What is on the ballot
Two citizen-initiated statutes.
Initiative 109 would require every school and college athletic team, public and private, to be designated male, female or coeducational based on whether a person’s reproductive system is “organized around the production of ova” or of sperm.
Initiative 110 would bar any health-care professional or other person from knowingly performing any surgery on someone under 18 to alter biological sex characteristics, and bar public money from paying for it.
Both are statutes, not constitutional amendments, so a simple majority makes either one law. There is no supermajority safeguard.
Note throughout: “109” and “110” are filing numbers. They will not be the numbers on your ballot.
- 1. They regulate problems Colorado does not have
- 2. 109 treats the two sexes differently on its face
- 3. 109 defeats its own stated purpose
- 4. 109 is unenforceable against the students it names
- 5. 109 has no answer for X-documented students
- 6. Enforcement can only run on how girls look
- 7. Colorado’s own constitution is a live question
- 8. 110 puts a ballot campaign inside a clinic
- 9. 110 never says who it applies to
Argument 1
They regulate problems Colorado does not have.
Neither of Colorado’s two largest providers of pediatric gender-affirming care performs gender-affirming surgery on minors. Children’s Hospital Colorado told Colorado Newsline it has never provided such surgical care to patients under 18, and stopped offering it to adults in 2023. Denver Health stopped offering it to minors in early 2025.
On the sports side, nobody knows the size of the group. Asked in February 2026 how many transgender athletes compete in its sanctioned events, the Colorado High School Activities Association answered: “Due to privacy laws, this information is neither shared with or received by CHSAA.”
Z Williams, co-director of the Denver nonprofit Bread and Roses Legal Center, told Colorado Newsline in January 2026 that “the number of trans athletes is incredibly small, and the number of gender-affirming surgeries done for transgender youth or minors is even smaller.”
Laws written for problems that are not occurring still do damage, to the specific children they name and to everyone caught in the enforcement described below.
Argument 2
109 treats the two sexes differently on its face.
Set gender identity aside entirely and read the text. There are two rules, and they are not the same rule.
“An interscholastic or intramural athletic team or sport sponsored by a school or athletic association that is designated for females, women, or girls shall not be open to a male student or participant.”
Unconditional. The subsection contains no exception.
The boys’-team rule carries a condition the girls’-team rule does not. A male-designated team is closed to a female participant “unless there is no female team offered or available for such sport for such female student or participant”.
Those last six words matter and are easy to drop: they make the exception turn on the individual student, not on the school’s programme.
The consequence, for children who are not transgender at all. A boy at a school that offers only girls’ volleyball has no route onto that team in any circumstance. A girl at a school that offers only boys’ wrestling has a statutory route onto it. Same facts, opposite answers, on sex alone.
Federal courts have upheld sex-asymmetric school sports rules for decades. In Clark v. Arizona Interscholastic Ass’n, 695 F.2d 1126 (9th Cir. 1982), the Ninth Circuit applied constitutional intermediate scrutiny and upheld a policy that let girls try out for boys’ teams while barring boys from girls’ volleyball, as substantially related to “redressing past discrimination against women in athletics,” because “average physiological differences” let sex serve as “an accurate proxy” for competitive advantage. Title IX’s own athletics regulation is built the same way: 34 C.F.R. 106.41(b) extends a try-out right to the excluded sex only “where… athletic opportunities for members of that sex have previously been limited.” So we do not say this is clearly unconstitutional. We say what the text proves: it is not the sex-neutral rule its marketing describes.
Argument 3
109 defeats its own stated purpose.
A transgender boy - assigned female at birth, living as a boy, possibly on prescribed testosterone - is female under the measure, because his reproductive system is “organized around the production of ova.” Two things follow, and the measure cannot avoid both.
Either it places him in girls’ sport. That is where its own definition puts him.
This is not hypothetical. Under the Texas UIL birth-certificate policy effective August 1, 2016, Mack Beggs - a trans boy taking physician-prescribed testosterone - was entered in the girls’ bracket, and won the UIL girls’ Class 6A championship at 110 pounds in both 2017 and 2018, beating the same opponent in both finals. He said he wanted to wrestle boys. If the worry is testosterone in girls’ sport, this kind of rule is what produces it.
