How Illinois rewrote family law, who wrote the script,
who funded it, and why it had nothing to do with science.
Follow the money
At every stage of this story, the driver was the same. It was not evidence. It was a worldview. And worldviews on this scale run on money. If you want to know whether a movement is a spontaneous professional consensus or an organized campaign, you follow the funding. When you follow the funding for this one, the same names keep appearing.
Start with the three legal organizations. The National Center for LGBTQ Rights runs on roughly $10–12 million a year, receives no government funding, and draws about 93% of its budget from private contributions. Its longtime legal director, Shannon Price Minter, argued the California marriage case and was counsel in Obergefell, and its executive director is Imani Rupert-Gordon. Lambda Legal runs on about twenty-two million dollars a year, takes zero government money, and, in 2025, announced an unprecedented two-hundred-and-eighty-five-million-dollar fundraising campaign under its CEO, Kevin Jennings.
The ACLU Foundation operates on a budget of over two hundred million dollars a year, takes zero government money, and redistributes tens of millions to fifty-six state affiliates. That detail about government money is not incidental. By refusing public grants, these organizations keep themselves free of the only leverage a government could ever exert over them. They answer to their donors and to no one else.
Who are the donors? The same philanthropic engines appear across all three. The Arcus Foundation, built on the Stryker medical-device fortune by Jon Stryker, funds the triad. That is the foundation Kevin Jennings ran for five years before he moved to Lambda Legal, which means the same man has now sat at the top of both a funder of this network and one of its litigators. The Open Society Foundations of George Soros fund the triad and, in 2025, pledged $300 million to civil-liberties work. The Ford Foundation funds the triad. The philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, through her vehicle Yield Giving, put twenty-five million dollars into Lambda Legal, the largest single gift in its campaign. These are not small or hidden players. They are the recognizable architecture of a movement’s money.
Wellspring
One funder deserves special attention, the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, and it began life under another name, the Matan B’Seter Foundation. It is a private foundation, and the law requires private foundations to disclose their contributors, so its builders engineered it to circumvent that disclosure.
Investigative reporting by the Capital Research Center and InfluenceWatch, building on a 2014 Bloomberg Businessweek investigation, has traced the structure to three hedge-fund billionaires, Andrew Shechtel, David Gelbaum, and C. Frederick Taylor, the founders of the hedge fund TGS Management. Beginning in 1999, they used a single law firm to create more than a dozen anonymous foundations funded and controlled by limited-liability companies, with shell names such as MBS Funding, so that the contributor lines on the returns list corporate entities rather than people. For years, Wellspring then pushed its grants out through donor-advised funds at the nation’s largest providers, vehicles that mask the final recipient, leaving the destination of most of roughly nine hundred million dollars in grants untraceable.
A for-profit consultancy, Wellspring Advisors, runs the operation. The money is concealed at both ends by design, on the way in through the shell companies and on the way out through the pass-through funds.
And what Wellspring gives is the whole map. It appears as a backer of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, of Lambda Legal, and of the ACLU Foundation, the entire legal triad. It appears as a backer of the Fenway Institute, the Boston body whose glossary supplied the clinical language to the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine’s Protocol #33. It appears as a backer of Advocates for Youth and of SIECUS, the two organizations at the center of the national sex-education apparatus.
And it appears as a backer of the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, the pressure organization whose Healthcare Equality Index turns this language into a scored requirement that hospitals adopt to protect their reputations.
A single fund touches the lawyers who rewrote the statutes, the health institute that wrote the clinical glossary, the groups that wrote the school curriculum, and the organization that pressures the hospitals, all at once, while concealing the identity of the people whose money it is moving. Every other funder in this story leaves fingerprints.
Wellspring wears gloves. When the same hidden hand is found resting on every part of a structure, the most natural reading is that the structure was built, not that it grew on its own. Wellspring is the reason this looks like a campaign rather than a coincidence, and it is the single thread an honest investigator should pull on hardest, because behind its shell companies and its pass-through funds sit the full accounts of the people actually paying for all of this.
A network funded by many means, coordinated at the top
A deliberate variety of means funds the rest of the network. That variety is itself part of the design, because it makes the whole thing look like independent organizations arriving at the same conclusions on their own.
The one shared upstream funder that is fully documented is not private at all. It is the federal government. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, through its Division of Adolescent and School Health, funded the American Psychological Association with roughly $4.3 million and Advocates for Youth with roughly $4.2 million in the same funding window in 2018, out of the same program office. The taxpayer was the common patron of both the psychology authority and the sex-education advocate at the same time.
From there, the funding fragments by design. The American Psychological Foundation’s revenue jumped on the strength of a bequest of roughly $10 million from a gay clinical psychologist named Franklyn Springfield, who died in 2020, and his husband, Peter MacNamara, with the money now steering the foundation’s support for LGBTQ psychology for years to come.
Advocates for Youth runs heavily on federal money, about sixteen million dollars of it over the years, and roughly seventy-eight percent of its budget from the CDC, supplemented by the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, which gave it more than ten million dollars between 2008 and 2016, and by the Hewlett, Westwind, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations, under its longtime president Debra Hauser. SIECUS saw its revenue spike to around five million dollars in 2022, with a CDC award booked as contributions, under its CEO Christine Soyong Harley, who describes the organization’s goal as a long-term culture shift and the reshaping of cultural and societal narratives. Those are her organization’s own words for what it is doing.
