A Colorado proposal that would punish parents for not using preferred pronouns is an example of government overreach, warned the U.S. Department of Education.
(LifeSiteNews) -- A Trump administration spokesman said it will “not tolerate” infringements on parental rights, such as a proposal in Colorado to make “misgendering” potential grounds to remove children in custody disputes.
Named after a victim of the 2022 Club Q nightclub shooting perpetrated by “non-binary” Anderson Aldrich, the Kelly Loving Act would establish that “when making child custody decisions and determining the best interests of a child for purposes of parenting time, a court shall consider deadnaming, misgendering, or threatening to publish material related to an individual’s (so-called) gender-affirming health-care services as types of coercive control. A court shall consider reports of coercive control when determining the allocation of parental responsibilities in accordance with the best interests of the child.”
It would also ban state courts “from applying or giving any force or effect to another state’s law that authorizes a state agency to remove a child from the child’s parent or guardian because the parent or guardian allowed the child to receive” dangerous “gender transition” procedures and has a host of additional requirements unrelated to custody matters. It has passed the Colorado House but not yet the Colorado Senate.
Speaking to the Daily Signal, U.S. Department of Education (DOE) spokeswoman Julie Hartman declared that “children do not belong to the government. They belong to parents.”
Without announcing any specific action, she added, “the department will not tolerate abuse of parents’ rights – or of students who are victims of predatory behavior by adults who are supposed to protect them.”
Critics say transgender activists have inflicted a wide array of harms on society, both to the physical and mental health of gender-confused individuals themselves as well as to the rights, health, and safety of those who disagree, such as girls and women forced to share intimate facilities with males, female athletes forced to compete against biological males with natural physical advantages, and individuals forced to affirm false sexual identities in violation of their consciences, their understanding of scientific fact, and/or their religious beliefs.
Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has taken multiple executive actions to reverse the Biden administration’s transgender policies, including an order that ends all federal support for “transition” procedures on minors, rescinds or amends all of the Biden health bureaucracy’s past endorsements of underage “transitioning,” and calls for a review of the medical literature on the subject, enforcing all existing restrictions on underage “transitioning,” and taking regulatory action to “end” the practice to the greatest extent possible under current law.
The Trump administration has also frozen Title IX grants to Main over the state’s potential noncompliance with rules against gender-confused males in sex-specific school athletic competitions against actual females, and opened investigations into Maine and California for policies related to schools withholding information about a child’s gender confusion from parents.
