by felicia rembrandt
With the recent creation of the International Trans Fund headed by Torontonian Broden Giambrone, it is becoming clear that the massive American Medical Industrial complex is using Canada as a staging point in its drive to push synthetic sex identities into every country on the planet -- and using women as the principal almsgivers.
GenderDissent has already profiled Aaron Devor of the University of Victoria, recipient of millions in funding from the Pritzker’s Tawani Foundation, and Kim Vance Mubanga, of the Arcus-funded Arc International.
Like Arc International, the International Trans Fund (ITF) looks suspiciously like it was created by the Arcus Foundation itself, with an origin story that cloaks the reality, and a director who is simply chief almoner, Canadian division, of the Arcus syndicate.
The Arcus Foundation is registered as a philanthropic organization, although it might better be described as the marketing arm of the Stryker Medical Corporation. It is run by Jon Stryker and funded primarily by Stryker Medical.
According to A Gender Variance Who’s Who, Giambrone was born in 1982 in Toronto of Italian immigrant parents who settled first in the US but moved to Canada to avoid the war in Vietnam.
She completed a BA in Sociology at McGill University, Montréal in 2006. In 2007 she was part of a “G/B/Q Trans men HIV Prevention Working Group” (now QueerTransmen.org) which wrote the health guide Getting Primed: The Back Pocket Guide for Transmen and the Men Who Dig Them.
She then became a volunteer with the social justice organization OPIRG at York University, Toronto, followed by a stint with Ontario’s Trans Pulse, working on HIV health issues. In 2010 she completed a Master of Public Health at the University of Toronto.
Interviewed by The Toronto Star, she said she became uncomfortable with her body when she entered puberty. She started wrong sex hormones when she was 22 and had surgery a few years later. She claims a synthetic male identity.
In 2011 she went to Dublin where she became CEO of the Transgender Equality Network Ireland (TENI) until 2017. According to its website, she was instrumental in transforming a volunteer-run organization into a professional body, and in getting the Gender Recognition Act passed through parliament there in 2015.
Then, in 2017 the ITF was calved from the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, with Giambrone named director, and TENI’s Chairperson, Sara R Phillips, named treasurer. The company is headquartered in Toronto. Its website states:
The International Trans Fund (ITF) is a trans activist and funder-led initiative that aims to increase the capacity of trans movements globally to self-organize and advocate for trans people’s rights, self- determination, and wellbeing. The ITF works to mobilize sustainable resources to help build strong, trans-led movements and collective action, and to address and eliminate funding gaps impacting trans groups across the globe.
Giambrone is the “trans activist” parachuting millions of dollars from primarily American funders into small countries to stimulate -- and simulate -- local grassroots organizations who lobby their governments for justice. The synthetic sex industry is no longer hiding the fact that this is a top-down initiative seeding trans activism is tiny countries throughout Asia, Africa and central and south America.
Exactly what relationship exists between Giambrone’s ITF and the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice is murky. The Astraea Lesbian Foundation was founded in 1977, and by 1996 had morphed into an “LGBTI” organization. In 2012 it was the recipient of the US government’s first significant financial contribution to international “LGBTI rights” and has been receiving Arcus funding since 2007 as well as regular donations from George Soros’ Open Societies Foundation (OSF). The Gender Critical Woman blog has further information on them.
The Astraea Lesbian Foundation received a half million dollar grant from Arcus in 2016 for the new ITF organization. But in 2018 the OSF again gave the Astrea Lesbian society $150,000 to support the ITF. This was the same year that Arcus gave the ITF $500,000 directly.
In one of its grants, Arcus described the ITF as part of a Global Trans Initiative. The Global Trans Initiative (GTI) was a five-year initiative begun in 2015 and funded by Arcus and the NoVo foundation, which is part of the NoVo Nordisk pharmaceutical company of Denmark. According to the Arcus website:
In addition to Arcus’ own increased level of grantmaking to trans organizations, the Global Trans Initiative committed at least $20 million in trans-related funding—a goal it surpassed. The NoVo Foundation gave $1.125 million to the Fund for Trans Generations at Borealis Philanthropy. The International Trans Fund also launched during this period with $4.5 million from other funding partners, including philanthropist Mackenzie Scott.
