records. They have described their objectives in their own documents. The Australian government has announced its co-investment publicly. The only thing required to see this clearly is the willingness to look.

The Arcus Foundation: Scale, Scope, and the Stryker Connection

Jon Stryker founded the Arcus Foundation in 2000. He is the grandson of Homer Stryker, an orthopaedic surgeon who established the Stryker Corporation in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The Stryker Corporation is today one of the largest medical technology companies in the world, manufacturing powered surgical instruments, endoscopic systems, neurosurgical equipment, and a comprehensive range of devices used in surgical theatres globally. Jon Stryker inherited that fortune. Forbes has placed his net worth at approximately USD 5 to 5.8 billion.

Arcus’s own website states that the Foundation has made nearly 3,000 grants totalling approximately $600 million since its establishment, grant-making funded in large part by Jon Stryker himself, whose personal contributions to Arcus have been reported at more than $600 million. The Foundation operates from offices in New York, Kalamazoo, and Cambridge, England. Its social justice program, the arm concerned with LGBTQ advocacy, describes its goal as ensuring that LGBTQ people worldwide can live with dignity, safety, and opportunity.

The Stryker Corporation’s product range includes surgical instruments and endoscopic equipment used across a wide range of clinical specialties, including the soft tissue and endoscopic procedures that form part of surgical practice globally. Jon Stryker retains a shareholding in the Stryker Corporation, whose market capitalisation stood at around USD 120 billion as of May 2026.

These are documented facts. What can be stated with confidence is that Jon Stryker, heir to a fortune built on one of the world’s largest surgical technology companies, has invested more than half a billion dollars of his personal wealth in advocacy movements that support the legal and social normalisation of gender transition procedures and related medical interventions.

Whether readers view that overlap as ethically significant is a matter for public discussion. No claim is made here of direct commercial motive or intentional profit linkage, only that the facts exist, are documented, and are worth knowing.

The Bellagio Meeting, the Yogyakarta Principles, and the UN

The Yogyakarta Principles were drafted in November 2006 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, by a group of twenty-nine international human rights experts convened in a private capacity. They were not commissioned by the United Nations. They were not adopted by any UN body. They carry no binding force in international law. Their authority rests entirely on the prestige of those who drafted them and the willingness of governments, advocates, and courts to treat them as authoritative.

Michael O'Flaherty was one of the two rapporteurs, the lead drafters, who oversaw their creation. In 2008, he sat in a private room in Bellagio, Italy, alongside Jon Stryker and twenty-seven other international leaders, at a meeting convened and hosted by the Arcus Foundation, at which those assembled committed to expanding global philanthropy in support of LGBT rights.

The full participant list, published in Appendix A of the convening report, confirms representatives from the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Institute, Atlantic Philanthropies, Hivos, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Astraea Foundation, the Gill Foundation, the Van Leer Foundation, Mama Cash, and Funders for Lesbian and Gay Issues, together representing the breadth of international LGBT philanthropy at the time.

In short, the room contained the who's who of international progressive philanthropy, the major foundations, advocacy funds, and human rights organisations that collectively direct hundreds of millions of dollars annually toward social change globally.

Also present was Susana Fried, Senior Gender Advisor at the United Nations Development Programme's HIV/AIDS Group, a UN agency representative in a private philanthropic convening, which foreshadowed the coordinated government-philanthropy model that would eventually enrol Australia as a formal co-partner.

Also present was Ise Bosch, granddaughter of Robert Bosch, the German engineer and industrialist who founded the Bosch corporation. Active in LGBTIQ philanthropy since the 1990s, in 2008 she formalised that commitment by selling her shares in the family holding company and establishing Dreilinden, which she has described as one of only two German foundations specialising in international LGBTIQ advocacy. Dreilinden focuses on international LGBTIQ advocacy with an emphasis on the Global South, the same broad region now receiving Australian government co-investment through the Equality Collaboration.

Michael O'Flaherty went on from Bellagio to become Director of the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (2015–2023), the EU's own human rights monitoring body — giving him direct institutional influence over EU-level human rights policy for nearly a decade. Since April 2024 he has served as Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe, a role with even broader institutional reach across the forty-six member states of that body. The man who drafted the Yogyakarta Principles in a private capacity in 2006, sat in a private philanthropic convening in 2008, and has subsequently held two of the most senior human rights institutional roles in Europe.

Andrew Park of Wellspring Advisors, also present at Bellagio, became co-chair of the Global Philanthropy Project. His own CV records that he also initiated process supporting creation of the Yogyakarta Principles and subsequently established funds to support their local adoption in sixty countries, a direct connection between Wellspring Advisors, the Principles' creation, and their global implementation. The convening produced not only a funding commitment but the operational infrastructure, GPP and MAP, that carried its strategic program forward.

