The bills, House Bill 1312 and House Bill 1309, are expected to be signed into law any moment by Colorado’s Democrat governor, Jared Polis.
The legislation is known collectively as "Legal Protections for Transgender Individuals."
Joseph Kohm, director of public policy at Family Policy Alliance, says HB 1312 claims it protects transgender people with an anti-discrimination law.
“Which might sound good,” he says, “until you realize that it could really threaten parents' fundamental rights.”
At the same time a new state law would crack down on “misgendering” and “dead-naming” transgender people, it does so for children, too. That means parents must acknowledge their own child’s new pretend name, for example, or face punishment under Colorado law.
AFN previously reported the bill’s original language – now changed due to public backlash – called it “coercive control” if a parent opposes a child’s new gender identity, and a judge hearing a custody case would consider doing so a form of child abuse.
“Colorado clearly wants to set itself up as an outlier amongst the United States to become a true transgender sanctuary state,” he warns. “And they would even call it that. That's not me ascribing a term to it. That's what they would identify these bills as being geared towards.”
CO activist recalls political fight
A related first-hand story, published at The Federalist, says radical trans activists are demanding Gov. Polis sign the bills to transform the already-liberal Western state into what they call the “Trans Continental Pipeline” for transgenders from across the nation.
A link in The Federalist story takes you to the website for the Denver-based “Trans Continental Pipeline." That group, a recognized non-profit, states it is a support network for “Queer and 2SLGBTQIA+ Individuals” who move to Colorado.
The Federalist story was written by Glenn Stanton, a Colorado-based research analyst at Focus on the Family. He writes that the two companion bills are so radical a homosexual rights activist sat beside him to oppose the legislation when Stanton testified against it in front of state legislators.
According to Stanton and his article, children are clearly a target of the “Pipeline” as well as a target of the two bills. HB 1309 demands a transgender-affirming medical environment in Colorado and then the companion bill, HB 1312, silences parents who would refuse to affirm their child’s plan for a new name, hormones, and surgery.
Farther down in the article, Stanton says the bill’s sponsors not only dropped “coercive control” from their legislation but also removed the terms” misgendering” and “deadnaming” from it, too.
Even without those terms, he writes, “the bill still makes such things fully punishable violations under state law.”
According to Kohm, Coloradans have failed to stop a “two-pronged assault” from the companion bills that targeted the medical community and “moral sanity” in his state.