Mackenzie Scott is the divorced wife of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who has publicly vowed to divest herself of $45 million USD.
In 2019 Arcus donated another $500,000 and in 2020 $1 million spread over two years.
In 2017 the ITF funnelled money from its western donors to 29 organizations in 23 countries. By 2021 it was funding 50 groups in 41 countries, from Russia to Ecuador, Tajikistan to Burundi, Mongolia to Paraguay.
Giambrone and ILGA
In 2016 the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) interviewed Giambrone for its 2017 Trans Legal Mapping Report, produced by the ILGA World Trans Secretariat. The purpose of the report was to “draw attention to how laws in different countries recognise the rights of trans people to change their identity markers on official documents.”
Speaking about the success of TENI in Ireland, she said:
Ultimately, what is the most likely to sway national legislatures is the "hearts and minds" stories (e.g. getting people to share their personal narrative). However, if you are trying to make an advocacy and legal argument (particularly in terms of human rights), it is really helpful to have UN level jurisprudence reinforcing what you are telling the government.
In other words, her advice to “trans” organizations was to deploy the sob stories so prevalent in the mainstream media, and leapfrog over the national government to some putative UN document. Often that document is the Yogyakarta Principles (YP), never signed by any UN agency.
In 2020 ILGA World joined 200 other organizations in something called a Women’s Rights Caucus to create a “Feminist Declaration” meant to supercede the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which was reaffirmed by the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women the same year.
This alternative Feminist Declaration makes the claim that the goals of the trans cult are those of true feminism. In section 14, it demands that governments:
Respect the rights of all individuals to exercise autonomy over their lives, including their sexualities, identities and bodies, desires and pleasures free from all types of discrimination, coercion and violence, and fully realize sexual and reproductive rights, and ensure bodily autonomy, integrity and sovereignty, by taking the following actions:
a. Eliminate all laws and policies that punish or criminalize same-sex intimacy, gender affirmation, abortion, HIV transmission non-disclosure and exposure, or that limit the exercise of bodily autonomy, including laws limiting legal capacity of adolescents, people with disabilities or other groups to provide consent to sex or sexual and reproductive health services [emphasis mine] or laws authorizing non-consensual abortion, sterilization, or contraceptive use;
b. Put in place affirmative measures to reduce violence, stigma and discrimination against people based on their sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, and sex characteristics, [emphasis mine] enact legal protections for LGBTQ, gender non-conforming and intersex people, and take other legal, policy, and educational measures to support individuals to exercise autonomy over their bodies and lives . . .
This is a document that demands everyone be available for sexual use, including those we currently consider unable to give consent due to either immaturity, or intellectual disability. At the same time it demands those same people be available to the synthetic sex industry for body modification drugs and surgeries.
Its anti-discrimination clause uses the language of the Yogyakarta Principles, which replace the two sex categories with gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics. It fails to demand measures to protect women and girls from discrimination.
It seems significant that, although the website of the Women’s Rights Caucus provides a link to its Feminist Declaration, that link is non-functioning. The only functioning link is on the website of Arc International, the Canadian company that organized the Yogykarta conference and holds the YP.
Incidentally, ILGA held a world conference last May in Long Beach, California, hosted by the It Gets Better Project. According to the conference program, members were interested in Canada’s Bill C4, the Anti-Conversion Therapy Bill that demands that “affirmation” be the only response to children who are confused about their sex.
Just last year when Bill C4 was being debated, It Gets Better Canada garnered 127,104 votes on a petition in support of the bill.
Dozens of Canadian organizations are members of ILGA. Aside from the expected LGBTrans+ organizations, they include : the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the Canadian Labour Congress , Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario , Ontario Public Service Employees Union, Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation, Ontario Federation of Labour.
