Pride wasn’t always a friendly neighborhood parade and festival day blanketed in rainbow gear. How Pride became a corporate profit center Corporations, their bottom lines, and retention rates have yet to be pushed into standing up for trans rights the same way they do for the larger LGBTQ community. It’s also because companies are often motivated into advocacy as a way to protect their employees - but parents of trans kids are rarer than gay employees. This is partially because conservatives have launched a misinformation campaign against trans kids and gender-affirming care that has left many reluctant to jump into the fray. The corporate world, it seems, has been hesitant to weigh in on the debates over trans children. “But this year we saw a noticeable lack of engagement from corporations as the anti-trans bills have been further introduced across the country.” “We are really grateful to corporations that have stepped up to support LGBTQ folks in the past,” Viv Topping, director of advocacy and civic engagement at the Equality Federation, told Vox. And in 2016, large corporations such as PayPal, alongside the NCAA and the NBA, were credited with the eventual rollback of North Carolina’s anti-LGBTQ bill, HB 2, after widespread backlash to the law cost the state around $3.7 billion over 12 years, per Associated Press estimates. The Texas Chamber of Commerce was instrumental in keeping the conservative-controlled state legislature from instituting a bathroom bill.
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Clayton County was being heard by the Supreme Court, more than 200 companies - from Disney to Ernst & Young - cosigned an amicus brief calling for employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity to be made illegal. It’s not that corporations have historically stayed apolitical in the recent past, many have shown up when it matters, influencing lawmakers on LGBTQ equality and having significant impact. While companies like Walmart profit off of rainbow merchandise and branding, this recent wave of anti-trans legislation has largely been met with corporate silence. Trans advocates are worried the attacks will only accelerate. (Comparable proposals in 19 states failed, according to the Guardian.) On top of the push for medical bans, nine states have successfully banned trans girls from competing on girls’ sports teams this year. While Arkansas is so far the only state to fully ban transition care for everyone under the age of 18 (Tennessee passed a bill limiting transition care for prepubescent children, but transition care doesn’t normally happen until puberty), similar bills are still on the agenda in states whose legislative sessions haven’t ended yet. Now some families with trans kids in Arkansas are looking to flee the state just to avoid persecution. A Walmart spokesperson told BI that the political contributions were made before the bills’ introduction, adding that Walmart reviews its “political giving strategy” on an ongoing basis. The investigation, which examined the campaign finance records of 76 Arkansas lawmakers, uncovered more than $400,000 in total donations to said lawmakers by the political action committees (PACs) behind nine corporations and industries that claim to be LGBTQ-inclusive. A recent Business Insider investigation found that since the beginning of 2018, Walmart had given $58,100 to the Arkansas state legislators who later sponsored the anti-trans bills. Earlier this year, when Arkansas - Walmart’s home state and the location of its global headquarters - banned both gender-affirming medical care for young people and the participation of trans girls and women in school sports, the CEO of the retail giant issued a statement calling the legislation “troubling.”īut in fact, Walmart had a direct hand in electing the very legislators who attacked trans kids.
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Walmart earned a perfect 100 percent rating on the Human Rights Campaign’s 2021 Corporate Equality Index, which scores companies based on their support of LGBTQ employees through HR policies, practices, and benefits, as well as their public advocacy. You can even buy a shirt that reads: “I can’t even think straight.”
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A perusal of the company’s website reveals hundreds of such items for sale, like a Queer Eye-branded clothing line and tie-ins from rainbow-themed brands like Skittles and the Kellogg Company.
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Just before the start of Pride Month, Walmart, the largest retailer in the world, began selling a wide variety of rainbow-themed merchandise.