Earlier this year, I testified before the Colorado legislature in opposition to House Bill 25-1109, which would have required death certificates to reflect decedents’ “gender identity,” rather than their sex. The proposal was self-evidently absurd—death certificates are legal documents, not tributes to decedents’ subjective sense of self. Nevertheless, the legislature passed the bill, which awaits Governor Jared Polis’s signature.
Now, Colorado lawmakers have gone a step further. A new proposal, House Bill 25-1312, would make “deadnaming” and “misgendering” children—that is, not using their preferred name or pronouns—a factor in child-custody disputes. Under the Kelly Loving Act, parents who refuse to use their child’s chosen name or pronouns, even out of sincere concern for the child’s well-being, would be deemed to be exercising “coercive control,” and therefore liable to lose custody.
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Instead of ensuring children’s safety, this bill would mandate speech, codify a radical ideology into law, and weaponize family courts to enforce compliance.
The bill is framed in terms of preventing “harm” and “abuse,” which relies on the popular claim that “gender-affirming care” is a form of suicide prevention. Despite the frequency with which such claims get repeated, no good evidence exists suggesting that “gender-affirming” treatments—social transition, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, surgeries—are grounded in rigorous, evidence-based medicine. On the contrary, every systematic review conducted to date has concluded that the evidence supporting these interventions is of very low quality.
By insisting that parents affirm their child’s identity, the bill pushes the “social transition” aspect of “gender-affirming care,” which entails changing a child’s name, pronouns, clothing, and behavior to align with his asserted “gender identity.” Proponents often portray social transition as a benign and cost-free intervention. But as Mia Hughes, a senior researcher at Genspect, noted in her testimony before the Colorado House Committee against the proposal, “affirming” a child in his delusion sets him up for a lifetime of regret:
There are consequences to lying to a child. A parent telling their sweet effeminate boy who liked Barbies and princess gowns that he can be a girl may solve his distress in the short term. It is, after all, not easy to be different. It may seem to be in that little boy’s best interest to use the female name and female pronouns, and a court may decide that he is better off with the affirming parent. But this is short-sighted. Social transition comes at such an enormous cost in the future. . . . Socially transitioning children sets off a chain reaction that can lead to becoming a life-long medical patient. Therefore, this bill has got it backwards. Socially transitioning a child is a form of coercive control that strips away the child’s sense of self, robs them of their bodily integrity, and violates their right to go through puberty.
Hughes is exactly right.
Psychologist Kenneth Zucker, an expert in gender dysphoria, similarly warned in a 2019 paper that social transition can inappropriately cement a child’s cross-sex identity. In that paper, he predicted that social transition would “increase dramatically” the rate at which transitioned children’s gender dysphoria persisted compared with children with gender dysphoria not socially transitioned.
He proved correct. A 2022 study by Kristina Olson and colleagues found that a shocking 97.5 percent of transgender-identifying “youth who socially transitioned at early ages continued to identify that way.” Nearly 60 percent of such children will continue on to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and many will pursue surgeries. In the years before widespread social transition, by contrast, most young children with gender dysphoria—about 80 percent—eventually desisted and accepted their bodies as they grew into adulthood.
Rather than view socially transitioned children’s persistent gender dysphoria as a red flag, activists hail it as validation. Azeen Ghorayshi, writing about Olson’s study for the New York Times, said that the results reflected “societal acceptance of gender diversity” and increasingly supportive parents, both of which allow “transgender children” to “thrive in their identities.” Olson, in an interview with Healthline, argued that the persistence rate debunks the notion that “a five or six-year-old who is insisting that they are a gender that does not align with their sex at birth can’t possibly know their gender, or that this is just a ‘phase.’”
These are deeply flawed interpretations. If social transition were truly a harmless way for kids to explore their identities, we’d expect a significant number to decide eventually that they aren’t transgender, given the numbers that historically desisted when left alone. Instead, nearly all those who are socially transitioned persist in the rejection of their natal sex.
I’ve often asked supporters of gender-affirming care: If 97.5 percent persistence after social transition doesn’t concern you, what number would? I am still waiting for a response. The truth, for many activists, is that any outcome serves as proof that gender-affirming care is working.
This kind of unfalsifiable thinking is now shaping public policy. Colorado’s Kelly Loving Act defines “deadnaming” and “misgendering” as forms of “coercive control”—a term traditionally used to describe domestic abusers who isolate, intimidate, and manipulate their victims. In custody disputes, the bill orders courts to favor parents who affirm their child’s identity and to disfavor parents who don’t.
Yet skeptical parents are often the only ones who can protect their children from harmful medical treatments. Many detransitioners—people who once identified as transgender but no longer do—speak of a parent who slowed things down, asked difficult questions, and refused to affirm their recently adopted cross-sex or “nonbinary” identity. Maintaining this tether to reality provided a safe and shame-free way out.
The Kelly Loving Act would punish such parents and reward those who set their child on an irreversible path of life-long medicalization. On April 2, the bill cleared the state house’s Judiciary Committee, with all seven Democrats voting in favor, and all four Republicans in opposition. On April 6, it passed the full state house with overwhelming Democratic support. It now moves to the state senate, where Democrats hold a 23-12 edge. If the bill clears the senate, it will land on the desk of Governor Polis, who has signed similar legislation simplifying the process for changing sex on IDs and banning so-called “conversion therapy” with respect to “gender identity,” which prevents gender clinicians from questioning patients’ transgender identity and trying to make them comfortable in their natural bodies.
If Polis signs the bill, Colorado will enshrine into law the notion that protecting a child from irreversible and unnecessary medical treatments constitutes abuse. This is precisely the opposite of the truth. Kids with gender dysphoria—and the parents who refuse to lie to them—deserve better.
Photo by RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images
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