The Rise and Fall of Corporate Gender Ideology

“First, they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.”

The old line, variously attributed to everyone from Mahatma Gandhi to early 20th-century trade unionists, maps well onto our struggle to purge political ideology from corporate America. Conservatives should have no illusions about where we are in that sequence. The corporate regime has moved decisively into the “then they fight you” phase. And the conflict, which began a quiet dispute over HR policies or internal messaging, morphed into an open struggle over whether major American institutions will serve their actual purposes or continue functioning as ideological delivery systems for the progressive project.

There are early signs the tide may be shifting back toward sanity (toward normalcy, toward competence over activism), but that shift is fragile and contested. Nowhere is the battle more visible than on the question of gender ideology, where the corporate consensus — that seemed unassailable only a few years ago — is beginning to fracture.

Let’s not lose sight of how critics of modern gender ideology have been treated by corporate America during roughly the past decade. People like Christian scholar Ryan T. Anderson, whose landmark 2018 book ‘When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment’ offered a serious Christian response to notions of gender fluidity and proposed treatments for gender dysphoria. Anderson’s book was banned at Amazon under the vagueries of hateful content policies in 2021. It would take years (and an administration change) for him to be able to sell the book in the world’s online marketplace.

For another example, and to prove that this isn’t limited to anti-religious animus, take the case of evolutionary biologist and atheist Colin Wright. Wright, one of the boldest and most prominent voices defending the reality of biological sex (and critiquing modern gender ideology), was abruptly cut off from services at PayPal in 2022 with nothing more than a vague rationale referencing risk profile. Etsy also deplatformed Wright in 2022, citing violations of the site’s hatred/violence policies.

In a New York Post piece, Wright noted that much of this pressure wasn’t coming merely from companies, but left-wing activists who were routinely making demands of companies in the early 2020s: “Activists, who insist that biological sex is nothing more than a transphobic mirage, are trying to silence me by going after the very payment processors I rely on.”

The strategy works because corporate allegiance carries enormous weight in the United States. Large companies sit at the commanding heights of American cultural and economic life. Their policies shape what employees may say, what consumers are permitted to buy, and what views are treated as legitimate within the country’s most powerful institutions. When those institutions adopt an ideological mission, they export it throughout the economy and the culture alike.

For that reason, it should not be surprising that activists learned to target corporations directly. As I recently wrote at The Daily Wire and elsewhere, many of the most censorious and controversial episodes involving Big Business in the late 2010s and early 2020s were widely understood as the product of activist pressure rather than the neutral enforcement of corporate hate-speech policies.

This is an under-discussed result of conservatives failing to engage corporate America. The progression is fairly simple. First, a company adopts a policy built on vague and subjective terms (“hate speech,” for example). Then, Side A of the political aisle boycotts the company, divests, and complains about the policy itself. Ultimately, Side B of the political aisle goes directly to the company, engages its leadership, and pressures it to enforce the policy.

Any rational person realizes that the inevitable outcome of this three-part progression is the company becoming aligned with Side B. Side B achieves all the desired outcomes: companies come to view the policy as primarily an emphasis area for Side B, the goalposts of the policy itself become set by Side B, the only side actually engaging with it, and the company gets to tout its engagement with the political aisle, when in reality it’s almost universally engagement with Side B.

As someone who talks to hundreds of companies on behalf of conservative and Christian pro-fiduciary investors, this is how companies got pulled to the side of the Destructive Left. As a member of Side A, let’s be clear: We’re making major strides in getting companies out of politics. But we haven’t won. There’s a lot of damage that has yet to be undone.

Consider the early 2020s, which many corporate engagement professionals regard as the high-water mark of corporate wokeness. Tolerance for viewpoint diversity had largely disappeared, while corporate deference to gender ideology became routine. Activist groups were quick to exploit the moment. Foremost among them was the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), whose influence over corporate behavior became a central driver of how gender ideology spread through major American companies.

The HRC made massive waves in American boardrooms via its activism scorecard: the Corporate Equality Index, or CEI. (For what it’s worth, only one of those words is strictly true: The current Index doesn’t represent corporate best practices and isn’t particularly about equality. But it is an index.) Some of the largest brands on earth participated. Support for the HRC wasn’t limited to typical left-aligned brands, the Starbucks and Disneys and Amazon.coms of the world. It extended to companies with normally conservative customer bases, such as Tractor Supply and John Deere (both of which would later distance themselves from the HRC).

