DENVER (LifeSiteNews) – Democrats in the Colorado Legislature are attacking parental rights for the LGBT cause yet again with new legislation to weigh custody disputes against parents guilty of “misgendering” or “deadnaming” a child.
Named after a victim of the 2022 Club Q nightclub shooting, the Kelly Loving Act would establish that “when making child custody decisions and determining the best interests of a child for purposes of parenting time, a court shall consider deadnaming, misgendering, or threatening to publish material related to an individual’s gender-affirming health-care services as types of coercive control. A court shall consider reports of coercive control when determining the allocation of parental responsibilities in accordance with the best interests of the child.”
It would also ban state courts “from applying or giving any force or effect to another state’s law that authorizes a state agency to remove a child from the child’s parent or guardian because the parent or guardian allowed the child to receive gender-affirming health-care services.”
The bill also extends beyond child custody disputes. It would make misgendering and deadnaming “discriminatory acts,” require education policies relating to “chosen names” to recognize “all reasons that a student might adopt a chosen name that differs from the student’s legal name,” ban schools from putting gender-based rules in dress codes, and require state forms asking for someone’s name to “include an option to provide the individual’s legal name and chosen name,” and abide by the latter in all subsequent forms.
The Daily Wire noted that “coercive control” is a serious legal category that includes behavior as severe as death threats and forcing others to break the law.
“In my opinion, the goal is to eliminate the ability of a parent to seek treatment for gender confusion and dysphoria,” Republican state Rep. Jarvis Caldwell said. “I’ve seen many radical bills this legislative session, but this is by far the most egregious. At a minimum, it attacks parental rights, local control, the U.S. Constitution, and more specifically, the First Amendment.”
A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Yet Colorado has been notoriously hostile to those who dissent from LGBT orthodoxy, such as banning counseling for minors dealing with unwanted gender confusion or same-sex attraction (which is currently before the Supreme Court), attempting to legally punish small businesses for refusing to participate in pro-LGBT messages, forcing female students to share restrooms with biological males, and even proposing legislation to make it a crime to “misgender” the deceased on death certificates (i.e., to accurately identify their sex on official medical records).
