Dear Legislators, 

Earlier this week, the Georgia Senate Health and Human Services Committee passed a bill that would prohibit medical providers, like us, from providing medical care to transgender and gender-expansive youth in our state. In an orchestrated effort to prevent public testimony, the chairman of the committee added language to an unrelated bill, HB 1170, that would ban puberty-delaying medications and hormone therapy, even for patients who are currently receiving these treatments. This motion was undertaken without prior notice to the public or medical community, thus preventing any opposing testimony from qualified, board-certified endocrinologists, pediatric and adolescent gynecologists, adolescent medicine specialists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and other medical providers who treat patients with gender dysphoria.  Continue reading →

To our fellow Georgians,

Today, a handful of politicians will host faith leaders who are outliers in our community at the Capitol, giving a platform to anti-transgender activists, dangerous rhetoric, and misinformation. They will exploit a small, but vocal, minority within the faith community and misconstrue our religious texts and faith traditions in attempts to lay the groundwork for a hostile legislative session.

As faith leaders from all across the state, we are appalled that this group is promoting such a hateful and divisive agenda; one that directly contradicts the central tenets of our religions, as well as the majority views of both Georgians and people of faith. Many of us see not condemnation, but celebration of LGBTQ+ people in our sacred texts, and reject these homophobic and transphobic readings of those texts.  Continue reading →