a christian fund with $5.4 billion asked nike's shareholders to come for trans healthcare and got under one percent

via Bloomberg, carried by Insurance Journal, and WFMD.

Good news first, because it is rare and it is a number.

At Nike's annual shareholder meeting on September 8, a proposal aimed at the company's trans healthcare coverage failed. Not narrowly. The preliminary tabulation had it under one percent of the votes cast, according to WFMD's account of the meeting.

Now the part worth paying attention to, which is not Nike.

who inspire investing is

The proposal came from Inspire Investing, which describes itself as the country's largest provider of Christian-based exchange-traded funds and oversees $5.4 billion. It was filed through Bowyer Research on behalf of a shareholder named William C. Cunningham, who holds 154 shares of Nike Class B stock. One hundred and fifty-four shares. That is the entry fee for putting a question on the ballot of a company worth a hundred billion dollars, and it is worth knowing how cheap the door is.

The ask was dressed as transparency: evaluate and report on the risks of Nike's charitable partnerships and its practices around what the filing calls gender ideology and transgender medical interventions for minors. Underneath it was Nike's perfect score of 100 on the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index, and the question of whether the employee health plan covers gender-transition care for minors.

the 242 companies on the list

That index is the targeting list. Inspire is running a campaign against 242 large employers, pulled from the companies that scored highest on it. The coalition behind it includes the Southern Baptists and the state of Nebraska, and represents more than $100 billion under management. Scoring well on a corporate equality survey is now how you get on a list.

Inspire says Walmart and Charles Schwab have both confirmed to it that they do not cover gender-transition surgeries for minors. Neither company responded to requests for comment, so take that as a claim rather than a fact.

Nike's board told shareholders to vote no, and said its charitable partnerships are approved "only after a robust due diligence review of the proposed recipient organization." The company declined to comment on a separate EEOC investigation into its diversity practices.

Tim Schwarzenberger, Inspire's portfolio manager and director of corporate engagement, was at the meeting and was unbothered afterwards. "Most shareholder proposals do not receive majority support, so that was not a surprise." He also said this, which is the sentence to file away: "For me, what resonates is forgiveness. If companies make changes, we need to applaud them."

what forgiveness means here

Forgiveness, here, means a company quietly editing its health plan. Applause is what you get for it.

So: a win, honestly counted. Fewer than one in a hundred Nike votes went with them. But this was never a vote they expected to carry, and 241 other companies have the same meeting coming. The strategy is not to win the ballot. It is to make the proposal arrive every single year until the legal department decides the coverage is more trouble than the people who use it.