According to its website, all members must support the aims of ILGA. If the aims of ILGA and of the Women’s Rights Caucus are the same, then these public service institutions support the elimination of all laws regarding who can engage in sexual activity and who can be available to the synthetic sex industry.
Giambrone and the Global Philanthropy Project
In 2020 Giambrone moved to the Global Philanthropy Project (GPP), which is hosted and “fiscally sponsored” by the Astraea Lesbian Foundation – although what exactly happened with the “move” is unclear.
Although her Zoominfo page lists her as leaving the ITF in 2019, Giambrone is still listed on the ITF website as director. The same zoominfo page lists her as a “partner” with the GPP. However, it is the ITF rather than Giambrone who appears on the GPP site, as a member rather than a partner.
The GPP website explains:
Global Philanthropy Project (GPP) is a collaboration of funders and philanthropic advisors working to expand global philanthropic support to advance the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) people in the Global South and East.
Established in 2009, GPP’s 18 member organizations include many of the leading global funders and philanthropic advisors for LGBTI rights. As the first international cohort of LGBTI funders, GPP is internationally recognized as the primary thought leader and go-to partner for donor coordination around global LGBTI work.
Global Philanthropy Project is organized through a core Executive Committee and three member working groups, which are focused on Government/Multilateral Funding, Individual Donor Funding, and Trans* Funding. GPP is a key source of strategic research and analysis for global LGBTI funders. GPP also plays a central role in convening philanthropists and human rights activists for opportunities to increase knowledge, skills and capacity towards expanding global LGBTI funding. These convening spaces includes donor pre-conferences during regional LGBTI convenings, funder webinars, and report release events.
The Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice serves as host and fiscal sponsor of GPP.
The GPP has 22 members, including the Astraea Lesbian Foundation, the International Trans Fund, Arcus, and the Open Societies Foundation.
It also has a similar number of partners, divided into “donor partners,” “research partners” and “programmatic partners”. Both member and donor lists contain the “who’s who” of multi-million dollar synthetic sex industry backers.
The GPP is clearly an umbrella organization which shelters a number of organizations that fund each other in complex, multi-layered ways. You can read more about them in the Gender Critical Woman blog here.
The GPP is currently embarked on a propaganda campaign to discredit the growing movement that seeks to protect women’s sex-based rights, and children’s rights to grow up naturally as opposed to surgically and chemically castrated.
In what seems to be counter-intuitive, the executive director of Elevate Children Funders Group (a GPP partner), Heather Hamilton, and the GPP have formed an alliance to defend against claims gender ideology harms women and children.
In a document incredibly titled “Manufacturing Moral Panic: Weaponizing Children to Undermine Gender Justice and Human Rights,” they warn their members and partners about the gender critical movement, which they reframe as “gender restrictive,” calling it the “wide transnational movement of religious groups, politicians, secular researchers and civil society organizations who oppose what they call ‘gender ideology’ , a pejorative term they use to describe efforts to support women’s, LGBTI and sexual and reproductive rights.”
Note that they are now claiming the synthetic sex industry in partnership with the trans cult is the real protector of women’s rights.
The GPP has also formed a “Responding to Anti-Gender Ideology Task Force” whose goal is to:
strengthen and expand philanthropic support for a robust, coordinated, and well-informed response to “anti-gender ideology” (AGI) forces that transcends and connects across philanthropic sectors. The objectives are to identify and map the progressive philanthropic actors responding to the AGI movement, evaluate the health of that funding ecosystem, and deepen the knowledge, skills, and capacity of progressive philanthropic response through research, public programs, and information-sharing.
These are the people and organizations Giambrone is partnering with, so many of them women or run by women, claiming to be the champions not only of “trans” people, but of women and children, claiming the mantle of feminism.
In 2007 Giambrone told The Star’s reporter she was “passionate about changing society's perception of transgender people but it won't necessarily be his [sic] life's work.” That she is now affiliated with the world’s largest organizations to market gender ideology and synthetic sex identities around the world is testament to the role that women can play when they fall in line behind a men’s rights movement. They are collaborators now, but how long will it be until they find they have been pawns in their own destruction?
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