Transcript: Jennifer Bilek on the true roots of the transgender movement

Meghan Murphy speaks with Jennifer Bilek about the men and money behind the transgender movement

Jennifer Bilek is a writer, a journalist, and an artist. As many of us struggled to understand the seemingly sudden onset of gender identity ideology and wonder how it took hold of institutions so quickly, Jennifer dug in and found the truth: billionaires, biotech, and transhumanists.

I spoke with Jennifer about her research and what she found about the roots of the transgender movement after “following the money.”

This interview has been edited for clarity and readability.

You can listen to an audio version of our conversation on the Feminist Current podcast.

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Meghan Murphy: Jennifer, thank you so much for joining me. It's so great to talk to you at long last.

Thank you, Meghan. I'm so happy to be here. I really appreciate your inviting me.

MM: I would love it if you could tell me a little bit about yourself.

JB: God, I just hate using labels today. They squeeze you into a box so easily. But I mean, I guess we need them.

I'm an artist, basically. I've been an artist all my life. I'm a painter. I'm also a writer. I've been a writer for many, many years. I got into journalism at the time of Occupy Wall Street. A friend of mine is a photographic journalist, and she was photographing Occupy Wall Street. She asked me if I would write about it — you know, contributions to go with her photographs.

I'm also — and here we go again — a feminist. I've been a feminist since I was probably in my 20s. I'm probably a very bad feminist... That label is really becoming kind of caustic because nobody really knows what it means anymore. Feminism has been so fractured, especially here in the United States. There's so many factions. You know, there's environmental feminism and there's cyber feminism and there's radical feminism and liberal feminism and corporate feminism. There are so many different feminisms that it's like, well, what are you talking about?

I really like what Kelly Jay Keen is doing in the UK — calling yourself a campaigner for women's rights. I love that because it cuts to the chase: what are you doing instead of what are you. I've been informed by feminist theory, but that's not the total of who I am. It's information that I've taken in and processed, and it's one of the lenses that I view life through.

I also got into the environmental movement [when I was in my 20s]. There's another loaded statement — the environmental movement. What does that mean? [These environmental groups] have all been so corporatized now that it's just ridiculous. I fought for the wellness of the planet. I've put my energies into that and have written about that.

I haven't painted in probably six years because I went down this rabbit hole of the gender industry — what has turned into an industry.

MM: When did you start looking into what you called the gender industry?

JB: Well, it was probably around 2013. I started to gather some material.

I had written a piece for Female Erasure with a colleague and we addressed the money aspect of this. So it was around that time that I started investigating.

I was working with this group on the West Coast and they were trying to get some platforms to speak, but they had already been pigeonholed as transphobic because they acknowledged biological reality. So every time they tried to speak somewhere, all these young people would show up with pink hair and bones in their nose and start screaming. So they couldn't really get any work done. So I said, "Well, let me try and get you some platforms in New York" (you know, New York City where I was).

I didn't realize how deep this actually had gone — you know, the whole censorship thing. And so when I called these different places in New York that could potentially platform them, I secured like three different venues and then I was canceled. You know, like a few days later they'd call back and say, "Oh, we can't, we can't do it." They wouldn't really give a sound reason. But I knew what it was... And I was like, "Wow, this is really something. This is really something because these kids have no power. Who's doing this? Why is this happening?" We have a first amendment here in this country, you know, free speech.

And then of course you and Jordan Peterson were up in Canada talking about the forced speech upon you and him and how dangerous that was. We sort of lost that thread along the way, which I think is really disastrous because it was a really, really important one.

MM: Yeah, he focused on that issue of compelled speech. We both testified at the Senate against Bill C-16 in 2017, and I focused more on the impact on women and girls and the sexism behind gender identity ideology, which, you know, was completely ignored.

JB: Of course. Fast forward all these years later, still completely ignored.

So that's how I got into this.

MM:  I think you did what nobody else really did at the time. Maybe more people are looking into this now, but you still don't really hear about it much. But you, as you said earlier, looked at the money aspect.

I was looking at it from a political perspective — from a feminist perspective, from an ideological perspective. Also, of course from a reality perspective and a free speech perspective. But I had no idea where this came from. I struggled for years to figure out, you know, why did this happen? How did these activists have so much power to be changing laws and institutions across the world?

When did you catch on to the fact that this was a much bigger project than what it was sold as, which was like this grassroots movement for the rights of so-called transgender people.

JB: Well, you know, I'm an American, so whenever we want to find out anything, we follow the money. And money trails don't lie. They tell you everything that you need to know. So that's where I started. So it was quite evident, rather quickly, that this was all connected to the techno medical complex. One of the families that I found first was the Pritzkers.