Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, said the transgender movement is not a civil rights cause but a multibillion-dollar industry deliberately targeting children, subsidized by taxpayers through Planned Parenthood, and weaponized by Democrat politicians to create a permanent class of government-dependent voters.
“Prior to the election, only around 63% of Americans in CNN’s polling supported President Trump’s initiatives to protect girls’ sports,” Schilling said on the Restoration Spotlight Podcast by Restoration News. “After the election, on the day that he signed his executive order on women’s sports, that was up to 79%. With only 18% opposing it. So we are winning this fight in huge ways.”
Schilling said President Trump has moved faster than anyone expected in delivering on the agenda his organization laid out for the full four-year term.
“President Trump gets an A+,” he said. “We had a list of 15 goals that we wanted the administration to get accomplished over four years. He had already checked out 12 of our 15 boxes.”
Schilling said Planned Parenthood’s name is a deliberate deception that masks the organization’s true mission.
“The best way to understand Planned Parenthood is that their name is fake,” he said. “Their name is a lie. They don’t do any help planning out your parenthood. What they really should call themselves is prevent parenthood.”
Most of Planned Parenthood’s nearly 600 centers now dispense cross-sex hormones, up from just 32 clinics in 2016, with one Ohio affiliate reporting a 544 percent increase in transgender services visits between 2021 and 2022, according to the Heritage Foundation.
Schilling said the transgender movement deliberately targets the youngest and most vulnerable children because adults are already too set in their ways to influence.
“They’re getting to kids young because if you don’t get to them young and you let them go through puberty, they’re going to look at it as absolutely idiotic,” he said. “The kids are the target. The kids are the whole point.”
Planned Parenthood has become the country’s leading provider of gender transition hormones for young adults, with insurance data showing at least 40,000 adults sought gender transition services at affiliates in 2023, about 40 percent of whom were between 18 and 22 years old, according to the Washington Times.
Schilling said the transgender industry is already enormous and its leaders have openly declared their ambition to grow it into one of the most powerful industries in America.
“Right now it’s a $4.5 billion dollar industry,” he said. “If we’re able to transition all 1.6 million Americans who identify as trans, it won’t be a $4.5 billion industry. It’ll be a $200 billion industry. That’s larger than the film industry.”
The U.S. sex reassignment surgery market was valued at $3.85 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $11.19 billion by 2033, growing at more than 11 percent annually, according to Nova One Advisor.
Schilling said there is an important distinction between mocking the ideology and showing compassion to those caught up in it.
“It’s important to ridicule the ridiculous,” he said. “Save your ridicule for the politicians. Give all your heart and compassion to those victims that are caught up into it.”
Schilling said Democrat politicians are pushing transgender ideology not out of conviction but because it creates a permanent class of government-dependent voters.
“If they are able to get 1.6 million Americans to transition, those 1.6 million Americans are going to be dependent on government subsidies,” he said. “What these politicians are looking at is, oh, I can have hundreds of thousands and even millions of voters that are dependent on my votes.”
Schilling is president of the American Principles Project, a national pro-family organization founded in 2009 and dedicated to direct political engagement in defense of parental rights, children’s innocence, and traditional family values. He has led APP since 2020, making the organization a driving force behind the push to protect women’s sports and defeat the transgender agenda in schools, the military, and culture.
Restoration News is an investigative outlet affiliated with Restoration of America, covering cultural issues, political funding, and border policy for conservative readers, with an emphasis on stories it says receive limited mainstream media coverage.