What the Index did, from an activist perspective, was genius. Once a company committed to getting a perfect score, that set a trend. A trend that allowed the HRC to seamlessly move the goalposts on what the Index required for that perfect score, while still framing its agenda as simple inclusion. And that worked for years, until the HRC pushed its luck one bridge too far. In 2025, to get a “perfect” score on the Index, companies had to indicate that their healthcare policies were in alignment with treatments recommended by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH. These treatments, perhaps unsurprisingly, were a cornucopia of the WPATH’s radical perspective on gender dysphoria. For that perfect score, companies were supposed to be confirming coverage of transition surgery and puberty blockers. And that, seemingly, was where the momentum of gender ideology hit a wall.

As we’ve explained in meetings with countless companies, this maneuver by the HRC was goalpost-shifting at its most brazen. What began as “don’t discriminate against gay employees” evolved into a system of gender ideology box-checking, pressuring companies to appease an activist minority on some of the most controversial questions of the moment, including hormone regimens and irreversible surgical interventions. As I mentioned before, there was nothing pro-corporate about this. Nondiscrimination is a clear business imperative. Taking sides on the most contentious issues of our time is what politicizes companies and creates genuine brand damage, as the widely-publicized examples of Target and Bud Light demonstrate. HRC, and the many activists who operate alongside them, had seemingly made a gamble — and lost.

As we head into the last half of 2026, the pushback against gender ideology is mounting at a rapid pace. The second Trump administration gave those of us talking to companies even more robust arguments about the reputational risk of gender ideology in corporate policy. The president’s executive orders surrounding DEI — and particularly around “gender-affirming” care — mean that companies are upping their risk calculus surrounding what they do and don’t cover in their healthcare policies.

On the medical side, both the American Medical Association and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons have shifted their posture on gender transition surgery, asserting now that there is insufficient evidence for such interventions for children — validating the perspectives of intellectuals like Anderson and Wright, and countless ordinary Americans who have always been skeptical about gender ideology. A detransitioner recently won a $2 million lawsuit against the doctors who approved her transition when she was 16. Gender ideology is no longer in vogue, but legally risky and increasingly at odds with the guidance of medical organizations.

We’re getting another chance at a pro-sanity consensus, and corporate America is taking that chance seriously. After more than a decade of wielding massive and largely unchecked power over corporate America, activist groups like the Human Rights Campaign are losing ground fast. In a recent analysis conducted by CNBC, 65% of the Fortune 500 had (1) stopped sponsoring the Human Rights Campaign, (2) dropped out of the Corporate Equality Index, or (3) both. This exodus of support included some of the biggest names in the business: Brands like Walmart, Meta (Facebook), and Salesforce ramped down their support for an organization that, ten years ago, was considered a relatively conventional benchmark for workplace inclusion.

It’s not just cutting ties with activist groups. Companies like Walmart are drawing bright lines when it comes to issues like gender transition surgeries for children. In its publicly available Associate Benefits Book, the company publishes the following: “Gender reassignment surgery is not considered medically necessary for individuals under the age of 18. Cosmetic services that are not medically necessary are not covered.” We could see many more companies drawing similar bright lines in the future.

And that itself is the great unknown: the future. The ESG and DEI-aligned left will not simply disappear, and a future Democratic administration would put tremendous pressure behind such groups. There are tactical plays to make here, key among them being this: the goal of conservatives who work in this space is political neutrality. Companies committing to political neutrality in policies, e.g. prohibitions on politicized debanking, removing anti-religious and politicized filters for charitable policies, and especially a nonpolitical, risk-oriented approach to covering things like gender transition surgery, is a stronger wall of sanity than mere political realignment. Fighting against future encroachments on sanity does not look like “you were woke, then you were a right-wing company for 4 years, now don’t be a left-wing one.” It will look more like “you were a company with politicized policies, you committed to political neutrality, and that is a viable safe harbor to stay in.”

How did the trend of corporate wokeness begin to slow? Our side was finally willing to make a simple but serious point: using corporate policy to play politics is risky business—a short-sighted gambit that ignores long-term costs and ultimately harms the investors and consumers it claims to serve. The fight against the extremes of gender ideology certainly involves shifting public sentiment. But the decisive pressures will be economic. As healthcare providers, insurers, and companies confront the mounting legal, financial, and reputational risks surrounding gender transition, particularly for children, the calculation will change. Supporting gender ideology will no longer look like the safe option.

But that shift is not guaranteed, and it is far from complete. Until those incentives really change, the corporate consensus that powered the last decade of gender activism will remain unstable and the conflict over it will continue.

We’re in a moment of sanity. But the process is more important. Companies need to understand, from investors, customers, and legislators, that the process of making corporate policy is not a pendulum that swings left or right depending on administration. It’s creating a stable, unchanging foundation to do the things that build society. Doing so requires fighting against activist forces that have no interest in engaging commerce, supporting capital markets, and building civilization. That fight is never over.