Colorado bills trouble families

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Thursday, the 15th of May.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

First up, a controversial new bill out of Colorado that critics say undermines parental rights.

It’s called Legal Protections for Transgender Individuals, also known as the Kelly Loving Act, named after a victim of the Club Q nightclub shooting in 2022.

REICHARD: One section of the original bill—now removed—sparked outrage: it would have allowed the state to take custody from parents who don’t affirm their child’s transgender identity. That included prohibiting parents from calling a child by his or her birth name or biological sex.

The bill labeled those acts as discrimination, even domestic abuse.

BROWN: Other troubling provisions remain: schools can’t enforce “gender-based” clothing rules. And teachers must use a child’s new chosen name—even without the parent’s knowledge.

After intense opposition from Republican lawmakers and concerned families, lawmakers removed the most controversial section, though much of that deleted language is popping up in other bills.

REICHARD: Joining us now to talk about it is Lori Gimelshteyn, she’s executive director of the Colorado Parent Advocacy Network and has been campaigning against this bill.

BROWN: Lori, good morning.

LORI GIMELSHTEYN: Thanks so much Myrna. Thanks for the opportunity to join your show.

BROWN: As we just heard, the Colorado Legal Protections for Transgender Individuals bill covers a lot. So many ways we could begin…let’s start with why you’re so concerned about it…

GIMELSHTEYN: Yeah, absolutely. So we have seen egregious bills get passed into law that really undermine the fundamental authority of parents to direct the upbringing, education, and care of their children. And when House Bill 25-13-12, which is deceptively titled, Legal Protections for Transgender Individuals, we were very alarmed. And a lot of the content that you were describing in regards to the parents losing custody of their children for not gender affirming was really seeking to codify what we're already seeing in practice in Colorado. So that's actually already happening without this law.

We have an incident reporting tool at the Colorado Parent Advocacy Network where families, parents, teachers, students can submit incidents and we help them. We're helping 28 families right now who have lost or have the potential to lose custodial rights because they are not gender affirming of their child's newly declared gender distress and confusion and declared gender identity.

Now we lobbied extremely aggressively against this bill. We received nearly 35,000 signatures on a petition to oppose this bill from Coloradans that we presented, we printed, and hand delivered to all of the senators when it was moved over to the Senate. And we were very just alarmed that when we got to the Senate Judiciary Committee, there was this big announcement: “we're gonna strike these sections of the bill and we're gonna get rid of this coercive control.” And it was, it looked like a win for parent rights, but it wasn't.

BROWN: You mentioned the tens of thousands of signatures what I would call a groundswell of pushback. How did that pushback shape the final version of the bill, you think?

GIMELSHTEYN: Well, it put a lot of not only local statewide attention on this bill, it brought in a lot of national attention on this bill. And what we have uncovered is that what they did is, yes, they did strike that language, but they added language back in. And they also passed another bill, House Bill 25-12-39, which makes significant changes to the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act.

So all the things that they struck in the original bill that seemed so egregious, they struck it, but they moved it into a different bill. So parents are at great risk for losing custodial rights of their children if this bill is signed into law. And there's a lot of pressure on governor Polis right now to not sign the law. He has 30 days since the close of session to sign or not sign it. We are asking him and have a very aggressive campaign to continue to put pressure on him to veto this bill. But this is very alarming.

BROWN: So as I understand it, this bill is on its way to the governor's desk to be signed. Is there anything more you think that can be done to challenge it?

GIMELSHTEYN: I think what this bill has done is it's really gotten people to see the truth. For years, there's been alarm bells going off in parent organizations. The mainstream media has done a really good job of making these claims seem false as if there's some type of propaganda. But now we have real impact. Real families are being impacted by this legislation and these practices. And because of that, people see what's happening and it's happening right in front of them. And they can see that it's coming from the legislature.

BROWN: As we wrap up, tell us a little about Bill 1309 which might protect so-called gender-affirming health care in Colorado…

GIMELSHTEYN: It's being sold as a bill to protect health care. But what it really does is it mandates insurance coverage for extreme procedures for people who self-declare or identify that they are transgender. So this isn't for people that might have a real medical need to have any type of surgery, but this is for somebody that has a feeling that they are transgender.

And so things like facial bone remodeling, breast augmentation, and sex change surgeries, really with zero meaningful safeguards. And it lets doctors just decide what's “medically necessary,” leaving the store kind of wide open for children to receive these life altering treatments without proper oversight. And we already know that's happening. It's happening at Children's Hospital here in Colorado, at their True Center for Gender Diversity. It's happening at Kaiser Permanente and other gender clinics here in Colorado. But what this does is it will mandate that insurances must coverage these extreme procedures.

And one of the other most alarming parts of this bill is it will hide testosterone prescriptions from state tracking systems, which will make it completely impossible to monitor how often or how much is being prescribed. And this is a huge recipe for abuse.

BROWN: Lori Gimelshteyn is executive director of the Colorado Parent Advocacy Network. Thanks for joining us this morning.

GIMELSHTEYN: Thank you Myrna. I hope you have a blessed day.

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