by Aaron Warner

Christopher Rufo has emerged as one of the most strident opponents to woke culture.  Raised by a family who embraced communist ideology, Rufo broke from his family’s way of life after realizing the ultimate futility and destructiveness of its cultish teachings.  His awakening began as a journalist in the Seattle area while writing about the city’s homeless.  His articles led to personal attacks on him both in the media and threats to him and his family, ultimately causing them to leave for Florida, where he now helps Governor Ron Desantis battle cultural Marxism (re: Woke) in all its forms.  

One of those forms is transgender ideology and its impact on children.  Rufo recently gave a talk at the Allan P. Kirby Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship, on Hillsdale College’s Washington D.C. campus  as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.  Titled “Inside the Transgender Empire” Hillsdale released an adapted transcript for their September 2023 issue of Imprimis, a journal published by the college.  

In it Rufo explains the source of some of the massive funding that acts as seed money for a variety of “gender affirming care” clinics and hospitals in the U.S.  The Pritzker family is a name known to many in Democrat circles as a major donor to Democrat campaigns.  The current governor of Illinois is one J.B. Pritzker, cousin to Jennifer Pritzker a transgender woman (re: biological man).  They are two of the thirteen billionaire Pritzkers listed on Forbes World’s Billionaires list of “the richest people in the world” in 2024. J.B. is worth an estimated $3.3 billion, placing him as the 920^th wealthiest person in the world while Jennifer sits atop a fortune of some $2.2 billion, putting “her” at the 1496^th wealthiest.

The combined wealth of the Pritzker billionaires is listed at $43.1 billion, which would make them among the ten wealthiest families in the world. Among their list of legacy donations:

• A.N. Pritzker Elementary School
• Pritzker Family Children’s Zoo at the Lincoln Park Zoo
• Pritzker College Prep, a Campus of the Noble Network of Charter High Schools
• Pritzker Institute of Biomedical Science and Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology
• Pritzker School of Law at Northwestern University
  • Pritzker Legal Research Center at Northwestern
• Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago (UChicago)
• Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at UChicago
• Pritzker Traubert Family Library at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools
• Pritzker Military Museum and Library-cited earlier in this article.

Born in 1950 as James Pritzker he transitioned to Jennifer in 2013 becoming the “first trans billionaire”, thanks to his inheritance from his family’s Hyatt hotel fortune.  Pritzker almost immediately began donating untold millions to universities, schools, hospitals and activist organizations to promote queer theory and trans medical experiments.  Consequently J.B. Pritzker, in his first year as governor of Illinois, signed legislation to promote gender theory into the state education curriculum, and direct state Medicaid funds toward transgender surgeries.  Speaking before an audience of trans activists, he proclaimed: 

“[O]ur state government is firmly on your side, on the side of every gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer person in the state of Illinois….those of you in this room know better than anyone that marriage equality was never the endgame….We’re gonna make sure that all the transgender Illinoisans are ensured their basic human rights and that healthcare services are provided to them so that they can thrive.”    

With both the power of law and funding the Pritzker’s influence to promote trans-ideology is enormous.  Financially backing activists at Lurie Children’s Hospital (the largest children’s hospital in Chicago) they provide local schools with training, materials, and personnel who promote gender transitions for children, using the hospital’s reputation to give their ideology a scientific veneer.  The more one investigates the worse it gets.  Children are exposed, for instance, not only to trans ideology, but to concepts such as “kink” (unusual tastes in sexual behavior), “BDSM” (bondage, domination, submission, and masochism), binders to flatten breasts, and prosthetic penises.  

Lurie Children’s Hospital, through its outreach presentations in Chicago public schools, encourages teachers and school administrators to support “gender diversity” in their districts, automatically affirm students who announce sexual transitions, and “communicate a non-binary understanding of gender” in the classroom. 

The objective?  To disrupt the “entrenched [gender] norms in western society” and facilitate the transition to a more “gender creative” world.  School districts are encouraged to designate “Gender Support Coordinators” to help facilitate children’s sexual and gender transitions, which, under the recommended “confidentiality” policy, can be kept secret from parents and families.  

Broken families, especially in poor communities, are an apparent target of the activists.  Rufo notes Highland Park, Michigan, which lies some six miles from downtown Detroit, is plagued by poverty, violence and crime and a landscape of abandoned or demolished homes and businesses.  Yet it’s home to the Ruth Ellis Center where transgender science, politics and funding are overflowing.  Among its marketing ploys are “trauma informed care”, “restorative justice”, “harm reduction”, “racial equity” and “gender affirming care”, many of which are conducted on a large-scale like medical experiments on poor black youths.  

In my home state of Oregon the vaunted Health & Science University (OHSU) is now considered the top provider for genital reconstruction.  Despite the ideological argument against sexual binary they provide just two types of reconstruction: phalloplasty and vaginoplasty – both take one’s God-given genitalia and robotically alter them to its opposite.  Do either of these sound like trauma informed care or harm reduction? 

Phalloplasty

“According to a handbook published by OHSU, surgeons first cut off the head of the penis and remove the testicles then they turn the penile-scrotal skin inside out and, together with abdomen cavity tissue, fashion it into a crude, artificial vagina.  The robotic arms are put through small incisions around your belly button and the side of your belly, the handbook reads.  They are used to create the space for your vaginal canal between your bladder and rectum.” 

It gets worse.  “The procedure is plagued with complication.  OHSU warns of wound separation, tissue necrosis, graft failure, urine spraying, hematoma, blood clots, vaginal stenosis, rectal injury, fistula, and fecal accidents.  Patients must stay in the hospital for a minimum of five days following the procedure, receiving treatments for surgical wounds and having fluid drained through plastic tubes.  Once they are home, patients must continue transgender hormone treatments and manually dilate their surgically created ‘neo-vagina’ in perpetuity; otherwise, the tissue will heal, and the cavity will close.” 

So far what have not closed are these clinics, and the practices of the Frankenstein-like doctors, Nazi-like experimenters who are subjecting emotionally vulnerable and mentally unstable people to a life of grotesque disfigurement and identity crisis. 

The author is a VDC columnist and Upper Valley regional reporter. He lives in Hartford, VT where he owns two award-winning small businesses. He is a graduate of Leadership Upper Valley class of 2010.