Or its own carve-out places him on the boys’ team. Where no girls’ team is offered in a sport, 25-60-103(2)(b) admits that same student to the boys’ team - where he competes as a boy, which is where a gender-identity policy would have placed him anyway.
The measure’s definition either produces the outcome it was written to prevent, or reproduces the outcome it was written to replace.
Argument 4
109 is unenforceable against the students it names.
The measure defines sex by gametes and gives nobody the power to establish anyone’s. There is no verification clause, no examination authority and no testing procedure anywhere in the filed text. Enforcement runs through the commissioner of education, and only where a district “has intentionally refused to comply.”
So a school can act only on documents. Here is what Colorado law says about the documents.
A new birth certificate “must not be marked as amended or indicate in any other manner that the gender designation or name on the certificate has been changed.”
A minor’s application takes three signed documents and no court order: a written request, a statement that the designation “does not align with the person’s gender identity,” and one statement from a medical or mental-health professional.
Put the two laws side by side. A documented transgender student’s birth certificate and state ID read consistently with their identity, with no notation. Ask the proponents the practical question: which document would a school use to classify that student otherwise? There is not one. And a district relying in good faith on facially valid state documents has not intentionally refused anything.
Colorado spent years deliberately making a transgender child’s paperwork ordinary. 109 is a biology rule dropped on top of a documentary system, with no tool to separate them.
Argument 5
109 has no answer for X-documented students.
Colorado has allowed an X sex designation on driver’s licences and state ID cards since 2018, with no requirement of hormonal treatment or surgery, and on birth certificates since Jude’s Law. The state does not publish how many Coloradans hold one.
109 never mentions X, never mentions nonbinary students, and never mentions documents. Its text recognises two categories and orders schools to place every student in a single-sex team into one of them. When an X-documented student appears: the statute says the student must be one or the other, the school’s only record declines to say which, and the measure supplies no mechanism to resolve it. The coeducational carve-out at 25-60-103(3) is not an answer in the many sports where no coeducational team exists.
A law that commands a binary classification but supplies no answer for a category the state itself issues is not a strict rule. It is an unwritten one, and unwritten rules get filled in by whoever is standing closest.
Argument 6
Enforcement can only run on how girls look.
This is the argument to sit with whatever you think about transgender issues. If documents cannot identify who the law targets, and no examination procedure exists, one trigger remains: suspicion. A rival coach, a parent in the stands, an anonymous complaint - someone decides a girl looks too tall, too strong, too something.
International sport has already run this experiment. Compulsory sex testing of every woman athlete was abandoned by the IAAF in 1992 and by the IOC from the 2000 Games, after decades of tests that misidentified women who had always been women. Both kept the power to test an individual when a question was raised about her - and both have since brought universal genetic screening back, World Athletics from September 2025 and the IOC from the 2028 Games. The practice is contested and it is not finished; what is settled is that the universal version was tried and abandoned once for cause.
The logic here is structural, not speculative. A rule that cannot trust documents and has no examination procedure can only run on appearance. That reaches girls who are not transgender first and most often, because there are far more tall, strong, short-haired girls in Colorado than there are transgender athletes in the entire state.
Argument 7
Colorado’s own constitution is a live question.
109 is a statute. Colorado’s Equal Rights Amendment sits above it. Colo. Const. art. II, sec. 29 (“Equality of the sexes”), effective January 11, 1973: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the state of Colorado or any of its political subdivisions on account of sex.”
In Colorado Civil Rights Comm’n v. Travelers Ins. Co., 759 P.2d 1358, 1363 (Colo. 1988), the Colorado Supreme Court held that this provision “requires that legislative classifications based exclusively on sexual status receive the closest judicial scrutiny,” and that Colorado’s provisions “provide additional prohibitions against sex discrimination not present in the United States Constitution.”
