I hope this is the year people fighting the gender hydra, with its proliferation of harms across society, finally recognize that this is not a culture war. It is a war against a rapidly expanding industry built on the deconstruction of sex and, like any profitable industry, it will continue growing until it is stopped. Calling it a medical scandal, misogyny, or social contagion will not create a sustainable resistance unless people understand it as an industry.
At the heart of the matter is the fact that industries in capitalist systems must expand to survive. And once they do, once a market forms, they’re near-impossible to erase. They begin to multiply, as others see opportunity. Consider pornography: despite widespread harm, eliminating it has proven impossible, so far.
The illusion of more sexes must be created and solidified – opening new consumer categories
The business of gender identity has operated in the same way. Even if it is eventually rooted out from institutions, removing it from the market will be nearly impossible – until and unless people begin to recognize it for what it is: an economic engine. People opposed to it focus on gender identity as ideology, but it is foremost a marketing campaign, a fusion of corporate power, political interests and cultural ideology. That is why the concept of “transgenderism” entered the cultural lexicon, reshaped institutions and was written into law.
Corporations, Big Tech, Big Pharma, financial institutions and governments do not pursue unprofitable ventures at industry scale. They remain interested in what they have always pursued: market expansion.
Sexual orientation became a market long before gender identity came along. The early gay civil-rights movement sought legal protection for same-sex-attracted people. That protection was necessary but a political community built around sexual orientation meant a new market too, one focused around sex-based identities. During the AIDS crisis, same-sex-attracted people organized for survival and power, and were simultaneously turned into a political constituency and a pharmaceutical market. HIV/AIDS drug revenue reached billions annually by the early 2000s (for example, $3.8 billion in 2000), and the global HIV drug market is now estimated at more than $34 billion – and still growing.
Global HIV/AIDS spending peaked at approximately $49.7 billion in 2013, just as “transgenderism” exploded into mainstream vernacular. This figure represents total global expenditure on the HIV response, including care, treatment, research and prevention, not just pharmaceutical revenue.
Male consumers of synthetic sex characteristics (transsexuals) are disproportionately affected by HIV, and the same clinics historically serving gay communities expanded to incorporate “gender medicine,” (meaning medical assaults on healthy reproductive systems) alongside HIV services.
LGB civil-rights advocacy was ultimately absorbed into the medical-industrial complex during the AIDS era, creating a permanent market around sexual identity. Same-sex attraction itself requires nothing to sustain it. It simply exists.
But once corporate culture built branding, NGOs and political influence around same-sex attraction, it became a powerful commercial constituency, now valued in the trillions globally. In other words: Big Pharma already had a foothold inside the LGB-focused NGOs and medical system, but to expand further – particularly to youth – it needed a rebrand and transsexualism became the next growth market.
Transgenderism is a corporate narrative built on tech-fantasy claims of changing sex (or obliterating it altogether), pharmaceutical dependency, fetish culture, homophobia projected onto children, and adolescent insecurity. Once the concept took hold, gender identities multiplied – and the market multiplied with them.
Many same-sex-attracted people ask not to be lumped in with gender identity ideology. But gender identity is simply an expansion of commodifiable sex identities, and a market based on sex identities cannot expand very far with only two sexes.
The illusion of more sexes must be created and solidified, opening new consumer categories. And the LGB marketing constituency now works as a human-rights Trojan horse for market expansion, and as a bridge to further identities not based on the reproductive binary. This is why LGB and TQ+ remain fused.
Transsexualism, a fetish that deconstructs reproductive sex characteristics into commodities, and which was already established within the medical-industrial complex, needed institutional validation for market expansion, and diagnostic manuals paved the way. One of the first was published in 1994 (the DSM-IV): “transsexualism” and “gender identity disorder of childhood” merged into “gender identity disorder.” In 2013, DSM-5 renamed “gender dysphoria,” reframing the diagnosis and, in 2019, the World Health Organization’s category system reclassified it as “gender incongruence,” which meant it moved out of mental-health chapters. Today, even some “gender-critical organizations,” inadvertently or not, reinforce the paradigm.
For example, Genspect, the international gender-critical group founded bypsychotherapist Stella O’Malley, is now proposing the re-pathologization of “gender incongruence,” which only reinforces the corporate fiction that “gender identity” is a viable clinical category requiring medical treatment, instead of a corporate myth aimed at profiteering.
An expanding market system that runs on profit and targets children – with a total disregard for ethics
This cycles the industry back to where it began: defining children as mentally unwell for responding to a marketing system so pervasive it would make the “father of public relations” Edward Bernays shudder. Various interests intersect here, and combine to push the gender industry to keep expanding. There are the tech futurists imagining a post-sex world; the pharmaceutical companies’ wealthy funders with paraphilic interests; and all the new and growing markets for technologically mediated reproduction. Whether consciously coordinated or not, the result is the same: an expanding market system that runs on profit and targets children – with a total disregard for ethics.
The first thing to do this year to fight back against the hydra is to reject the “human-rights narrative” which provides emotional and political cover for the industry.
We should be aware of the connections between the gender business and emerging markets such as technological reproduction (projected revenue growth by 2030-2033: $50- to $80 billion).
When – and if – people detach from the human-rights branding and recognize the industry structure behind gender identity, meaningful resistance will become possible.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s January 19, 2026 World edition.
Comments