That meeting, documented in Arcus’s own published records and the convening’s own proceedings, was the origin point of a coordinated global philanthropic infrastructure that, within fifteen years, had enrolled the Australian government as a formal co-investor.

The Yogyakarta Principles carry no binding force in international law. They were drafted by a private group of experts, never ratified by any UN body. They are nevertheless cited in Australian parliamentary submissions, state government documents, and federal legislation as though they constitute binding international legal standards.

The Yogyakarta Principles' own introduction declares that they "affirm binding international legal standards with which all States must comply", language that Arcus's own website endorses and promotes. That framing requires careful examination. The Principles were not adopted as a treaty and carry no independent binding force. Their own text presents them as an interpretation of existing binding international law, meaning they claim to reflect obligations that already exist, rather than creating new ones.

Whether that interpretive claim is correct is itself contested. What is not contested is that a privately drafted document, produced by experts convened in a non-governmental capacity, was subsequently promoted as though it settled questions of international legal obligation. The more precise question this piece traces is how that document acquired the practical authority of binding law, most concretely, as the cited justification for the Sex Discrimination Amendment Act 2013, which passed through the Commonwealth Parliament and became the legislative vehicle for the Full Federal Court judgment of 15 May 2026, without ever passing through democratic ratification as an international instrument.

A separate Arcus funding line extends the UN connection further. Arcus’s own website confirms that its Social Justice Program funds the institutional infrastructure and research apparatus surrounding the UN Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, first through a grant to the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program, and subsequently through a grant to the Expert’s institutional home at Yale University. The Harvard grant is described as supporting the Expert’s work to “define human rights in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity.”

This is a structural fact about how international norms are shaped in practice. A United Nations independent expert position receives operating support from a private American foundation. That expert's work then shapes the assumptions and standards that governments, including Australia, draw on when making policy and interpreting what their international obligations actually require.

The Legislative Foundation: How the Yogyakarta Framework Reached Australian Law

The Full Federal Court judgment of 15 May 2026 in Giggle for Girls Pty Ltd v Tickle did not happen in a legislative vacuum. It was made possible by a specific amendment to the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 passed in the dying weeks of the Gillard government — the Sex Discrimination Amendment (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersex Status) Act 2013.

That amendment reframed and expanded the Sex Discrimination Act, replacing portions of it with gender-neutral language while introducing gender identity as a protected attribute in Australian federal law for the first time. It was, in effect, the legislative moment at which gender identity became a competing legal category alongside biological sex within Australian anti-discrimination law. Without that legislative vehicle, the legal pathway for Tickle’s claim would have been substantially narrower. The 2013 amendment is the hinge point between the international advocacy framework and the domestic legal outcome.

What is documented in the parliamentary record is the justification the Gillard government gave for those amendments: that Australia needed to align its domestic law with evolving international human rights standards on gender identity. The “international standards” cited, in submissions, in advocacy materials, and in the legislative framing, were precisely the Yogyakarta Principles framework.

The Australian Human Rights Commission made a formal submission to the Senate inquiry as an active proponent of the amendments. Australian Lawyers for Human Rights referenced the Yogyakarta Principles in its submissions. ACON made a submission to the preceding 2012 Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill inquiry. The advocacy architecture was already in place.

The constitutional basis for the amendment was also significant. Under the Australian Constitution, the federal government can pass laws to implement Australia's international treaty obligations, a power known as the External Affairs power. The difficulty was that the international treaties Australia had signed, including CEDAW, the convention on eliminating discrimination against women, and the ICCPR, the international covenant on civil and political rights, make no explicit mention of gender identity or sexual orientation.

What the Gillard government relied on instead was an interpretive argument: that United Nations bodies had concluded these broad treaties implicitly covered gender identity, and that Australia therefore had an obligation to act on that interpretation.

That interpretive argument is precisely what the Yogyakarta Principles had been designed to establish and legitimate. A privately funded framework, promoted as though it reflected settled international law, became part of the interpretive environment used to support a new Australian statute.

The critical distinction, one that critics of the 2013 amendment have raised, is that the External Affairs power traditionally requires conformity to a ratified treaty. The Yogyakarta Principles are not a ratified treaty. They were used instead as an authoritative interpretive gloss on ratified treaties, a step further removed from formal democratic authorisation than even a conventional treaty obligation would require.

The pipeline now runs to a documented thirteen-year chain: Arcus convenes and funds infrastructure promoting the Yogyakarta framework globally (2008) → framework promoted as binding international standard in Australian submissions → Gillard government amends the Sex Discrimination Act in 2013 citing international alignment → 2013 amendment provides the legal vehicle → Full Federal Court judgment, 15 May 2026.

