What is a coalition?

And why did we form one?

Our Purpose:

We are a coalition of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender adults who are concerned with the current state of gender medicine for children, adolescents, and teenagers in the United States and Canada.

The LGBT Courage Coalition was formed over the past four month of 2023. We formed from personal relationships, many of which were already in place for a few years. We are a diverse group of individuals who agreed upon one core principal:  

We are opposed to children and adolescents medically transitioning in its current practice. We are unified in opposition to the use of puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, and surgical procedures as they are currently being administered to children and adolescents.

We recognized that we were unified in this position and that we were would be more successful in affecting change if we pooled our human resources. We felt that we would not be able to do so as individuals alone.

We also see the medicalization of children and adolescents as the grave medical scandal that it is.

Every day that we fracture that coalition over drag queen story time or debate what bathroom @tullip/Ritchie should use on twitter is another day that a new child is in a surgical appointment to have Lupron implanted in his arm. Or the day that another 13 year old girl has testosterone injected into her thigh. Or that another 16 year old girl has her breasts surgically removed.

We know that the only way to end this grave medical scandal is to form alliances, partnerships, and coalitions with those who might not agree on other things.

Photo by Oliver Cole on Unsplash

Our Values:

We respect all LGBT people and our committed to upholding free speech. We value viewpoint diversity and encourage honest, open, and good-faith discussion.

In our initial meetings we recognized that we hold positions and beliefs on other aspects that we do not have universal agreement with, and from that we agreed with the second core statement. That means we have had challenging conversations about drag queen story time, about the intentional misgendering of people, about bathrooms; but we can hold these conversations and remain coalition partners because we know a few things about humans.

1.       We will never agree with everyone about everything and that is ok. We can still share our stated purpose.

2.       We want to try to put into practice how free speech can work. So you will see different views presented on the substack.

3.       Part of what has gone so very wrong is that the LGBT organizations that we used to work at, believe in, and support have lost sight of this value and made a unilateral decision to silence the many from within the LGBT that share our purpose.

Our Values:

We support gender and sexual diversity. We want to contribute to forming a world where gender diversity can be expressed without medicalization. A non-medicalized vision of gender nonconformity.

We also joined together because we found that we all have some tie to the LGBT umbrella, and most of us are old enough to have personal experiences with this umbrella from our own development. The LGBT has changed, and it is ok to discuss those changes over time and where this goes into the future.

Many organizations who have formed have made intentional choices to exclude the T.

So why the LGB with the T?

In order to support the value of supporting gender and sexual diversity we believe that we cannot exclude voices from adults who have medically transitioned and we cannot exclude adults who have experienced childhood and adolescent gender questioning who never medically transitioned.

Adult transgender people are a part of our society, for many of us from a certain age we grew up together in shared LGBT spaces. For some of us we considered medical transition ourselves. There are no easy divisions with this much shared history. We care about one another, some of us are in relationship with one another. We came together because we share a common purpose.

We also known that many in the T are also same sex attracted and that transition is often driven by a sexual orientation.

We recognize that many lesbians, gays, and bisexuals feel their organizations, cultures and supports have been taken over by trans activism. We respect the rights of LGB people to organize separate organizations, and support their efforts.

We welcome partnering with those organizations where we overlap on our core purpose. We also wish that the LGBT organizations made different choices in the past decade. We wish that they would have actually been courageous and encouraged honest, open and good faith discussion; because maybe we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in now and children and adolescents wouldn’t be being hurt.

Our Values:

We want to speak to the silenced center, the other lesbians, gay, bisexual and transgender people, the parents, the clinicians, the political leaders who can feel in their bones that something is wrong with transitioning children but don’t have the language or information to articulate it.

Many of our core leadership are from the political left. Some of us no longer feel like they have a political party. Many of us now have begun to say that they are politically homeless.

We have to jump into this fight right now. In the United States we are seeing serious fractures, and some of us in same sex marriages and those raising children are scared. There is a blow back brewing and we have to take a stand.

Transitioning children is wrong, keeping information from parents in schools about their children transitioning is wrong, silencing any voices who oppose these things is wrong.

We do not want to see the loss of marriage equality. The loss of gays and lesbians being protected in raising families. We never want to go back to gays and lesbians not being able to hold their loved ones as they pass away because they are not recognized as their immediate family.

We know what is at stake.

We want to build coalitions, bring in those from the left those who really meant it when they put out the yard signs that said, “women’s rights are human rights” and “science is real” and that “love is love.”

Join us:

Coalitions are hard to form and easy to break.

But when they work they can:

• Provide safety for advocacy efforts and protection for members who many not be able to take action alone. This is why we seek your submissions that can be anonymous and we are working on more ways to take action. Send submissions to lgbtcouragecoalition@gmail.com

• Bring together a diverse range of people and ideas. Diversity can strengthen a campaign to broaden perspective and understanding of the issue.

• Protect against authoritarianism.

• Gives us strength in numbers so that we can work to achieve our core goal. A way to get things done together that we can’t get done alone.