By Joy Overbeck | Guest Columnist
With the Colorado legislature’s huge Democrat majority passing a flood of bills pushing radical gender-switching dogma for children, the only way to fight back is with ballot initiatives.
Let’s let the electorate vote on the legislature’s wacky woke agenda. Should boys who think they are girls be allowed on girls’ sports teams, where their stronger male physiques make injuring girls a real danger, and those same male advantages win them trophies and scholarships that should rightfully go to females? Should schools be required to tell parents if their child tells the teacher that she now “identifies” as the opposite sex and wants to be called Bill, and not Jill?
These are two of the issues voters should have an opportunity to decide.
If you say “NO” to boys on girls’ sports teams and “YES” to parents’ right to know if their child is unhappy or confused about his or her gender, you need to get involved with the petition signature effort to put these issues on the November ballot. You can do so by going to Protect Kids Colorado, and sign up to help collect petition signatures, or to find out where you can sign the petitions. This requires effort from all of us since the goal is obtaining 200,000 signatures by Aug. 1.
Both initiatives are critically necessary in the face of determined efforts by the left’s woke crowd to deny biological reality. You don’t need to be a doctor or a scientist to know that it’s unfair and misogynistic for boys with male equipment to dominate girls’ sports. And you don’t need to be a Supreme Court justice to know that millennia of human existence on this planet has been possible only because men are men and women are women.
It’s crazy we need to even discuss whether humans can be born in the wrong body, as the gender-switching gang insists. Yet, right now, elementary children in Colorado school districts including Jeff Co, Cherry Creek, Littleton and Boulder, to name a few, are being taught that they can simply “choose” their own gender.
In the schools promoting this biologically preposterous, non-scientific lunacy, district policy forbids parents from being told that their own children are changing their sexual identities. Children can go to school and tell their teachers to call them by an opposite-sex name and their parents never know. Children, these school districts insist, need their privacy.
This travesty was enshrined in a new Colorado law, “Non-Legal Name Change” (HB24-1039) that lets youngsters change their names at school without parents’ knowledge. This is called “social transitioning” and it’s the first step toward irreversible medical treatment including puberty blockers, hormone injections that prevent or trigger a deep voice, beards or breasts, and eventually often multiple genital-mutilating surgeries. These minor children, who can have trouble remembering to bring their books to school or feed the dog, are being faced with “deciding” their lifelong gender at a most vulnerable age when they’re already undergoing the bodily and emotional upheavals typical of puberty.
Erin Lee is a mom whose 12-year-old daughter was recruited and nearly destroyed by gender-switching indoctrination. The girl’s artistic interest and social isolation led her to an after-school “Art Club” meeting at her Poudre Valley District Wellington Middle-High School, where a woman from the Gender and Sexuality Alliance (GSA) told the children that if they felt uncomfortable in their bodies, they were likely transgender. (Most Colorado schools have a GSA Club – check out your children’s school.) But, what adolescent doesn’t dislike their weirdly morphing bodies? These kids were then initiated into the very adult, complex irreversible medical treatments of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, plus polyamory (group sex), and suicide. They were told to connect with “trusted” adults online at woke websites, while keeping all this secret from their parents. Lee’s daughter told them anyway.
“I thank God she did,” says Lee. “We went through a very hard year as a family because she was so traumatized and confused over her sex. Laws in Colorado that force therapists to agree with gender confusion instead of looking at underlying mental issues only made her worse and more confused. We are so lucky that our girl finally returned to her former happy self.”
Asked what would have resulted if her daughter had kept her despair a secret from her and her husband, Lee said: “I really believe that we would have lost her to suicide. My husband and I have mulled this over and talked to her about what would have happened if we’d gone along with her gender confusion. The pressure of trying to make a label fit, a label that was never right for her, was so heavy she fell into a deep depression and even left us a suicide note. It’s only because we were involved and knew what was going on, and we asked her if she was sure this was right for her, whether she was sure she wanted to live her life as a male, that she eventually recovered.”
The family’s ordeal is the subject of the film, The Art Club Movie and can be viewed for free.
Parents aren’t perfect, but nearly all of them love their children with a love surpassing all understanding and want the very best for them. The law has ways of dealing with the others.