Some of the network is funded in ways engineered to be invisible.
Answer, the sex-education program run out of Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology, files no tax return of its own, because it lives inside the university and disappears into the university’s books. Arcus routed one point seven million dollars to the Proteus Fund between 2017 and 2021, a pass-through arrangement whose final destination is exactly the kind of channel that makes money hard to trace.
The National Center for Youth Law grew from $2.8 million in 2015 to $21.7 million in 2022. In 2021, about eighty-one percent of its budget, more than seventeen million dollars, came from government grants, while its general counsel, Johnathan Smith, arrived from the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, a clean example of the revolving door between the government that funds and the grantee that is funded. One of the people on that organization’s board also leads a grantmaking foundation, a governance overlap between a grantee and a funder that warrants closer scrutiny once the foundation’s exact identity is nailed down.
Here in Illinois, Equality Illinois shows the same architecture in miniature. It operates as two entities, a 501(c)(4) advocacy arm and a 501(c)(3) educational institute, and its shared chief executive, Brian Johnson, draws his salary through the advocacy arm rather than the donor-supported charity. This arrangement clouds how the money is really spent. Its funders include the TAWANI Foundation of Jennifer Pritzker, which gave $165,000, and the MacArthur Foundation, which gave more than $250,000.
And the lactation bodies, the place where this story began, are the revealing contrast. ILCA takes no government money. It runs on member dues and royalties from the publisher of its journal. The credentialing body that the field depends on, the International Board of Lactation Consultant Examiners, runs on exam fees. The United States Lactation Consultant Association is member-funded and was running a deficit. No hidden foundation is paying these groups to degender their language. They adopted it because the premise had already won inside the profession, carried by the authority of their associations and their most trusted authors. That is what makes the lactation field the proof of the thesis as a whole. Where the money is, you find coordination.
Where the money is not, you still find the language, because by then the ideology no longer needs to be bought. It only needed to be believed.
What is actually being remade
What all of this money is buying, underneath all the layers, is a change in the family itself. The people advancing this understand something their opponents often miss: that the surest way to alter a thing is to alter the words for it. So they have gone after the words.
You can hear them say it if you listen to their own language about their own goals. Division 44 announced the formal recognition of multi-partner families. SIECUS talks about a long-term culture shift and the reshaping of cultural narratives. The National Center for Youth Law describes its mission as fundamentally transforming systems and entirely replacing harmful structures.
The Human Rights Campaign, through its All Children, All Families program, certifies state child-welfare agencies for treating every family form as equivalent. No single one of these organizations stands up and says it intends to redefine the family. Taken together, through curricula, clinical standards, statutes, and accreditation, these organizations advance an operational expansion of what the law, the schools, and the medical system will recognize as a family.
They are changing the thing by changing the words for it.
What the words carried
Look closely at what the new words actually do, because this is the heart of it. “Mother” becomes “birthing person.” “Breastfeeding” becomes “human milk feeding.” A mother carrying her child becomes a “gestating parent” or, worse, a “gestational carrier.” Each of these replacements keeps the bare denotation. You can still work out, on a purely technical level, which role is being named. What each of them throws away is everything else the old word carried.
A mother is a person you belong to. The word “mother” held that belonging inside it, the bond and the weight and the warmth of a relation no one else can fill, and the replacement word empties all of that out and leaves the role standing there alone, like a job title. The old words named a relationship. The new words name an operation. A “birthing person” performs a task and is finished. A mother is someone’s mother for the rest of both their lives.
That is the cruelty buried inside the kindness. The replacement vocabulary can state the function but cannot state the bond, so a family described entirely in the new language becomes a family reduced to a set of operations, a household of irreplaceable people rewritten as a flowchart of interchangeable roles.
The denotation survives. The soul of the word is gone.
Do that to enough words, in enough statutes and curricula and clinical manuals, and you have changed what a family is in the public mind without ever passing a single law that announces the change. That is precisely why the work was done on the language first, and quietly, and why a family built on the words our fathers used would be unrecognizable once those words have been hollowed out from the inside.
So I will ask you
Come back to where we started, in the Illinois statute books, with “father” struck out fifty-five times by a bill that never got a hearing. We were told the people this serves are vanishingly few. We were told the worry was overblown and the worriers were bigots. And yet the entire vocabulary of family has been rewritten in the law of one state after another, on the authority of professionals who believed they were following science, by a method published decades ago for changing what a culture feels, on an ideology that locates human suffering in the words themselves, advanced by a tight network of organizations, and paid for with money that, in its most important channel, hides its own face.
Looking at all of it, the names and the dates and the dollars laid end to end, what do you think? Is this movement to change the language driven by science?
If you live in Illinois, your legislators rewrote your family law without a public hearing on its substance, and they answer to you. Ask them to hold one. Ask them to produce the clinical evidence that removing “mother” and “father” from the code improves a single outcome for a single child, and watch closely whether they can produce any at all.
When a hospital, a school district, or a state agency adopts the new vocabulary, ask the same question and refuse to accept a feeling in place of a finding. Read the public funding disclosures, and demand to know who stands behind the ones engineered to stay dark, the shell companies that fill Wellspring and the pass-through funds that empty it, chief among them.
And in your own home and your own speech, keep the words. Say mother. Say father. They were never imprecise. They were precise about the one thing that matters most, the bond, and that is the very reason this movement to change our language needs them gone.
