Fossil fuel billionaires are bankrolling the anti-trans movement

An investigation shared exclusively with Atmos and HEATED finds that 80% of anti-trans organizations receive fossil fuel funding.

This story is a collaboration between HEATED and Atmos, a nonprofit media organization exploring climate and culture. Subscribe here.

Yessenia Funes is the author of Possibilities, a creative climate justice newsletter featuring Yessenia’s intimate thoughts on weekly news. Subscribe here.

Source: Getty Images

Across the U.S., a dangerous movement is brewing, one that seeks to silence trans folks and push them into the shadows. One of its leaders is the Alliance Defending Freedom.

On May 20, the right-wing organization ADF sued Minnesota over its advocacy for trans rights. ADF argues that allowing trans girls and women in women’s sports discriminates against cis girls and women. ADF, a Project 2025 adviser, has been at the helm of several anti-trans initiatives, its lawyers authoring model bathroom bills that would force trans people into the bathrooms of their assigned sex at birth. In 2025, lawmakers have already passed more than 100 anti-trans bills across the U.S., including 13 bathroom bills.

But where is ADF getting money for its anti-trans advocacy? These days, it's almost impossible to tell due to regulations that allow nonprofits to hide their donors, but one verifiable source is the fossil fuel industry. Between 2013 and 2022, Shell USA Company Foundation donated $58,002 to ADF, per an investigation by the Guardian. Phil Anschutz, a billionaire who built his wealth on fossil fuels and now owns Anschutz Entertainment Group, Inc., which puts on live entertainment events like Coachella, also donated $110,000 to ADF between 2011 and 2013.

ADF isn’t the only anti-trans organization with financial ties to the fossil fuel sector. An independent analysis of 45 right-wing groups advocating against trans rights found that 80% have received donations from fossil fuel companies or billionaires. The analysis, conducted by two independent researchers in 2023 and not peer-reviewed, was shared exclusively with Atmos and HEATED. Through a qualitative search, the researchers identified 45 groups advancing anti-trans lobbying, events, and publications and checked reports about their donor disclosures for fossil fuel funding. 

Vivian Taylor, a climate policy expert who co-authored the analysis, said the fossil fuel industry has a real interest in funding panic over transgender people: It distracts the public from "the very real and ongoing risks that climate change creates.”

The analysis doesn't explore what percentage of each organization's total budget is derived from fossil fuel donations or whether fossil fuels are their primary funders. Still, advocates believe that highlighting the connection could unite the climate and LGBTQIA+ movements. 

“Even if you were unmoved by the humanity, just at a purely tactical political level, the opposition to climate action is using anti-trans rhetoric to build its base,” said Philip Newell, the other researcher who is the communications working group co-chair for the Climate Action Against Disinformation Coalition, which organizes against disinformation and misinformation on climate change. “If you want climate action, you’re going to have to fight back.”

The Billionaire Backers of the Anti-Trans Right

The findings do illustrate the insidious ways the oil and gas industry uses its dirty money to harm trans folks, some of the people most vulnerable to climate change impacts.

Although fossil fuel billionaire Anschutz has denied that he is anti-LGBTQIA+, he is directly tied to at least nine other conservative transphobic entities, including Colorado Christian University, the Council for National Policy, Dare 2 Share Ministries, and the Family Research Council, per the new investigation.

Anschutz’s foundation has also donated to Movieguide, a media site that has written that gender-affirming care “is living into a lie and straying from God” and that “true satisfaction can only come from Christ.” The investigation also found that his foundation has given money to Sky Ranch, a Christian camp whose doctrinal statement clearly outlines the erasure of trans people. 

Dan and Farris Wilks, who made their fortune on fracking and the latter of whom is a pastor, helped launch The Daily Wire, a popular right-wing media company co-founded by Ben Shapiro, with a $4.7 million donation. The media outlet regularly erases trans identities and parrots conservative transphobic talking points. 

Charles and the late David Koch, who built their empire on fossil fuels and bankrolled an entire climate denial ecosystem, have contributed to the American Enterprise Institute, which has long spoken out against climate action and written transphobic blogs. They have also funded the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council, whose model policies on “academic transparency” and anti-DEI appear to have been foundational to state bills fighting to restrict curricula on gender identity and whose membership has spoken out against trans rights. (ALEC denied working on transgender issues in an email and stated that its members have taken stances on trans rights but not as representatives of ALEC; Shell USA Company Foundation said it “does not endorse any organizations.” No other parties mentioned in this story responded to requests for comment.) 

Now, President Donald Trump is repeating many of the same talking points, but taking them to the next level through violent executive orders and federal policies. Activists and experts are urgently drawing attention to the polluting powers that helped put these inhumane policies on the map—often the very same powers that created the climate crisis. 