Yet the educational and legal systems of many states are pursuing an aggressive mission to shut parents out of the radicalization of their offspring, labeling parental involvement dangerous to their children.
The California Senate recently passed a bill (AB 1955) banning many local school districts’ rules to notify parents if their children from K-12 gender-switch, or ask to be called by opposite sex pronouns, or to use bathrooms for the other sex. Oh, and the bill would provide more “resources” to support LGBTQ students. Though parents overwhelmingly support the notification rules, California Attorney General Rob Bonta supports lawsuits against the school districts that passed those parent notification rules.
California State Superintendent Tony Thurmond is also against parents being informed, insisting AB 1955, “Protects our LGBQ+ youth from increased risk of bullying and harassment, and it affirms families’ ability to handle family matters at home without school employees being forced to intervene.” But when a child is being called by an opposite sex name at school, wouldn’t that voluntary “outing” to the entire student body actually increase bullying and harassment from other students? Or is the Superintendent really accusing parents of bullying and harassment if they know their child has changed their gender identity? If parents are kept ignorant about their children’s gender-switching, how do they even know it’s a family matter they need to discuss? School employees are clearly intervening by keeping it a secret. In a monumental display of clueless irony, Thurmond also stated the proposed law “will allow our teachers to focus on teaching academic skills – not on policing gender identity.” Oh pleeze.
Anyone who’s lived in Colorado for more than 20 minutes knows that every atrocity passed this year in California will appear inevitably next year on the Colorado Democrats’ legislative bill docket. So it will be with the promotion of transgenderism, which bizarre agenda Colorado Dems so intensely adore that they this year passed a half dozen bills to boost it into law.
Let us observe that Colorado AG Phil Weiser used almost exactly the same fear porn lingo as the California superintendent to attack the ballot Initiative effort to inform parents here in Colorado. According to Colorado Politics, Weiser said, “I have consistently fought in the courts to protect LGBTQ+ youth who are vulnerable to bullying, mean-spirited attacks, and risks to their safety. Any policy that requires school officials to out kids against their will… is irresponsible and dangerous. I will oppose any efforts that endanger the lives of nonbinary and transgender youth.”
Translation: schools must protect children from their own parents! Colorado’s top lawyer says that informing parents of their children’s gender-switching and name-changing endangers the lives of their own children. And it’s mean-spirited!
This is how the almighty State is sabotaging and usurping parents’ sacred duty to guide their children, protect them from danger, and bring them up with the moral principles they see fit. Instead, our children – from kindergarten up – are being claimed as wards of the state that will train these innocent young minds to question the biology of their own bodies and follow a path of irreversible harm.
The urgency is clear: it’s essential for all children’s health and welfare to involve their parents in these life-changing issues that minor children are not mentally and emotionally equipped to navigate alone.
Are you alarmed yet? You should be. But we can fight their takeover. After months of work by a coalition of parent and family groups led by former State Sen. Kevin Lundberg at Protect Kids Colorado, Lori Gimelshteyn of Colorado Parent Advocacy Network, Linda White of Grandparents4Kids.org, and Erin Lee, the two Initiative petitions are ready for signatures. Initiative 160 “Public Athletic Programs for Minors” creates three classes of sports teams based on a child’s biology at birth: girls, boys, and co-ed teams. Initiative 142 “Parents right to be Informed “ requires schools to notify parents if their child wants to use an opposite-sex name, asks to use opposite-sex bathrooms or shows other signs of gender confusion.
Your help is urgently needed to collect enough signatures to put these Initiatives on the ballot.
We must stop the march of the radical woke movement that is coming after our kids. Next, as signaled by AG Weiser, they will doubtless follow California’s lead to pass a law that blocks parents from knowing their child is gender name-switching.
Please join us by clicking the “Carry a Petition” button at protectkidscolorado.org – We The People are the only ones who can save our children. Thank you so much for joining us in this essential work.
Joy Overbeck is a Colorado journalist whose work has appeared at Townhall.com, Rocky Mountain Voice, Complete Colorado, American Thinker, The Washington Times, The Federalist and elsewhere. Follow her on Facebook and on Twitter (X) @joyoverbeck1
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.