While the rest of corporate America runs for the hills on over-the-top Pride messaging, a handful of holdouts seem determined to run their brands into the ground. Nike, who felt Americans’ wrath for hiring Dylan Mulvaney to sell sports bras, is going for broke with its latest stunt: a special Pride event featuring a doctor who commits gender mutilation on children. Just do it, indeed.
Controversial doctor Blair Peters, The Daily Wire discovered in a leaked email, will be taking part in this summer’s NikeUNITED Pride events, which intend to celebrate “the past, present, and future of our global LGBTQIA+ community” — including spotlighting a barbaric practice that 19 states have now outlawed. Peters will be featured on a panel that promises “to discuss policies impacting the transgender community” next week. (This, of course, is in addition to the “family-friendly Drag Story Time” and drag queen-employee sports competition Nike will also host).
Peters, who goes by the Twitter handle @queersurgeon, bragged in a now-deleted 2022 tweet that he “performed gender affirming mastectomies (top surgeries) for 3 young adults and adolescents today.” He also admitted to irreversibly altering children’s bodies in another video for Oregon Health & Science University, where he works.
“I’m Blair Peters,” he says to the camera. “I use pronouns. I’m a plastic and reconstructive surgeon at OHSU, and I specialize in gender-affirming and peripheral nerve surgery. I describe gender-affirming surgery as using surgery to help someone physically actualize their internal sense of self. So I view surgery as changing something that makes someone feel dysphoric to make them feel euphoric and better and more comfortable in their own body.”
“You know,” he continues, “I have an adolescent patient that hasn’t been going to school for months and is completely socially isolated and is having just like an extremely difficult time. And they come back to clinic two months after top surgery, and they are like this exuberant teenager in school, you know, planning the rest of their life, thriving all of a sudden.”
Peters insists a “few hours in the operating room can completely transform somebody.” “And that’s a pretty amazing way to spend your life,” he insists, “especially as a queer person. … I couldn’t imagine feeling more fulfilled.”
“Fulfilled” may not be how investors put it, especially if Americans train their fury on the brand Michael Jordan made famous. But then, walking on thin ice is second nature to Nike. The company that sparked shoe bonfires after its defense of Colin Kaepernick, who outraged human rights advocates by trying to weaken protections for the Uyghur slaves sewing their swooshes, and infuriated women with a breast-less Mulvaney selling their bras may have survived storms before. But this moment, experts say, is different.
Before Bud Light triggered an avalanche of boycotts, CEOs flaunted their LGBT extremism. But, as “Shark Tank’s” Kevin O’Leary pointed out, “[People] are concerned that maybe [businesses] are losing their way in terms of what the prime objective is: your customers, your employees, and your shareholders. … [S]o if you start to get too distant or too far away from the primary mandate, the market has proven itself to really, really punish you. And it’s woken up all kinds of boards.”
“When you lose [$15 billion] of market cap,” O’Leary continued, “there are a lot of unhappy cowboys out there. They’re called your investors.”
Billionaire Elon Musk warned that Target and others could even be staring down legal action from investors now that the company’s stock has been officially downgraded. The transgender merchandise that CEO Brian Cornell insisted was “great for our brand” has destroyed the retail chain, sending profits into a nosedive. “Won’t be long before there are class-action lawsuits by shareholders against the company and board of directors for destruction of shareholder value,” Musk tweeted.
Like Nike, Target has been publicly unrepentant. Even Bud Light, whose Dylan Mulvaney cans started this woke brand dumpster fire, sank another $200,000 into the LGBT activism that got them into this mess in the first place.
Family Research Council’s Joseph Backholm isn’t surprised by the companies’ brazenness. “Metastasized sin always flaunts itself,” he told The Washington Stand. “It often begins as something we hide because we feel shame. But eventually we become comfortable with it and then we become proud of it. Lots of people within the sexual revolution are proud of their sin and have no sense of shame.”
“But there’s another thing happening on the transgender issue as well,” Backholm insisted. “The implications of the Left of being wrong about this issue are so terrible they can’t consider the possibility. If you mutilate children for progressive brownie points, that basically makes you Josef Mengele. So, when you have a position that you must defend — despite significant evidence you’re wrong — sometimes the instinct is to be bombastic as a way to avoid introspection. It’s at least possible all of this is overcompensation in an attempt to convince themselves they’re confident about what they’re doing.”
But overcompensation is a pricy gamble these days. And if consumer sentiment doesn’t change, the company named for the goddess of victory is bound to be a financial loser.
Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.
