Parental rights groups filed a lawsuit against the state of Colorado on Monday over a newly-signed law forcing people to use transgender individuals’ preferred name and pronouns or risk investigations, lawsuits and fines.
Democrat Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed the law on Friday which declares “deadnaming and misgendering” as “discriminatory acts” prohibited by the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act. Defending Education, Do No Harm and others allege the law violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments and “cannot stifle viewpoints it doesn’t like simply because it finds those views offensive or disagreeable.”
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“Colorado can’t seem to stop losing at the Supreme Court on constitutional challenges to its anti-discrimination laws. And yet, Governor Polis has nevertheless signed another patently unconstitutional iteration of its Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act—something that can only be described as an exercise of remarkable hubris,” Sarah Parshall Perry, Vice President of Defending Education, said in a statement. “HB 25-1312 muzzles parents, doctors, and associations alike if they fail to hew to the government’s preferred gender orthodoxy.”
The law also requires courts to consider “deadnaming, misgendering, or threatening to publish material related to an individual’s gender-affirming health-care services as types of coercive control” when making custody decisions, meaning parents could be stripped of their rights to parent their children if they refuse to allow their child to transition.
“Our members must now alter their speech to endorse the State’s view that someone can change their sex to match an internal sense of so-called gender identity, even though they believe the opposite,” Perry continued. “Under the law, they are now required to refer to individuals using preferred pronouns and ‘chosen name[s]’ instead of biological pronouns and birth names. Members like ours and those of other plaintiff organizations stand to be silenced and we won’t stand for it.”
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The lawsuit argues that the law is controversial even among Colorado residents, and that it “punishes Coloradans for their speech and compels them to use language endorsing the State’s views on highly contested and highly political matters of sex and gender.” It also argues that Colorado’s anti-discrimination act already protects individuals from unfair practices in hiring, employment and other public accommodations.
“In other words, it was already illegal to deny someone actual ‘services’ or ‘goods’ in a public accommodation because their ‘dress’ or ‘appearance’ does not conform to their biological sex,” the lawsuit reads.
The plaintiffs are seeking a permanent injunction barring the law from being enforced and a declaration that it violates the constitution.
“The purpose of H.B. 25-1312 is clear,” the lawsuit says. “The law 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.”
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Under the new law, schools that seek to create a policy regarding student name changes must be “inclusive of all reasons that a student might adopt a chosen name that differs from the student’s legal name.” If a school has gender-specific dress codes, students must be allowed to chose to dress according to either dress code.
“Abridging American’s constitutional right to freedom of expression in the name of radical gender ideology is wrong,” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of Do No Harm, said in a statement. “We expect the court to reaffirm that the Constitution trumps progressive dogma.”
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