This is not a conspiracy. It is how sustained, coordinated, well-resourced advocacy operates when it understands that the real contest is about institutional definitions rather than public opinion. Most Australians were not paying attention to the 2013 amendment when it passed. The people who drafted it, submitted on it, and framed its justification, were.

Targeting the Church: What Arcus’s Own Records Show

For readers of this site, one part of the Arcus grant record warrants direct attention, not because it is the most significant element of the funding infrastructure, but because it is directly relevant to the Christian community and because it comes from Arcus’s own disclosed objectives.

The Catholic News Agency and National Catholic Register have both reported on Arcus grant records revealing a sustained campaign targeting religious communities. These reports draw directly from Arcus’s own grant database. The grants are not alleged. They are disclosed.

A 2014 grant is described in Arcus's own records, as reported by the Catholic News Agency and National Catholic Register drawing from those records, as designed to “support pro-LGBT faith advocates to influence and counter the narrative of the Catholic Church and its ultra-conservative affiliates” in relation to the Synod on the Family and World Youth Day. Arcus has disclosed at least $200,000 in grants to a coalition of groups with this objective. The Religion News Service received Arcus funding to place stories countering traditional Christian positions. The Catholics United Education Fund received Arcus grants; it later attracted scrutiny in connection with John Podesta’s “Catholic Spring” emails.

The ACLU connections are documented with equal precision. In 2013, Arcus provided a $600,000 grant to the ACLU specifically for its Campaign to End the Use of Religion to Discriminate. A 2014 grant of $100,000 supported, in Arcus’s own language, “communications strategies to convince conservative Americans that religious exemptions are ‘un-American." A 2016 grant of $150,000, as reported from Arcus grant records, funded “a national coordinated media and public-education campaign to beat back religious exemptions at federal and state levels.”

In 2021, Jon Stryker and his husband made a personal donation of $15 million to the ACLU, the largest LGBT-focused gift in the organisation’s history. The ACLU announced it would use the gift to “change the law and create a culture where discrimination against LGBTQ people is unfathomable.” The ACLU’s LGBTQ and HIV Project has been renamed in their honour.

Arcus also directed grants at evangelical Protestant and Muslim communities, funding Muslims for Progressive Values to challenge religious exemption claims and cultivate LGBT advocates among imams and Muslim leaders. This is not a campaign directed at one faith tradition. It is a systematic program of influence across religious communities, conducted with disclosed funding and stated objectives, operating over more than a decade.

The appropriate Christian response to this is not outrage. It is clarity. What Arcus has funded in the religious space is structured, well-resourced persuasion aimed at changing what Christians believe and how they engage publicly with questions of sexual identity and religious freedom. Christians who want to engage this question faithfully need to know it is happening, and to understand its institutional architecture, rather than being surprised by it or dismissing concerns about it as paranoid.

The Australian Government Pipeline

The connections traced so far are international. The question for Australian readers is how they connect to Australian domestic policy. The answer is direct, documented, and public.

On 1 March 2023, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong announced Australia’s Inclusion and Equality Fund at the Sydney WorldPride Human Rights Conference, an event organised by Equality Australia. Foreign Minister Wong’s speech committed AUD 3.5 million annually to support LGBTQIA+ civil society organisations and human rights defenders in Asia and the Pacific, and is published on the Australian government website.

The Global Philanthropy Project (GPP), originally developed as a coordinating committee hosted by the Arcus Foundation, co-wrote the Partnering with Pride report with Equality Australia calling for Australia to establish this fund, and co-hosted the pre-WorldPride convening that immediately preceded the announcement. GPP’s own website describes this as “GPP and EA’s successful advocacy for the Australian Government to establish the Inclusion and Equality Fund.” GPP is a listed member organisation on Arcus’s own website.

Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) has since expanded the Inclusion and Equality Fund into the Equality Collaboration, a six-year, AUD 20.9 million investment (approximately USD 14 million at current exchange rates) running from 2025 to 2031, confirmed in DFAT’s own published program summary. Initial grants have already been disbursed to nine regional networks and 44 national and grassroots organisations across Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

The formal co-investment relationship between Australia and Arcus goes further. The US State Department's Global Equality Fund page, archived here before its removal under the current administration, listed the partners of this public-private partnership managed by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. Those partners included Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the Arcus Foundation. Jon Stryker's private philanthropic organisation and the Australian government were formal co-partners in the same international advocacy infrastructure, listed side by side on the same US government website.

To be clear about what that means: Australian taxpayer money and Jon Stryker's private fortune are formally listed as joint funders of the same international advocacy program, on the same United States government webpage.

