Krista Kafer: Law to protect transgender pronouns and dress comes with a steep price — free speech

Eventually the Legal Protections for Transgender Individuals law if it passes will be struck down by the courts as an unconstitutional suppression of free speech but by then damage will already have been done In the time it takes to wind its way through the legal system residents discourse will deteriorate family relationships will be hurt and schools will lose trust The damage will be immense and unmendable Better that Colorado House Bill not become law in the first place It has passed the House Hopefully sounder thinking will prevail in the state Senate if not in the governor s office House Bill would empower populace institutions to discriminate in several different avenues against Coloradans who consider gender the same as biological sex a genetically determined immutable physical characteristic When deciding custody cases one provision of the law would allow courts to discriminate against a parent who uses his or her child s given name and biologically correct corresponding pronoun if the child is experiencing gender dysphoria The court could favor the parent who chose instead to encourage a transgender child s confusion and alienation from his or her body Consider a divorced man whose daughter experiences gender dysphoria If the dad chooses to gently affirm her biological reality by using her real name and pronouns he could get less custody or perhaps none This isn t entirely hypothetical A friend of mine faced this situation fortunately he lived in a state that protects parental rights and freedom of speech and his custody was unaffected by this choice A law like this would have interfered with his parental right to steer his daughter toward acceptance of her body and biologically determined gender It would have given his ex-wife a useful legal weapon to use against him That s not all House Bill would do It would mandate that citizens schools allow cross-dressing by students who wish to live as the opposite sex The law would discriminate against schools that want to reduce distractions from learning by having students dress according to their biological sex It would take decisions out of the hands of principals and school board members and put it into the hands of politicians In the end the law would define calling a trans-identifying person by his or her former name or a pronoun associated with his or her biological sex as a discriminatory act under the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act In cases of employment housing and general accommodation by completely using one s freedom of speech to utter a biologically factual pronoun a person could find him or herself in the crosshairs of a Colorado Civil Rights Division review and punishment or possibly a lawsuit That would be a clear violation of free speech Certain Coloradans believe that gender is a self-selected characteristic that need not correspond to genetically determined biological sex They have every right to hold that belief and to treat trans-identifying people by the gender of their choice and to raise their own children with this belief Other Coloradans consider gender tantamount to biological sex They have the right to identify males and females by their biological sex and to guide their own children away from what they consider a harmful delusion Opinions on gender are diverse and individuals have the right to persuade others using facts and emotions What they don t have the right to do is create laws that limit free speech override school strategy and interfere with parental decisions It s time to identify House Bill as a dead bill Krista L Kafer is a weekly Denver Post columnist Follow her on Twitter kristakafer