Following six years of failed efforts to convince the Colorado General Assembly to eliminate protections for transgender children, a coalition of religious and ultra-conservative activists are taking their case directly to voters.
On Nov. 3, Coloradans will vote on two separate ballot measures to enact laws prohibiting “any surgery to a minor for the purpose of altering biological sex characteristics” and requiring school districts and colleges to limit sports participation based on students’ sex assigned at birth.
A third initiative created by the same sponsor, Protect Kids Colorado, would increase the penalty for child sex trafficking to life imprisonment without parole.
Political strategists on both sides of the debate over LGBTQ rights are watching anxiously. If the gambit succeeds, it would be the first time nationwide that new statewide anti-trans restrictions would be enacted by voters, and not by a legislature, an executive order from a governor or president or by a state or federal agency.
It would also open up a new path to rolling back transgender rights in states that lack GOP majorities in elected office. According to trackers maintained by the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy organizations, hundreds of bills seeking to curtail transgender rights have been introduced in Congress and state legislatures every year since 2020 — and more than 100 have been enacted — but some 91% have failed.
Twenty-seven states have enacted laws banning trans students from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity, while 23 have retained or strengthened laws prohibiting anti-LGBTQ discrimination.
Colorado is being watched especially closely. Since 2019, when party control there flipped to Democrats, the General Assembly has passed 14 laws protecting transgender and nonbinary people and rejected 11 bills that would have curtailed their rights, making it one of the most LGBTQ-affirming states in the country. State law prohibits in-school discrimination against gender-nonconforming and gay students.
Colorado is one of a handful of states that make it comparably easy for residents to end-run their legislatures. This year, anyone who could gather 124,238 signatures — the equivalent of 5% of the votes cast in the last gubernatorial election — could place a “citizen initiative” to create a new law on the ballot.
According to the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute, 13,000 Coloradans ages 13 to 17 identify as transgender. It’s unclear how many play sports. Opponents of the initiative say they can count them “on two hands.” Meanwhile, Protect Kids Colorado co-founder Erin Lee told The 74 she hears from three to five families a week whose kids have been affected by trans athletic participation.
Research from the LGBTQ organizations The Trevor Project and the Human Rights Campaign has consistently found that as few as 17% of gender nonconforming youth participate in sports, while 90% of LGBTQ youth feel unsafe in locker rooms.
Neither of the two Colorado hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to youth perform surgery on minors. Nationwide, a study published in JAMA Pediatrics found that from 2018 through 2022, of 5 million patients ages 8-17, fewer than 1,000 received puberty blockers while 1,927 received hormones.
There are several implications for school districts, which would be responsible for creating policies deciding who will determine students’ sex — described on the ballot as “certain aspects of a participant’s biological reproductive system” — how screening will be paid for and how the state Department of Education would enforce compliance. Small and rural districts would have to decide whether they can field single-sex teams for both girls and boys.
Colorado’s 175 school districts would make these decisions in the face of competing legal frameworks and political pressures. The state’s anti-discrimination laws protect gender nonconforming students’ access to athletics, bathrooms and in-school opportunities, even as the Trump administration has pronounced these rules in violation of Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in programs that receive federal funding.
In March, the U.S. Department of Education threatened to withhold federal funding from the state’s second-largest district, Jeffco Public Schools, after the department’s Office for Civil Rights concluded transgender students “occupy up to 61 roster positions” on its girls’ teams. Jeffco leaders sued the Trump administration, claiming that complying would put the district afoul of trans-inclusive state laws.
In August, a federal judge dismissed a separate suit against Colorado education officials brought by eight other school systems whose boards wanted to bar transgender students from teams that don’t match their sex assigned at birth. Protections for transgender athletes in the state’s anti-discrimination law put the districts in an “untenable position,” the suit argued.
Whether the initiatives pass, schools will have to deal with the negative impact on their LGBTQ students, who often count on school to be a respite.
“When kids see their politicians and their teachers and school districts and media coverage talking about these issues it really can change the rhetoric and the dialogue and and the day-to-day experiences of kids themselves and particularly in schools,” says Logan Casey, director of policy and research for the Movement Advancement Project, which tracks legislation affecting LGBTQ people and democracy.
