One of Joe Biden’s first acts as president of the United States was to sign, within two weeks of his inauguration, a “Memorandum on Advancing the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Persons Around the World.”
You would have thought that an incoming American president had more important things to worry about than promoting a fashionable urban cosmopolitan agenda which would alienate large swathes of the planet.
This memorandum directs the following US departments and agencies to fight for LGBTQIA+ rights around the world: the Departments of State, the Treasury, Defense, Justice, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, and Homeland Security, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the United States International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the Export-Import Bank of the United States, the Office of the United States Trade Representative, “and such other agencies as the President may designate”.
It is backed up by a 132-page Interagency Report issued by the State Department explaining how these various departments and agencies must work together for this cause. The fact that LGBT rights are a “core part” of US foreign policy was reaffirmed in March by the State Department spokesman and US embassies around the world flew the LGBT flag on 17 May, the International Day against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia.
In other words, the whole of the US government, including the Pentagon, is involved in this fight for LGBT rights. President Biden has listed six areas in which these gigantic ministries and agencies have been instructed to “combat discrimination, homophobia, transphobia, and intolerance on the basis of LGBTQI+ status or conduct.”
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Indeed, it is not just American departments, agencies and embassies abroad which have been instructed to campaign for this. NATO itself has announced that part of its mission is to fight for LGBT rights. Jens Stoltenberg devoted a special video to the issue on 17 May explaining that it is part of NATO’s mission to defend LGBT rights. He said he was the “ally” of the LGBT community, a phrase also repeated by his spokesman in her tweet of the same date. Yet “ally” is an important word in the NATO vocabulary. Usually used to refer to NATO member states, its use in this context implies that NATO will use its military force to promote and defend LGBT people and their rights over and above the general defence of NATO member states.
Many people will think it entirely normal to be tolerant towards gays. But the debate has moved far beyond this. It is now considered transphobic and reactionary to forbid transsexuals from changing their birth certificates or not to allow gay marriage and adoption. Issues which were hardly even dreamed of a few years ago are now being imposed on third countries by the US government, military and its allies.
These are recent developments but their pre-history is much older. Transgenderism was first researched and ideologized in the late 19th and early 20th century by a German sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) who promoted the idea of a “third sex”. This has entered the law of certain European countries, such as Germany, and that of the United States, which now permit people to declare their gender as X. Hirschfeld’s associate Harry Benjamin, born in Germany in 1885 and who emigrated to the US where he died in 1986, took transgender theory across the Atlantic where it flourished. He published The Transgender Phenomenon in 1966.
Benjamin’s associate John Money is the founder of gender theory: he published Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment in 1969 and founded the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic in 1971. This was the first clinic to perform gender reassignment surgery. Money is notorious for having promoted the sex change of a boy, Bruce Reimer, in 1965 : the boy refused to accept his new female identity and both he and his twin brother were so traumatized by the experience that they committed suicide in 2004. John Money’s colleague, Robert Stoller (1924-1991), professor of psychiatry UCLA and researcher at UCLA Gender Identity Clinic, was an early advocate of sex conversion ‘therapy’ for young children. All of these people were influenced by Alfred Kinsey whose Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948) had an immense influence throughout the following decades until he was exposed by Judith Reisman (1935 - 2021) as a paedophile and his work thoroughly discredited.
John Money in turn influenced the chief ideologue of gender theory, the philosopher, Judith Butler, also based in California, at Berkeley. Born in 1956, Butler is an immensely influential figure whose work has essentially created gender theory – the theory that male and female are social constructs which do not necessarily coincide with a person’s biological sex. In its most extreme form, gender theory dovetails with transgenderism and even paedophilia. There are numerous activists today, especially in international organisations, which promote very early sex education (lessons about masturbation for children between the ages of 0 and 4, for instance) and early sex reassignment. Robert Stoller, for instance, said that such reassignment would become more difficult after the age of 5.
All these people are based in the USA. Gender theory is essentially an American invention and an American export. Its adoption by the United States government as a “core element” of US foreign policy – transsexuality is the T in LGBT – is only the latest example of the US government energetically pursuing so-called progressive policies, through its numerous agencies including its intelligence agencies, as part of the country’s battle in the Cold War against a Soviet Russia which was depicted as socially backward. This has been excellently documented in Frances Stonor-Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War (1999) which deals with the work of the CIA supporting left-wing anti-Soviet writers and artists.
Today, LGBT issues are at the forefront of the conflict with Russia. On the day after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the head of MI6 in London tweeted that the most important issue in the conflict was LGBT rights. Vladimir Putin has also addressed the issue, on the other side of the argument, attacking transgenderism for children as “pure Satanism” and calling for “a healthy conservatism” to face down the woke agenda emanating from the US and the EU.
John Laughland is director of Forum for Democracy International. This article first appeared on FVDInternational.com. We reprinted it here with permission of the author.