Colorado’s Democratic legislature is moving to penalize parents who don’t use the new name or pronoun their child uses, even if the child changes his name and pronouns repeatedly. It would be deemed “coercive control” just to use the child’s birth name and the pronouns associated with the child’s biological sex.
The provisions are in a bill passed by the Colorado Assembly on April 7:
Parents in custody battles who misgender or “deadname” their child would be accused of “coercive control” under a new radical Colorado bill….
The “Kelly Loving Act,” named for a trans-identifying man who was killed in the 2022 Colorado nightclub shooting, targets parents who do not affirm their child’s new gender identity.
In child custody decisions, “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,” the bill reads.
“Coercive control” also includes things like threatening to kill someone or forcing someone to commit crimes under Colorado law.
The bill also bars Colorado courts from cooperating with other states’ laws that remove a child from their parent because the parent allowed the child to receive transgender medical services like puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgery.
The bill also says that school policies allowing children to use a different name must be “inclusive of all reasons that a student might adopt a chosen name.” Also, school dress codes must not “enforce any rules based on gender,” according to the bill.
“Deadnaming” and “misgendering” would officially be “discriminatory acts” under Colorado law if the bill passes.
State Rep. Jarvis Caldwell, a Republican, called attention to the bill on social media and told The Daily Wire that Democrats introduced the bill “late Friday evening after we went home for the weekend.”
Usually lawmakers would have at least two weeks to prepare before a bill goes to committee, but this time Republicans had less than 24 hours to prepare despite Democrats apparently having the bill in the works for over a year, he said.
Does the bill violate parents’ free speech rights? It will in some cases.
Supporters of the bill say appeals courts allow judges in child custody cases to restrict parents’ speech when doing so is in the best interest of the child.
But appeals courts sometimes overturn restrictions on parents’ speech by judges, even when those speech restrictions were deemed to be in a child’s best interest by a judge.
Critics of the bill say it’s not necessarily in a child’s best interest to be called the new name and pronouns a child demands, because this can put the child on the road to a gender transition the child later abandons and regrets.
Some transgender people constantly change their pronouns, making it difficult to use their preferred pronoun. There are 72 different genders that transgender people can choose from, according to Medicine.Net. There are many made-up pronouns such as “ze” and “zem” that are hard to keep track of.
Forcing people to use particular pronouns can violate the First Amendment, as law professor Eugene Volokh explained in the Washington Post. The First Amendment can protect a speaker’s right to not use the pronouns preferred by a transgender person, even if it offends that person, as a federal appeals court ruled in Meriwether v. Hartop (2021), which revived a professor’s First Amendment lawsuit over being forced to use a transgender student’s preferred pronoun.
In the child-custody context, courts sometimes restrict parents’ speech, and sometimes don’t, and they don’t handle these cases very well, explains professor Volokh in a law review article at this link. When they want to restrict parents’ speech, courts say there is a “compelling interest” in restricting the speech.
Calling speech that offends someone “coercive control” does not make it so, so the fact that Colorado Democrats think it is coercive not to use a made-up pronoun or new name for a child does not mean parents’ speech can be restricted on that basis.
Calling non-violent speech violent or coercive does not make it so. A federal appeals court did not allow a college to punish a professor’s speech as “workplace violence” even when it expressed a yearning for someone else to drop a heavy object on the college president’s head. (See Bauer v. Sampson (2001)). Legislative declarations that speech does something or causes some harm don’t bind the courts in a First Amendment challenge, or get around the First Amendment, as the Supreme Court explained in Landmark Communications v. Virginia (1978). As the Supreme Court explained in that decision, “Deference to a legislative finding cannot limit judicial inquiry when First Amendment rights are at stake.”
The fact that a child wants to be called a new name or made-up pronoun doesn’t mean that that name or pronoun is objectively the right one. Kids may say they are transgender one moment, and then return to their birth gender weeks or months later. As a New York Post article notes, “as many as 80% of [gender] dysphoric children could ultimately experience ‘desistance’— or coming to terms with their biological gender without resorting to transition.”
Calling a child a new name or pronouns is not a neutral statement of fact, but an endorsement of them transitioning, which can have negative consequences. For example, guidance from Britain’s National Health Service “recognizes social transition as a form of psychosocial intervention and not a neutral act, as it may have significant effects on psychological functioning.”
Encouraging kids to transition by using their new name and pronouns could put them on the road to gender transition procedures they may come to regret. The New York Post article says that many girls who get sex changes will “struggle for the rest of their lives with the irreversible medical consequences of a decision they made as minors.” They temporarily identify as transgender boys, then get sex changes before realizing they are really just girls:
The number of girls temporarily identifying as “transgender” has skyrocketed. Dr. Lisa Littman, a former professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences at Brown University, coined the term “rapid onset gender dysphoria” to describe this subset of transgender youth, typically biological females who become suddenly dysphoric during or shortly after puberty. Littman believes this may be due to adolescent girls’ susceptibility to peer influence on social media.
A variety of studies suggest that as many as 80% of dysphoric children could ultimately experience “desistance”— or coming to terms with their biological gender without resorting to transition. Which is why many professionals like Evans think it’s wise to hold off on potentially irreversible medical intervention for as long as possible….All these treatments run the risk of side effects that critics argue are too serious for children to fully understand. In the short term, puberty blockers can stunt growth and effect bone density, while the long-term effects are still unknown since they were only approved by the FDA in 1993. Side effects of testosterone include high cholesterol, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, blood clots and even infertility.
Sex-change procedures come with serious side effects than can leave transgender people with lifelong pain and discomfort. 95% of young transgender people on testosterone develop pelvic floor dysfunction; most have bowel issues and sexual dysfunction. As the Telegraph reported, “Around 87 per cent…had urinary symptoms such as incontinence, frequent toilet visits and bed-wetting, while 74 per cent had bowel issues including constipation or being unable to hold stools or wind in. Some 53 per cent suffered from sexual dysfunction…Almost half had an ‘orgasm disorder’, while a quarter suffered from pain during sexual intercourse.
After Jazz Jennings’s penis was surgically removed at age 17, Jazz experienced pain, constant reflux, an inability to orgasm, rapid weight gain, and mental illness (Jazz was put on puberty blockers at age 11).
The unsatisfying nature of sex changes was conceded in a New York Times op-ed, “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy. And It Shouldn’t Have To.” That’s because of the physical pain and discomfort that result from a sex change, and the artificial, subpar nature of the sex organ that doctors create in sex-change surgery. As Andrea Long Chu wrote in that op-ed:
Next Thursday, I will get a vagina. The procedure will last around six hours, and I will be in recovery for at least three months. Until the day I die, my body will regard the vagina as a wound; as a result, it will require regular, painful attention to maintain. This is what I want, but there is no guarantee it will make me happier. In fact, I don’t expect it to.
Chu still wanted the sex change, but doctors don’t have magical powers, so “sex change” surgery can’t really give transgender people the body they want. So Chu won’t be happy, even after receiving the sex change. The suicide rate of transgender people actually rises after they get sex changes, as a think-tank had already pointed out way back in 2018.
“Gender-affirming surgery is significantly associated with elevated suicide attempt risks,” according to a recent study that was published in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science. Hot Air sums up this peer-reviewed study as finding that “suicide risks” are “1200% higher after gender-affirming surgery.”