Do Gender Binaries Prop Up the Oil Empire?

Newell and Taylor—who is a leadership member of Stand Up for Trans Women at Duke, a group of Duke University and Durham, North Carolina community members pushing the university to defend trans rights—first began thinking about the connection between fossil fuel money and anti-trans advocacy in 2021 when they were both on staff at the now-defunct climate communications firm Climate Nexus. 

They kept noticing how Republicans were using transgender people as “hate-bait to build support for their party, because their policy platform is otherwise unpopular,” Newell said in an email. At the time, Republican Glenn Youngkin had just won the Virginia governorship through a campaign built on anti-trans rhetoric. 

That tactic has since spread like wildfire across both major political parties in the U.S. By 2023, Newell and Taylor went full steam ahead digging into who is funding the organizational bodies pushing anti-trans rhetoric into legislative chambers and found fossil fuel connections at every turn.

“If we care about climate, we’re going to have to care about trans rights,” Taylor said. “And if we care about climate, we’re going to have to find ways of getting America and the whole world past all forms of bigotry so that we can work together to face an existential threat to all of humanity and the natural world.”

Jesse Bryant, a sociologist studying right-wing environmentalism at Yale University, sees the issue as emblematic of a larger trend. He said the bigger issue lies in the fossil fuel industry’s funding of nearly every conservative political issue in the United States. 

“Fossil fuels have seeped into every crease of American politics,” he said. “So if you're concerned about this connection between anti-trans legislation and fossil fuel dollars, it's super important to acknowledge that money in politics is a gigantic problem—specifically fossil fuel dollars in American politics."

Indeed, billionaires with fossil fuel origins have left their fingerprints all over right-wing U.S. politics—from fracking tycoons Farris and Dan Wilks' reported financial contributions toward anti-abortion efforts to Charles Koch’s funding of right-wing groups that advocate for violent border policies. The Koch network has also promoted immigration reform in the past. And Democrats have taken fossil fuel donations, too.

Still, anti-trans legislation and climate disasters pose a double whammy for trans people, said Leo Goldsmith, a health policy research scholar at the Yale School of the Environment who studies climate impacts on trans people. States have aggressively pushed anti-trans legislation that, for instance, criminalizes transgender people for using the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity and issues bounties that would pay others $10,000 to report them.

Meanwhile, trans youth are increasingly losing access to life-saving, gender-affirming healthcare. Trump’s spending bill, which has already passed the House of Representatives and is now in the Senate, proposes to eliminate this type of care for trans adults under Medicare, too.

“Anti-trans bills pretty much impact all aspects of trans people’s lives,” said Goldsmith. “This can include education, healthcare, being able to use the bathroom, their actual expression, employment, housing, whether or not they can legally get custody over a child, being able to marry.” 

The difficulty of living under these suffocating conditions, Goldsmith added, can keep trans folks from adequately preparing or responding to climate-fueled disasters.

Keeping trans people in the margins is the whole point, though. The fossil fuel industry has a vested interest in maintaining the cultural status quo: the white-picket fence in the suburbs where the white wife stays home to take care of her white kids and her white husband drives to work in his gas-guzzling car. 

Queer families, especially queer families of color, don’t fit this image. 

“What trans and queer movements are doing is challenging a gender binary that that entire dream rests upon,” said Dr. Cara Daggett, a senior fellow at the Research Institute for Sustainability in Germany, where she researches gender in American culture and its connection to energy.

Why would fossil fuel billionaires want to end an “ecologically violent order,” as Daggett put it, where they can drill and pollute without consequence?

Vanessa Raditz, a Ph.D. student studying queer climate justice movements at the University of Georgia, plans to continue Newell and Taylor’s independent research. They and their collaborators are looking for more academics and funders to join their efforts. They plan to expand the research to Canada, whose local anti-trans policies are headed in a similar direction as the U.S. 

More urgently, perhaps, Raditz wants to illustrate to the climate and LGBTQIA+ movements the importance of collaboration—to point to fossil fuels as their common enemy. 

“It’s a story, for me, about building bridges with other vulnerable and attacked communities,” they said. “Queers against fossil fuels, we lose—but maybe everyone against fossil fuels? Maybe then, we win.”

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Catch of the Day: Though there are no photos of pets celebrating Pride in the Catch inbox this week, I did find this one of Leo serving a pretty fierce look.

Reader Ann tells us that Leo is both King of the Jungle and Supreme Pontiff. He’s blessing bones, issuing barked decrees, and expects treats on command.

We’re just lucky to call him our friend.

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