The lobbying blueprint behind Colorado’s parental rights erosion

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

Editor’s note, April 28, 2026: HB26-1322 passed the House on April 2 and cleared Senate Judiciary on April 27. It is under Senate consideration. HB26-1309 passed House Judiciary on March 31 and is in House Appropriations.

In 2019, a team of lawyers at one of the world’s largest firms produced a document explaining, in precise detail, how to change the law around children and gender without the public knowing it was happening.

That document is now a lens through which Colorado’s last three legislative sessions make a different kind of sense.

Formally titled “Only Adults? Good Practices in Legal Gender Recognition for Youth,” the 65-page report was produced pro bono by Dentons — the world’s largest law firm by attorney headcount — along with the Thomson Reuters Foundation and IGLYO, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Youth & Student Organisation. Released during Transgender Awareness Week, it came with standard disclaimers from both institutional partners that it didn’t reflect their views. One UK contributor went unnamed.

The report’s stated purpose was to equip NGOs with legal analysis and lobbying strategy for advancing gender recognition laws for minors. Its recommended framework: no minimum age, no medical gatekeeping, no mandatory parental consent. Where parents refused to give authorization, the document called on states to take action against them. Parental consent, it acknowledged, “can be restrictive and problematic for minors.”

From page 14 of the Dentons/IGLYO document, “Only Adults? Good Practices in Legal Gender Recognition for Youth” (2019).

The playbook

What makes the document unusual isn’t the policy it advocates. It’s that people wrote down exactly how to win.

It coached advocates to keep legal gender recognition separate from medical transition in public messaging — specifically to reduce alarm. Attach proposals to more popular causes as political cover. Limit press exposure to prevent “misinterpretation.” Target younger politicians early. Introduce proposals before governments set their own terms. Its foreword says the report was intended to be “a powerful tool for activists and NGOs working to advance the rights of trans youth across Europe and beyond.”

Page 20, of the Dentons/IGLYO document

What the document didn’t account for was the science catching up. 

In April 2024, England’s NHS released the Cass Review — four years of independent work led by pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass, drawing on research out of the University of York. On mental health, the reviewers said the studies weren’t strong enough to tell whether puberty suppression helps. Effects on gender dysphoria, on cognitive development, on fertility — the reviewers said the evidence wasn’t there to draw conclusions. 

Pages 20–21, Cass Review final report (April 2024).

The countries the Dentons document pointed to as models — Sweden and Finland — have since pulled back, restricting or pausing youth gender interventions while better evidence is gathered. 

The authors of the Dentons document weren’t in a position to know any of this in 2019, but they also weren’t asking those questions. The report was a legal and tactical guide. 

Colorado’s sequence

The legislation that has moved through Colorado’s statehouse since 2024 follows the document’s recommended structure closely enough that the correspondence is worth examining directly.

HB24-1039, signed by Governor Jared Polis on April 29, 2024, required all public and charter schools to use a student’s “chosen name” — defined as reflecting “an individual’s innate sense of the individual’s own gender, which may or may not correspond with the individual’s sex assigned at birth.” 

No parental notification required. Failure to comply constituted discrimination under state law. 

The Dentons document had advised separating legal changes from medical ones to reduce public resistance. HB24-1039 carried no reference to medical transition. It was framed as a narrow anti-discrimination measure.

HB25-1312, the Kelly Loving Act, came next. 

In its introduced form, it contained what the Dentons document had recommended almost verbatim — courts directed to treat misgendering and deadnaming as coercive control and weigh that in custody determinations. A parent who refused a child’s preferred name and pronouns could have that refusal used against them in family court. 

The document had described exactly this mechanism, recommending that states use custody proceedings to manage parents who “obstruct the free development of a young trans person’s identity in refusing to give parental authorization when required.”

Over 680 people signed up to testify at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, which was capped at eight hours, speakers limited to two minutes. Dozens of parents, pastors, educators and medical professionals waited for hours, then were turned away after midnight. 

Colorado father Paul Serrini was among those who got through. “I lost custody of my daughter because professionals affirmed her gender identity without my consent,” he testified. “She’s been suicidal, institutionalized, and has done self-harm.” 

