Two bills allowing transgender and nonbinary Coloradans to more easily use their preferred names cleared the House on Friday after anti-transgender rhetoric from Republican lawmakers spread debate and votes over multiple days.
The two Democrat-backed measures — HB24-1071 and HB24-1039 — have led to hours of tense debate in the House over the past week, and both had lengthy committee hearings before hitting the floor. HB24-1071 would make it easier for people convicted of crimes to change their names to fit their gender identity, subject to court approval. HB24-1039 would allow students to use their preferred names and would make it discrimination to intentionally use the wrong names.
The House passed the bills on an initial voice vote last week. The first attempt to pass them out of the chamber sputtered Monday, after the name-change bill’s sponsor, Rep. Lorena Garcia, attempted to change the bill’s name to honor the transgender woman who inspired it. That sparked hours of debate that included allegations about the woman’s criminal history, with one Democratic lawmaker, Rep. Leslie Herod, noting that two Republican lawmakers had acknowledged their own prior arrests at a recent congressional debate.
The attempt to rename the bill failed on a bipartisan vote, though several Democratic legislators were absent from the floor. House leadership then punted the bills until Friday and publicly floated bringing legislators back this weekend if the bills weren’t settled.
Debate over the measures, which were considered in succession, was distinct in some ways: Republicans argued the name-change bill would allow people convicted of felonies to duck broader public awareness of their histories (such people have long been able to pursue name changes with court oversight) and that parents were being left out of the bill to let students identify by their gender-affirming name.
“I know that there’s people out there that are going to demonize their kids and work them over for things like this,” said Rep. Ty Winter, a Trinidad Republican and the House’s assistant minority leader. “But to me (the students’ naming bill) takes away the right, the ability for someone like myself who wants to help their children. That (help) isn’t a bad thing.”
Democrats countered that a criminal conviction shouldn’t restrict a person’s ability to self-identify and that, while parents could be notified by their kids of their desired name, some students were afraid of their parents’ reaction to their identity. In that bill’s committee hearing, transgender people and family members testified about being bullied and belittled by students and staff alike.
Rep. Barbara McLachlan, a Durango Democrat and former teacher, described talking with a student who asked to be called by a different name and was scared to tell their parents.
“I thought, ‘Should I have the parents kill them? Or should I give them the safe space to be?’ ” McLachlan said. “I chose the safe space.”
Broadly, though, the debate for the two bills turned on the partisan divide about gender identity in America. Some Republicans’ opposition sprung from what lawmakers described as the transgender “agenda,” while Democrats defended the bills as means to better protect transgender Coloradans and mentioned the recent death of a nonbinary student in Oklahoma.
Tensions in the House between the majority Democrats and super-minority Republicans already were high because of the bills’ previous debates and in the wake of Republican lawmakers’ attempts to baselessly smear their Democratic colleagues after House Democrats rejected a bill last month to increase criminal penalties related to child prostitution.
Some Democratic lawmakers said they received threats as a result of both those claims and the name-change bills debated Friday. Democratic House Speaker Julie McCluskie told reporters that she was “disgusted” by the rhetoric spread on social media.
On Friday, Rep. Richard Holtorf, an Akron Republican, referred to transgender identities as a cult, and Rep. Ken DeGraaf, a Colorado Springs Republican, described teachers abusing students as an example of how educators couldn’t always be trusted independent of parents. Others likened transgender identities to a mental illness while describing gender-affirming surgery in graphic terms.
Democrats, meanwhile, defended their bills as important changes needed to protect a targeted group, and they repeatedly decried what they described as hateful rhetoric from their Republican colleagues. Rep. Stephanie Vigil, the sponsor of the student bill, said she didn’t understand what about the topic sparked such hostility. Rep. Jennifer Bacon, a Denver Democrat, said some of the debate was “unbecoming of the building.”
“People are being harmed and shamed and hurt for saying, ‘I just want to be affirmed the way the law affirms everybody else,’ which we have to do according to the Constitution,” she said. “… So to demand that we be equally treated, and then to be doxxed, shamed… is fundamentally against what we are doing here.”
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