The only exception any Colorado appellate court has articulated is differential treatment “reasonably and genuinely based on physical characteristics unique to just one sex.” People v. Salinas, 551 P.2d 703, 706 (Colo. 1976). That exception is narrower than it sounds. When the Colorado Supreme Court applied the ERA to pregnancy — a condition unique to one sex — it held that excluding normal pregnancy from an employee health plan violated the amendment, rather than falling inside any exception. Travelers, 759 P.2d at 1363, 1365.
Massachusetts’s highest court struck down a rule with the same one-way structure in 1979 under its comparable ERA, and doubted it could be sustained “under any mentioned approach, or variant.” Attorney General v. Mass. Interscholastic Athletic Ass’n, 378 Mass. 342 (1979). Two limits: that case concerned boys who were not transgender, and Massachusetts decisions do not bind Colorado courts.
In West Virginia v. B.P.J., decided June 30, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court held that Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause permit schools to limit girls’ teams to biological females. That decision runs against part of this argument, and we are not going to hide it. Two things limit it: the Court expressly reserved a separate question, stating that “nothing in this opinion should be interpreted to address or limit participation by biological females on male or co-ed sports teams”; and it does not reach state constitutions.
And the honest limit on our side: no Colorado appellate decision has applied the state ERA to athletics, and none has applied it to gender identity or transgender status. Colorado courts have also not decided whether “closest judicial scrutiny” demands more than the federal test; a federal court applying Colorado law called the stricter reading plausible and left it open. This is a genuinely open question, which means passing 109 buys years of litigation rather than settlement.
Argument 8
110 puts a ballot campaign inside a clinic.
110 bans surgical care that Colorado’s major providers already do not give to minors. What is not symbolic is its definition and its funding cut. It defines the banned conduct by purpose rather than procedure: “altering biological sex characteristics” means “treatment in response to a minor’s perception of sex or gender.” The same operation stays lawful when the reason for it is different - the measure’s own carve-outs for disorders of sex development and for circumcision prove exactly that.
It applies to everyone under eighteen and the phrase “parental consent” appears nowhere in it. A parent who agrees with their child and their child’s doctor has no route through it.
And it binds far more than surgeons: “a health-care professional or other person,” where health-care professional is defined to include psychiatry, psychology, mental health therapy, pharmacy and “other healing arts.”
The principle is the point. It substitutes a ballot campaign’s judgment for the judgment of a family, a patient and a physician. A state that can do that for this care has established that it can do it.
Argument 9
110 never says who it applies to.
The whole measure is one rule: a health-care professional “shall not knowingly perform, prescribe, administer, or provide any surgery to a minor for the purpose of altering biological sex characteristics.” Everything turns on that last phrase, because the definition is where the rule actually lives. Here it is, complete and unedited:
“Altering biological sex characteristics” means treatment in response to a minor’s perception of sex or gender. It does not include treatment for persons born with a medically verifiable disorder of sex development or treatment for acquired physical or chemical abnormalities. “Altering biological sex characteristics” does not include male circumcision.
Now notice what is not there. The measure never uses the word “transgender.” The word “gender” appears exactly once in the whole thing — in that sentence. No gender identity, no dysphoria, no discordance.
The test it writes down is whether an operation responds to “a minor’s perception of sex or gender.” It does not say the perception has to be that the minor’s gender differs from their sex. The measure is four pages. You can read it in five minutes and we would rather you did.
Compare Tennessee’s law, the one the Supreme Court upheld in June 2025 and the template most of these measures follow. Tennessee bans the covered treatments only where the purpose is “enabling the minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s biological sex,” or treating distress from “a discordance between the minor’s biological sex and asserted identity.” Both require a mismatch, and the mismatch is what keeps Tennessee’s ban off children who are not transgender.
Tennessee also allows treatment of a “congenital defect, precocious puberty, disease, or physical injury,” and it defines its terms. Colorado’s measure has no mismatch requirement, no disease exception, no injury exception, and no definition of “abnormalities” at all.
