The director of Washington-based National Legal Policy Center’s Corporate Integrity Project told RedState he is presenting the case for NLPC’s proposal to direct Microsoft to study and report on the cost and effects of its transgender benefits at Microsoft’s Dec. 7, 2023, annual shareholders meeting held virtually at 11:30 a.m. East Coast time, when he will ask about the company’s transgender benefits policy.

“I will have three minutes to speak in support of this proposal. And we're just trying to draw attention to the issue,” said Paul Chesser, who became the center's director in October 2021 after serving as an associate fellow there beginning in 2010.

Microsoft's annual meeting is always one of the most important events on the tech investor calendar, but this year, even more so as the company appears to have leapfrogged Google's technical advantages with its Bing Chat search engine. Bing Chat is powered by an artificial intelligence program created by OpenAI. Still, what makes it tricky is that Microsoft owns 49 percent of OpenAI—and just hired OpenAI’s two co-founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. 

There has never been a more anticipated Microsoft annual meeting.

Chesser said the shareholder resolution is a tactic pioneered by the left, which used these binding directives to push corporate America out of its natural political neutrality.

“The political left has owned shareholder activism for a few decades now,” he said.

“You've seen corporate America drive shift to the left as far as capitulating to diversity and equity initiatives and climate change and equity and just all these different liberal agenda items and conservatives to their shame have been pretty absent,” he said.

The NLPC resolution highlights the problems created by the transgender movement. If it passes, it will force the company to deliver information it otherwise would keep to itself, he said.

Resolved: Shareholders request Microsoft report on median compensation and benefits gaps across gender as they address reproductive and gender dysphoria care, including associated policy, reputational, competitive, operational, and litigative risks, and risks related to recruiting and retaining diverse talent. The report should be prepared at reasonable cost, omitting proprietary information, litigation strategy and legal compliance information.

In the memo filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and sent to all shareholders, NLPC spelled out its rationale—not the least of which is to discern the company’s exposure to the federal government’s discrimination regulatory regime.

This report is necessary for Microsoft shareholders because, despite its claims, compensation and benefits inequities persist across employee gender categories at the Company, running afoul of U.S. Department of Labor and U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission equal pay laws. 

There may be no more hotly debated or contested issue in the United States than that of transgenderism and related gender rights, equality, and discrimination issues.

Proposal 5 addresses issues of gender identity/ideology and discrimination, and related policies, that are in shareholders’ interests as it pertains to policy, reputational, competitive, operational and litigative risks, and risks related to recruiting and retaining diverse talent. With its likely discriminatory practices regarding equitable prospective and current employee treatment, the Company is vulnerable to potential enforcement actions by the U.S. Department of Labor, as well as criminal and civil actions.

Chesser said the resolution deliberately uses the left’s jargon.

“I mean, what we're doing is we're taking the progressives' language about inequity and unfairness in pay and all their different categories of what's discriminatory,” he said.

“You discriminate against homosexuals, you discriminate against transgenders. Well, we're taking it to its logical conclusion,” he said. 

“You cover all these things, but you don't cover these things, these procedures and therapies for people who are truly discriminated against; they have nowhere to turn for this kind of care,” he said.

Chesser said the plight of the transgender patients does not get the proper attention.

“They can't get jobs where they're going to get coverage for these kinds of things, so we're taking it to their own language and their own agenda to its logical conclusion, and we want the company to hear about it,” he said.

“We're bringing this same proposal to a few other companies,” he said. 

“We are shareholders in a few dozen companies, major corporations.”