There is a conversation happening in LGBTQ spaces right now that mostly isn’t happening out loud. It surfaces in strategy sessions and donor meetings and organizational board rooms, in the careful language of political consultants and the nervous calculations of advocacy leaders who are watching polling numbers and thinking about what is winnable and what is not.

The conversation goes something like this: trans rights, and in particular the specific fights around gender-affirming care for youth and trans women in sports, are polling badly with persuadable voters. The authoritarian project has chosen these issues with precision, not because they represent a serious policy concern but because they are effective wedges, generating visceral cultural anxiety that can be weaponized to separate the LGBTQ movement from potential allies and to make the movement as a whole appear extreme. And some people, some organizations, some funders are wondering whether the rest of the LGBTQ community – and by extension the broader progressive coalition – might be better served by a strategic retreat, by quietly distancing from trans rights, by deciding that this particular fight is not the hill to stand on right now.

I want to be direct about what that calculation is, what it misunderstands about the authoritarian strategy, and why it would be catastrophic, not only morally, which should be sufficient, but strategically, which apparently also needs to be said.

What the Authoritarian Playbook Is Actually Doing

The targeting of trans people – and specifically trans youth and trans women in sports – is not a policy agenda. It is a strategic operation. Understanding it as policy produces the wrong response. Understanding it as strategy produces the right one.

Jason Stanley, in How Fascism Works, identifies the targeting of vulnerable minorities as a core mechanism of authoritarian consolidation. The function is not primarily to harm the targeted group, though that harm is real and intentional. The primary function is to test the solidarity of potential opposition coalitions, to find and exploit the fracture lines, and to establish a precedent: that some members of the coalition can be sacrificed when the political cost of defending them is judged too high.

Every successful authoritarian project has done this. The question it is always asking of the opposition is: is there anyone in your coalition you will abandon to protect the rest? Because if the answer is yes, we know exactly how to proceed. We find that person. We make defending them as costly as possible. And we watch the rest of the coalition either hold together or fracture. If they fracture, we learn where the next fracture line is, and we push there.

The targeting of trans people is not the end of this strategy. It is the test. And what the test is measuring, in real time, is whether LGBTQ organizations, progressive coalitions, and pro-democracy movements will sacrifice their most vulnerable members when the pressure is sufficient.

If the answer is yes – if the movement signals, through organizational silence, funding withdrawal, or explicit distancing, that trans people are expendable – the authoritarian project will have learned something invaluable: that the coalition’s solidarity is conditional, that it has a price, and that the price can be paid in the currency of targeted minority sacrifice. The next target will be identified and pressured with that knowledge.

The Springs-to-River Framework

Before going further, let me explain the organizing concept that makes the strategic stakes here legible.

A spring is a distinct source – an ideologically coherent community, a movement, an organization with its own values, its own history, its own base, its own way of understanding the world. Springs are not interchangeable. Their distinctiveness is not a problem to be solved through merger or ideological alignment. It is the source of their power.

A river, in the organizing context, is what forms when distinct springs coordinate, merging but without ceding diversity; when they maintain their separate identities and commitments while feeding collective action toward a shared goal. The river’s force comes from the combination of many springs. No single spring, however powerful, generates the volume and momentum that a river requires.

The springs-to-river model is the strategic framework for how a genuinely pluralistic coalition produces the kind of mass civil resistance that historical evidence shows is necessary to reverse authoritarian consolidation. Erica Chenoweth’s research establishes that nonviolent civil resistance succeeds at roughly twice the rate of violent resistance, and that the key variable in that success is the breadth of participation counted in the number of distinct communities, constituencies, and institutional sectors engaged in coordinated action. The river has to be wide. Width requires springs. Springs require that the river not demand that any of them stop being what they are.

The LGBTQ community is a spring, or, more precisely, an ecosystem of springs, with enormous internal diversity of experience, culture, politics, and strategy. Trans people are among those springs. Bisexual people, lesbian women, gay men, nonbinary people, queer people who don’t organize their identity around any of these labels – each is a distinct source of energy, analysis, and commitment.

The question that the authoritarian project is forcing the LGBTQ movement to answer is whether it is a river or a collection of springs that are only willing to flow together when doing so is politically convenient. The answer to that question has consequences not just for the LGBTQ movement but for the entire pro-democracy coalition of which it is a part.

Why “Strategic Distancing” Is a Strategic Catastrophe

The argument for strategic distancing from trans rights goes roughly like this: we are in an emergency, political capital is limited, we should concentrate it where it can be most effectively defended, and the polling suggests that trans rights, particularly for youth and in sports, are not terrain where the broader public is with us. Better to consolidate the gains already made on marriage equality, workplace protections, and adoption rights, and fight for trans rights when the conditions are more favorable.

This argument has the structure of a strategic analysis and the content of a moral failure. Let me explain why the strategic analysis is also wrong.