The clearest place this could matter is gynecomastia — breast tissue that develops in boys during puberty. The Merck Manual states flatly that “during infancy and puberty, enlargement of the male breast is normal,” and the American Academy of Family Physicians reports that “one-half of adolescent males will experience gynecomastia.” Surgeons in the American Society of Plastic Surgeons reported 2,942 such operations in 2024 on patients 19 and under — a band that includes 18- and 19-year-olds, who are adults, counted from member surgeons only. Treat it as rough scale, not a headcount of children.
What makes it the test case is that the medical literature does not describe the reason for this surgery in neutral anatomical terms. It describes it in the measure’s own vocabulary. A 2024 study in Plastic Surgery calls the condition “gender-incongruent chest development,” arising in “a period of increased awareness of one’s self-image and sexual identity,” and describes the operation as giving “a perceived ‘normal-appearing’ male chest.” Those are the surgeons’ words, written before this measure was drafted.
The definition excludes “treatment for acquired physical or chemical abnormalities.” Gynecomastia is not present at birth; it develops during puberty. Proponents will say that makes it an acquired physical abnormality, plainly outside the ban — and the grammar supports them, because that exclusion starts its own phrase and “acquired” is the ordinary opposite of “born with.” This is the strongest argument against everything in this section, and we think it more likely than not that it wins.
Our answer is only that it rests on a word the measure never defines. Something that happens to about half of boys in puberty, and resolves on its own in most of them, is not obviously an “abnormality” — Merck calls it normal. Tennessee saw the problem coming and wrote a definition. Colorado’s drafters used a similar term and left it blank. No court has resolved it, because this is not law yet, and anyone who tells you the answer is obvious in either direction is guessing.
Two things need no interpretation at all. First, the funding ban reaches anything the prohibition covers — and the measure creates no penalty, names no agency, and says nothing about who decides in the first instance whether a particular operation is covered. The state’s own fiscal analysis assumes that work lands on the Division of Insurance, the State Medical Board and the civil courts.
Second, when Colorado’s nonpartisan Legislative Council Staff wrote its official summary in September 2025, it described the ban as reaching “surgery on anyone under 18 years old in response to their perception of sex or gender unless they have a medically verifiable disorder of sex development” — naming one exception and leaving the other out. A fiscal summary binds nobody. It is evidence of how this text reads to a careful person with nothing at stake.
So here is the claim, as narrowly as we can put it. We are not telling you 110 bans surgery for boys who are not transgender. We are telling you it does not say that it doesn’t, that other states’ versions say it in so many words, and that one sentence would have settled it — a definition of “perception of sex or gender,” or naming gynecomastia in the exclusions the way circumcision is named. That sentence is not in the measure. If it becomes law, the question gets answered later by courts, licensing boards and insurers. Not by you.
The bottom line
Vote no on both.
- They regulate problems Colorado is not having.
- 109 treats the two sexes differently on its face, including children who are not transgender.
- 109 is internally contradictory: its own definition either puts a testosterone-taking trans boy into girls’ sport, or its own carve-out puts him on the boys’ team.
- 109 is unenforceable against the students it names, because Colorado’s birth-certificate law leaves no notation to find.
- 109 has no answer for students holding a document the state itself issues.
- In practice it can only be enforced through scrutiny of how girls look.
- It invites years of litigation under Colorado’s own constitution.
- 110 puts a ballot campaign between a family and its doctor.
- 110 never says it applies only to transgender children, and the law it is modelled on does.
A simple majority makes these law. A simple majority stops them.
Where to go
There is already a campaign, and it is further along.
Families Not Politics is the registered issue committee opposing both measures, filed with the Colorado Secretary of State on February 10, 2026 and led by One Colorado, with Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, Cobalt, Interfaith Alliance and Inside Out Youth Services. If you want to volunteer, donate or organise, go to them.
One Colorado · Rocky Mountain Equality · ACLU of Colorado · Register and check your ballot
Corrections and questions: info@protecttranskidscolorado.org. Offers of help: volunteer@protecttranskidscolorado.org.
These addresses receive but do not send. Mail to them is read. Any reply will come from a different address, and often the right answer is that we correct the page rather than write back — if we got something wrong here, the fix belongs on the page where the mistake was. If you want a conversation with people who can reply properly and organise around it, go to Families Not Politics.