“Even when they don’t become law, they still impact and can drastically shape the culture, the public discourse about LGBTQ people and especially about trans people,” he says. “And kids often feel the biggest brunt of that.”
Voters in Arizona, Nebraska and Washington will also decide whether to prohibit transgender student participation in girls’ athletics or expand restrictions, albeit with differing political dynamics. Arizona’s Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs has repeatedly vetoed anti-trans legislation, while such bills have stalled in the Democrat-controlled Washington State Legislature.
Missourians will be asked to amend the state constitution to outlaw gender-related healthcare for minors, including puberty blockers, as well as overturn a 2024 ballot measure affirming abortion rights. Gender-affirming care for youth is already illegal in Missouri. Unlike the measures in the other four states, the initiative was placed on the ballot by state lawmakers.
Colorado Democrats appear poised to retain control over state government. According to the nonpartisan election tracking site Ballotopedia, Washington’s Democratic trifecta may not survive the midterms, and Arizona’s divided state government could end up in either party’s control. Republican control is not threatened in either Nebraska nor Missouri.
Protect Kids Colorado was co-founded by Lee, a parent who in 2023 sued the Poudre School District, which serves students in Fort Collins and several other northern Colorado communities, alleging her parental rights were violated five years ago when a teacher invited her then 12-year-old to a meeting of the school’s gender and sexuality alliance club, or GSA.
“They taught her normal pubescent discomfort means she’s actually a transgender boy,” says Lee. “They taught her how to transition.”
After the child came out as transgender at home, the Lees unenrolled her. The girl has since said she was never trans, just “really, really confused.”
While continually under assault from anti-LGBTQ activists, GSAs have been legally protected for decades.
A federal court of appeals last year upheld a trial court’s decision that the family had not “plausibly alleged” that they were injured by the district’s policy of not requiring educators to disclose students’ gender identities to their parents.
The suit did, however, put the family in touch with others throughout the country who believe many in-school LGBTQ student protections violate their parental rights. In 2024, Lee founded Protect Kids Colorado, which initially failed to gather enough signatures to place initiatives on the ballot prohibiting trans sports participation and what she calls “secret school gender transition.”
At the time, says Lee, “It was widely accepted that you have to have millions of dollars to pay circulators and for messaging and calling. Like a special interest group process; if you have enough money, you can buy your way onto the ballot.”
This year, Protect Kids Colorado had little trouble clearing that hurdle. Lee says the group took a methodical approach to its organizing strategy. More than 3,300 volunteer canvassers worked in concert with the state’s Catholic conference — which urged congregants to circulate petitions on high-attendance weekends — and at least one network of evangelical megachurches.
A complaint pending before state campaign finance officials claims the initiative’s backers failed to report payments to a signature gathering firm. “We’re rectifying the reporting issue there,” says Lee, who described the canvassing as an outside effort to ensure the petition had “a buffer.”
By contrast, proponents of the ballot questions in Washington and Arizona had to collect the equivalent of 8% and 10% of the vote. In Missouri, the threshold is 8%, with a requirement that a certain number come from at least six of the state’s eight congressional districts.
Using ballot initiatives to target trans people may be new, but it was a common tactic used to oppose same-sex marriage, notes Casey.
From 1994 to 2012, more than 40 marriage equality measures went on state ballots — all but three seeking bans. Research from the University of Michigan found that the states with the easiest processes for getting an initiative onto the ballot were much more likely to enact laws or constitutional amendments outlawing same-sex marriage — regardless of public opinion, which did not differ significantly across states.
“One of the reasons that in Colorado specifically we’re seeing these ballot measures is not just because it’s easy to get a measure onto the ballot, but also because the legislature has faced many anti-trans bills and proposals in recent years and has defeated them across the board,” says Casey. “They’re pivoting back to this old tactic to see if they can’t try to advance these policies directly through voters at the ballot box.”
Advocates are unsure of the initiatives’ chances of success. The proposition that appears first of the three on the ballot is 133, the anti-trafficking proposal; the sports and surgery bans are 134 and 135. Protect Kids Colorado’s Lee has described the connection between the three initiatives as combatting the sexualization of children.
Both sides say they are disadvantaged by the “plain language” describing the measures and arguments for and against them in the book state officials mailed to every registered Colorado voter earlier this month. Proponents say the descriptions are biased. Opponents, meanwhile, say they are not specific enough.