After anti-transgender speech from Democratic lawmakers spread argument and votes over the course of several days, two bills passed the House on Friday that would allow transgender and nonbinary Coloradans to use their preferred names more quickly.
The two Democrat-backed bills, HB24-1071 and HB24-1039, have both had long committee hearings before going to the floor. They have caused hours of anxious discussion in the House over the past week. Under the terms of HB24-1071, it would be simpler for those who have been found guilty of crimes to adapt their names to meet their gender identity. HB24-1039 would make it discriminatory for students to consciously use the wrong names and allow students to use their preferred names.
On a preliminary voice vote next year, the House passed the bills. After the sponsor of the bill, Rep. Lorena Garcia, attempted to change the president’s brand to recognize the transgender girl who inspired it, the second attempt to pass them out of the room failed on Monday. Rep. Leslie Herod, a Republican senator, noted that two Democratic lawmakers had acknowledged their personal prior arrests at a recent parliamentary debate, sparking hours of discussion that included allegations about the person’s criminal background.
Despite the absence of some Democrat legislators from the floor, the bill’s attempt to rename it failed in a bipartisan vote. House leadership then punted the bills until Friday and publicly suggested bringing legislators back this trip if the bills weren’t resolved.
The debate over the measures, which were discussed in succession, differed in some ways: Republicans claimed that the name-change bill would allow those who had been found guilty of felonies to avoid a greater level of public scrutiny for their histories, and that parents were being exempt from the bill so that students could be recognized by their gender-affirming names.
Rep. Ty Winter, a Trinidad Republican and the House’s assistant majority leader, said, “I know there are people out there that are going to vilify their kids and work them over for stuff like this.” “But to me, the students’ naming bill takes away the right, the ability for someone like myself who wants to help their children,” he said. “That (help) isn’t a bad thing.”
Democrats countered that a criminal conviction shouldn’t limit a person’s ability to identify themselves and that some students were afraid of their parents’ reactions to their identities while their parents could be notified of their desired name. Transgender individuals and community members testified during the commission hearing of the bill about being bullied and demonized by both students and staff.
Rep. Barbara McLachlan, a former teacher and Durango Democrat, described speaking with a pupil who wanted to be called a different title but was afraid to tell their parents.
“I thought, ‘May I have the kids kill them?’ Or if I offer them the designated safe haven?” McLachlan stated. “I chose the safe room.”
However, the partisan divide over gender identity in America was the focus of the controversy over the two bills. Democrats defended the bills as means of better protecting transgender Coloradans and mentioned the recent death of a nonbinary scholar in Oklahoma, while some Republicans’ opposition came from what lawmakers called the transgender “agenda.”
Due to the bills’ earlier conversations and Democratic lawmakers’ attempts to baselessly disparage their Democratic colleagues after House Democrats rejected a bill last month to enhance criminal penalties related to child prostitution, the House now had great tensions.
Some Democrat politicians claim they were threatened as a result of both those assertions and the Friday name-change bill debates. Julie McCluskie, the speaker of the Democratic House, stated to reporters that the language being circulated on social media was “disgusting.”
Rep. Richard Holtorf, a Republican from Akron, and Rep. Ken DeGraaf, a Republican from Colorado Springs, described teachers abusing students as an example of how educators couldn’t always be trusted in the absence of parents on Friday. While using vivid language to describe gender-affirming surgery, some people compared trans identities to mental illnesses.
Democrats defended their bills as crucial changes that needed to protect a particular group, and they constantly decried what their Republican counterparts described as hateful rhetoric. The student bill’s sponsor, Rep. Stephanie Vigil, claimed she had no idea why the antagonism was sparked by the subject. Some of the discussion, according to Denver Democrat Rep. Jennifer Bacon, was “unbecoming of the setting.”
According to her, “People are being harmed, shamed, and hurt for saying, ‘I just want to be affirmed the way the law affirms everyone else,’ which we must do in accordance with the Constitution. But to demand that we be treated equally and then to be doxxed, shamed… is necessarily against what we are doing here.”