The sequence is worth holding in view. A private American foundation funds the development of an international legal framework. That framework is promoted as binding international law. It provides the justification for a Commonwealth legislative amendment. That amendment provides the vehicle for a federal discrimination claim. A peak Australian advocacy body, co-funded through a network with direct institutional roots in that foundation, organises the event at which Australia’s Foreign Minister announces formal co-investment with that foundation.

The chain from Bellagio in 2008 to DFAT in 2025 is traceable at every link.

The Redefinition of Sex and What This Means for Australia

I want to be precise about what I am and am not arguing here.

I am not arguing that Penny Wong made her announcement under instruction from Jon Stryker. I am not arguing that Australian officials are corrupt or that advocates within these organisations act without genuine conviction. And I am not arguing that the people who work within this philanthropic and advocacy infrastructure have no genuine concern for the wellbeing of LGBTQ+ people. Many of them do, and that should be acknowledged.

What I am arguing is structural, and it is what this series has been tracing from the beginning: the pipeline through which ideas, and the legal and policy frameworks built on them, travel from private rooms to government announcements is not the product of spontaneous democratic movement. It is resourced. It is coordinated. It is institutionally connected. And the coordination runs from a private American foundation through an international network of organisations to Australian foreign policy and, as established in my previous piece, to the reasoning of the Full Federal Court.

Most Australians who care about these questions do not have access to grant databases, philanthropic networks, and research teams. They have jobs and families and limited time. The people who shaped the legal environment in which Sall Grover was found to have discriminated unlawfully were not operating on equivalent terms. They were organised, resourced, and operating over decades. That asymmetry is not, by itself, evidence of wrongdoing. But it is something a democracy that values honest public reasoning ought to name plainly.

In my previous piece I wrote that the contest was not about individual attitudes but about institutional definitions: about what words mean in the places where decisions get made. This piece has tried to show where the resources that shaped those definitions, and drove the redefinition of sex itself in Australian law, came from. Not because that resolves the underlying questions, but because informed civic engagement requires knowing what forces are at work.

The Love of Money and the Institutions It Shapes

The saying most people know is that money is the root of all evil. The actual text, in Paul’s first letter to Timothy, is more precise: ‘the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.’ Some, Paul continues, in their eagerness for it have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. That precision matters. This piece has not been an argument that wealth is inherently corrupting or that philanthropy is inherently suspect. I do not doubt that many of the people within this network act from genuine conviction about human dignity. But Paul’s warning is not directed at the corrupt. It is directed at those whose love of something, money, influence, a cause, displaces the ordering that holds everything else in place.

What I have documented in this piece is the sustained use of private wealth to reshape the institutions that govern public life, and to do so in ways that directly targeted the Christian faith and the natural family. These were not incidental consequences of a broader program. Arcus grant records, as reported by Catholic News Agency and National Catholic Register, describe funding designed to 'counter the narrative of the Catholic Church,” to “beat back religious exemptions,” to cultivate dissent within Christian and Muslim communities, and to redirect the teaching of the Church on marriage and sexuality. That is not a neutral philanthropic program. It is a funded campaign against the convictions of millions of believers, conducted with the resources of a private fortune and the machinery of international institutions.

The natural family is not a cultural preference or a conservative political position. It is a creational reality, the architecture within which new human life comes into being, in which children are formed and loved, in which men and women learn what it means to be responsible to someone beyond themselves. Genesis 1:27 does not describe a social construct. Matthew 19 does not record Jesus appealing to cultural convention.

When that architecture is targeted for legal redefinition, not through honest democratic deliberation but through a coordinated pipeline of funded scholarship, aligned institutional networks, and norm-setting presented as though carrying binding authority, I think Christians are right to name it plainly for what it is.

I want to be careful here, as I have tried to be throughout this series, not to tip from clarity into contempt. I am not writing about enemies. I am writing about a structural reality that has consequences for people I love, my wife, my daughters, my grandchildren, the women concerned about the narrowing of sex-based exclusions in law, the Christians whose freedom of conscience is being steadily narrowed. Naming the architecture that produced those consequences is not the same as hating the people inside it. But naming it is necessary. We cannot engage honestly with what we cannot see clearly.

Jesus said you cannot serve both God and money. I take that not as a warning about wealth alone but as a warning about what happens when any resource, money, institutional power, philanthropic reach, is placed in the position that belongs to God.

When it begins to define what words mean, what families are permitted to be, what churches are allowed to say, it has been elevated somewhere it was never meant to go.

The question I raised in What Is a Woman? in March has not changed: when we lose the ability to speak plainly about what words mean, we do not become more compassionate. We become less able to protect those who depend on us.

What this piece has tried to show is that the loss of that clarity was not organic, not inevitable, and not accidental.

It was funded. And now, through the Equality Collaboration and our co-partnership in the Global Equality Fund, it is funded in part by us.