Dr. Travis Morrell, a physician who said he had prescribed cross-sex hormones to adults, told the committee that primary care providers shouldn’t be doing the same for kids without proper referral. Planned Parenthood and other Colorado providers, he said, were prescribing these medications to minors through telehealth. “There are no good studies proving safety.”

Under sustained public pressure, the custody provisions were stripped before final passage. 

The bill still passed 23-12 along party lines in the Senate, with school name-change policies intact and parental notification amendments defeated.

Then SB26-018 arrived in the 2026 session. It permits a minor’s legal name change without consent of a non-custodial parent who objects — then seals the court record of that change from the dissenting parent. Three separate amendments requiring consent of both parents were voted down during its passage. The House majority used Rule 14 to cap floor debate at three hours. Polis signed it on April 21.

HB26-1309 redefines domestic violence in custody proceedings to include “health-related abuse” — defined as interfering with or preventing access to medical care, mental health care or reproductive health care through physical harm, intimidation or coercive control. If a court finds domestic violence under this standard, mutual decision-making can be blocked over the other parent’s objection. The bill does not define “reproductive health care.” Under existing Colorado law, gender-affirming care is classified and protected as a separate category — but the bill’s language does not draw that line, leaving the term open to interpretation in a custody proceeding.

HB26-1322, the Civil Actions for Conversion Therapy Survivors Act, creates a new civil cause of action against licensed mental health professionals whose practice “seeks to direct a patient toward a predetermined sexual orientation or gender identity outcome.” The action can be brought at any time, with no statute of limitations. Counseling that supports gender transition or identity exploration is explicitly exempted. The House majority used Rule 14 to limit debate to three hours before passing it.

Four bills. Parental authority narrowed at each step. Records sealed against the objecting parent. The Dentons framework, enacted incrementally.

The resolution they couldn’t vote on

Three sessions. Three attempts. The answer was the same every time.

HCR26-1004 was the latest version — a concurrent resolution that would have sent a single constitutional question to Colorado voters: do parents have an explicit right to direct the upbringing, education and care of their children? 

It did not go far. On April 21, 2026, the House State, Civic, Military, and Veterans Affairs Committee voted 8-3 along party lines to postpone it indefinitely. Twenty Coloradans had testified in support. Zero came to oppose. The Democrat majority didn’t ask a single question.

Erin Lee — whose daughter was secretly socially transitioned through a school club in sixth grade, and whose federal lawsuit over the incident reached the U.S. Supreme Court — testified for the third time on this same resolution.

When testimony closed, committee member Rep. Nguyen thanked those who came. He said he appreciated “your preferences, your stories, speaking your truth.” Then he voted no. “I just don’t see the urgency of having a constitutional amendment in the rights of parents,” he said. “Because right now, I believe that parents are able to still take their children to homeschool.”

Rep. Brandi Bradley closed for the sponsors. “I didn’t see a single one of you, other than the two on the ends, basically ask questions — which I’ll have to say on the record bothers me,” she said. “I ask questions for every bill that comes in front of this committee, no matter what I think my outcome might be. I ask the questions so I can understand the policy better.” She stopped short of drawing a conclusion, but raised the question of whether outcomes in that room are decided before testimony is given.

What the document explains

The Dentons document was not a secret. It was published, distributed to NGO networks and cited in parliamentary evidence in the UK and Ireland. 

Page 6, of the Dentons/IGLYO document

Journalist James Kirkup, writing in the Spectator in December 2019, identified the central question it raises: how did small organizations with limited budgets achieve such rapid and widespread influence over public bodies, politicians and officials in a short period? The document, he wrote, helps answer that.

Whether Colorado’s legislature was shaped by networks connected to it, or arrived at the same policy framework independently, the public record does not say. What it shows is a four-bill sequence tracking the document’s recommendations from tactical framing through policy outcome — and a constitutional referendum killed three consecutive sessions without a single voice raised against it.

The evidence that prompted Sweden and Finland to reverse course — and that the Cass Review said wasn’t strong enough to support these interventions — hasn’t registered in Colorado’s statehouse.

The parents who showed up unopposed were told homeschooling remains available to them.

That is part of the record.