The case against 134 and 135.

Argument 1

They regulate problems nobody can show Colorado has.

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, the state does not track how many transgender students this involves. In February 2026 the Colorado High School Activities Association was asked how many transgender athletes compete in its sanctioned events. Its answer: “Due to privacy laws, this information is neither shared with or received by CHSAA.”

Z Williams co-directs Bread and Roses Legal Center, a Denver nonprofit. In January 2026 Williams told Colorado Newsline: “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 reach and to everyone caught in the enforcement described below.

Argument 2

134 writes one rule for girls’ teams and a different rule for boys’ teams.

Set gender identity aside entirely and read the text. There are two rules, and they are not the same rule.

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.

Argument 3

134 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. The Texas UIL’s birth-certificate policy took effect on August 1, 2016. Under it, Mack Beggs, a trans boy taking physician-prescribed testosterone, was entered in the girls’ bracket. He won the UIL girls’ Class 6A championship at 110 pounds in 2017 and again in 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 a sport has no girls’ team, 25-60-103(2)(b) admits that same student to the boys’ team. There 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

134 is unenforceable against the students it targets.

The measure defines sex by gametes, then gives nobody the power to establish what any student’s gametes are. 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.

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. 134 is a biology rule dropped on top of a paperwork system, with no tool to tell the two apart.

Argument 5

134 has no answer for students whose documents say X.

Colorado has allowed an X sex designation on driver’s licenses 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.

134 never mentions X, nonbinary students, or documents. Its text recognizes two categories and orders schools to place every student on a single-sex team into one of them. So when a student with an X designation shows up, the statute says the student must be one or the other. The school’s only record declines to say which. The measure supplies no way 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

134 supplies no way to enforce itself except suspicion.

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. The IAAF abandoned compulsory sex testing of every woman athlete in 1992, and the IOC abandoned it 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, 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 appearance is the only input the rule leaves, and most tall, strong, short-haired girls in Colorado are not who the measure was written about.

Argument 7

134 faces an open question under Colorado’s own constitution.

134 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.”

The Colorado Supreme Court has applied that provision. In Colorado Civil Rights Comm’n v. Travelers Ins. Co., 759 P.2d 1358, 1363 (Colo. 1988), it held that the provision “requires that legislative classifications based exclusively on sexual status receive the closest judicial scrutiny.” It added 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. Pregnancy is a condition unique to one sex. Yet when the Colorado Supreme Court applied the ERA to it, the court held that excluding normal pregnancy from an employee health plan violated the amendment. The opinion does not invoke the Salinas exception. Travelers, 759 P.2d at 1364, 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.

Argument 8

135 puts a ballot campaign between a family and its doctor.

135 bans surgical care that Colorado’s major providers already do not give to minors. Its definition and its funding cut are not symbolic, though. It defines the banned conduct by purpose, not by 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. It reaches “a health-care professional or other person,” and it defines health-care professional 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

135 never says it applies only to transgender children.

This is the longest argument on the page and the most carefully hedged. It has three parts: what the text says, what the proponents will answer, and what we could not verify.

What the text says

The measure’s operative rule is a single sentence: “a health-care professional or other person 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. The definition is where the rule actually lives. Here it is, complete and unedited:

What the text leaves out

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 short. You can read it in five minutes, and we would rather you did: here is the filed text.

Tennessee requires a mismatch. Colorado does not.

Compare Tennessee’s law, which the Supreme Court upheld in June 2025. 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. 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.

Where it could matter: gynecomastia

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 (physiologic gynecomastia),” and the American Academy of Family Physicians reports that “one-half of adolescent males will experience gynecomastia.” Members of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons reported 2,942 such operations in 2024 on patients 19 and under. That band includes 18- and 19-year-olds, who are adults, and it counts member surgeons only. Treat it as rough scale, not a headcount of children.

What makes gynecomastia the test case is how the medical literature describes the reason for the surgery. It does not describe that reason 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.” It describes the operation as giving “a perceived ‘normal-appearing’ male chest.” Those are the surgeons’ words, written before this measure was drafted.

Two things that need no interpretation

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, in September 2025 Colorado’s nonpartisan Legislative Council Staff wrote its initial fiscal impact statement on the measure. 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.” That names one exception and leaves the other out. A fiscal summary binds nobody. It is evidence of how this text reads to a careful person with nothing at stake.

The two exclusions leave a gap between them

Start with what the exclusions say. One covers children born with a disorder of sex development. The other covers abnormalities that were acquired. Between them, they do not cover every child born with an atypical sex characteristic. Some congenital conditions are neither. The clearest is Poland syndrome: a child is born missing the pectoralis major muscle on one side, with the ribs, nipple and breast on that side underdeveloped or absent. It is not acquired. The muscle is missing at birth, and the condition has been diagnosed by ultrasound before birth.

And it is not a disorder of sex development. That phrase is a term of art. The 2006 international consensus that gave it meaning defines it as “congenital conditions in which development of chromosomal, gonadal, or anatomical sex is atypical,” and classifies every such condition by chromosomes, gonads and hormones. There is no chest-wall or breast category anywhere in it.

Orphanet, the European rare-disease reference, is the clincher. It does maintain a full difference-of-sex-development branch. It files Poland syndrome somewhere else entirely: under rare breast malformation, syndromic breast hypoplasia, congenital limb malformation and dysostosis. An authority with the category available declined to use it.

Tuberous breast deformity has the same shape. The largest adolescent study of it describes it as “a nondiagnostic, descriptive term for a congenital breast difference that becomes apparent at puberty.” Congenital, so the acquired exclusion misses it. Nondiagnostic, so it cannot be a “medically verifiable” anything.

So the exclusions do not reach these conditions. That much is a reading of two documents you can open yourself.

What is still worth saying. The measure’s own drafting can put two children with the same anomaly and the same operation on opposite sides of a line. A published Poland syndrome algorithm reports a fifteen-year-old boy treated with a chest wall reconstruction and a breast expander implant. A girl of the same age with the same syndrome receives the same implant. If the measure reaches her operation and not his, it is drawing a line by sex. If it reaches both, Colorado has banned reconstruction of a boy’s absent chest wall. Neither branch looks like what anyone thinks they are voting for. If it reaches neither, the proponents are right and this paragraph is moot.

And the person who has to answer this first is not a court. It is a surgeon, reading a definition that does not tell her whether her patient’s chest reconstruction counts. We do not know the answer. On this text, neither does she.

We publish this as an observation about how the measure is drafted. We are not claiming any particular operation would be prohibited, because we could not source the element that claim would require.

The claim, as narrowly as we can put it

We are not telling you 135 bans surgery for boys who are not transgender. We are telling you three things. It does not say that it doesn’t. Tennessee’s version, the one the Supreme Court upheld, says so in so many words. And one sentence would have settled it: a definition of “perception of sex or gender,” or gynecomastia named in the exclusions the way circumcision is. That sentence is not in the measure. If it becomes law, courts, licensing boards and insurers answer the question later. Not you.