DENVER (LifeSiteNews) — A coalition of parental-rights groups is suing Colorado over a new law to make “misgendering” potential grounds to remove children in custody disputes, as textbook viewpoint discrimination.
Named after a victim of the 2022 Club Q nightclub shooting, which was perpetrated by a gender-confused person, the “Kelly Loving Act” establishes 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 (so-called) 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 also bans 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” dangerous “gender transition” procedures and has a host of additional requirements unrelated to custody matters. Gov. Jared Polis signed it into law on May 16.
Colorado News Online reports that the groups Defending Education, Colorado Parent Advocacy Network (CPAN), Protect Kids Colorado, and Do No Harm, along with dermatologist Dr. Travis Morrell, are suing Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser and Colorado’s Civil Rights Division over the law, saying it “punishes those who refuse to speak using chosen names and pronouns, and it does so in order to suppress traditional beliefs about sex and gender. In other words, the law openly discriminates based on viewpoint.”
“Plaintiffs and their members operate in places of public accommodations,” the suit states. “They want to refer to transgender-identifying individuals using biological pronouns, birth names, and other forms of address inconsistent with an individual’s self-professed gender identity or gender expression. But the ‘chosen name’ and ‘gender expression’ provisions make their speech unlawful and unconstitutionally compel them to alter their speech.”
“When CPAN and (Executive Director) Ms. Gimelshteyn use birth names and biologically accurate pronouns, they are not doing so to be malicious or hurtful,” the suit explains. “They do so because this expression reflects their deeply held beliefs that sex is fixed in each person from the moment of conception and cannot be changed,” as well as reflecting the simple necessity of clarity and accuracy in factual or medical communication.
It is a dictate of left-wing ideology that gender is no more than a matter of self-perception that individuals are free to change at will. But, as biology attests, sex is not a subjective sense of self but an objective scientific reality, established by an individual’s chromosomes from their earliest moments of existence and reflected by hundreds of genetically-based characteristics.
Yet for years LGBT activists have worked to promote “gender fluidity,” the idea that sexual identity is separate from biology and discernible only by personal perception, across public education, libraries, health care, and cultural traditions such as school homecomings and athletic competitions.
Critics warn that their efforts have yielded a wide array of harms, both to the physical and mental health of gender-confused individuals themselves as well as to the rights, health, and safety of those who disagree, such as girls and women forced to share intimate facilities with males, female athletes forced to compete against males with natural physical advantages, and individuals forced to affirm false sexual identities in violation of their consciences, their understanding of scientific fact, and/or their religious beliefs.
In April, U.S. Department of Education (DOE) spokeswoman Julie Hartman declared that “children do not belong to the government” and that the Trump administration “will not tolerate abuse of parents’ rights – or of students who are victims of predatory behavior by adults who are supposed to protect them.”