First, the polling. The polling on trans rights is real and the numbers are not good on specific contested questions, particularly those that have been the focus of sustained authoritarian disinformation campaigns. But polling on targeted minorities during authoritarian consolidation is not a reliable guide to underlying public values. It is a measure of the success of the targeting operation. When authoritarians spend years and hundreds of millions of dollars generating fear and confusion about a specific group, the resulting polling reflects that investment. Responding to that polling by distancing is not reading public sentiment, it is rewarding the targeting operation for having worked.

Second, the precedent. Every movement and every institution that signals it will abandon vulnerable members under sufficient pressure has established a negotiating position: we can be moved. The question is only how much pressure is required and who the next target will be. The LGBTQ movement’s credibility as a coalition partner to labor, to racial justice movements, to disability rights organizations, to faith communities, and to the broader pro-democracy movement depends substantially on whether it is seen as a movement that holds together under pressure or one that sacrifices members when politically convenient. Coalition partners watch. They remember.

Third, the moral logic of authoritarianism. Authoritarian movements do not stop at the boundaries their opponents draw for them. If the LGBTQ movement signals that trans people are acceptable losses, the authoritarian project does not accept that boundary and move on. It takes the loss, notes the fracture, and pushes further. Marriage equality, which was described as the settled law of the land and a done deal, is already being litigated. The idea that a strategic retreat on trans rights would protect the rest of the movement assumes that the authoritarian project has a specific, limited policy agenda and will stop when it achieves it. It does not. It has a structural agenda: the elimination of LGBTQ visibility and rights from American public life. Trans people are the current point of attack because they are the most recent addition to the movement’s political gains and because the disinformation campaign against them has been most successful. They are a soft entry point to drive the wedge and divide and conquer, not the only target.

The Solidarity That Is Needed

Let me be honest about what solidarity with trans people actually requires in this moment, because the word “solidarity” is used so often that it has lost specificity.

It does not mean agreeing with every policy position or strategic choice made by every trans advocacy organization. Springs maintain their distinctiveness; they do not require ideological merger to flow together.

It does not mean that no critique within the coalition is possible. Internal accountability and honest disagreement are part of what makes a pluralistic movement functional rather than merely formal.

It does not mean prioritizing trans rights above every other strategic consideration in every context. The springs-to-river model is about coordination, not hierarchy.

What it does mean is this: the LGBTQ movement’s organizations, funders, and leaders must refuse, categorically and publicly, to signal through their resource allocation, their public messaging, or their organizational positioning that trans people are strategically expendable. That refusal must be explicit enough to be legible to the authoritarian project that is watching for fractures, and to the coalition partners who are assessing whether the LGBTQ movement is a reliable river or a collection of fair-weather springs.

It means naming the targeting operation as what it is: a strategic operation, not a genuine policy debate, and refusing to engage it on the terms it sets. When the authoritarian project frames trans youth healthcare as a debate about parental rights, the response is not to find a more moderate position on parental rights. The response is to name the frame as a strategic deception and to explain what is actually at stake.

It means, concretely, that organizations and funders that are quietly reducing their investment in trans advocacy need to understand that they are not managing political risk. They are transferring it to trans people who will bear the consequences of that abandonment, and to the broader coalition, whose credibility as a movement of genuine solidarity will be damaged in ways that are difficult to repair.

The River Holds or It Doesn’t

The springs-to-river model makes a claim about power that is empirically grounded: broad, pluralistic civil resistance is significantly more effective than narrow, homogeneous resistance. The breadth is not incidental to the power. It is the source of the power. A coalition that sacrifices its most vulnerable members to make itself more palatable to a political center that is itself being moved by authoritarian disinformation is not making itself stronger. It is making itself smaller, more predictable, and more susceptible to the next round of targeted pressure.

Trans people are part of this river. Their experience of living under sustained authoritarian targeting, including the legislation, the disinformation, the violence, and the deliberate erasure, is not a political liability to be managed. It is strategic intelligence about what the authoritarian project is doing and how it works, and it belongs at the center of the movement’s analysis, not at its margins.

The LGBTQ movement did not achieve what it has achieved by abandoning its most vulnerable members when the political cost of defending them seemed high. It achieved what it has achieved by insisting, repeatedly, and in the face of enormous opposition, that the humanity and dignity of every member of the community was non-negotiable. That insistence was not naive idealism. It was the strategic foundation of every coalition the movement built and every institutional ally it won.

The authoritarian project is testing whether that foundation holds. The answer the movement gives in its organizational decisions, its funding priorities, its public voice, and the explicitness of its solidarity will shape not just the fate of trans people in this country but the coherence and credibility of the entire pro-democracy movement of which the LGBTQ community is an essential part.

The river holds or it doesn’t. This is the moment that tests which.

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