May 30, 2025 11:00 AM UTC

How GOP Legislators Manufactured Outrage Against a Transgender Rights Bill in Colorado

• 2 Comments
• by: James O'Rourke

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Originally published at the Colorado Times Recorder

Despite widespread support and an unassailable Democratic majority in both Colorado’s state House and Senate, House Bill 1312, which codifies landmark protections for transgender people, was widely believed last month to be in jeopardy, with one prominent LGBTQ group changing its position multiple times. Some of its most consequential provisions were ultimately left on the cutting room floor before it was signed by Gov. Jared Polis, who had himself left room for doubt on his support.

Some Democrats who voted against the bill cited many constituents urging them not to support it. In a Denver Post article, state Sen. Marc Snyder (D-Manitou Springs) was quoted as saying that, despite his past support for trans rights, “constituents he heard from opposed the bill.” Similarly, state Sen. Kyle Mullica (D-Thornton) raised concerns about “parental rights,” a conservative talking point that has been used as a pretext to oppose anything from vaccines to books that talk about race — but which, in this case, was Colorado Republicans’ main vector of attack against the bill.

But to say that this was an organic outpouring of concern is to miss the real story. That story is about how, through a widespread public relations campaign centered around sparking outrage on social media, Colorado Republicans managed to rile up their base and circumvent their complete lack of legislative power to extract concessions from Democrats.

This viral media strategy was shored up by sympathetic figures in national right-wing media, including Fox News.

Extreme Voices Take Center Stage

Let’s back up to November 2024. In an election that favored Republicans nationwide, Colorado Republicans managed to claw their way back from a statehouse superminority. But the prospects for their legislative agenda were still grim: Democrats continued to hold strong majorities in both chambers.

Enter freshman state Rep. Jarvis Caldwell (R-Colorado Springs). This year may have been Caldwell’s first session as a legislator, but he is no stranger to statehouse politics. His past career includes doing communications for Colorado Republican lawmakers, and until he was elected into office, he was one of the hosts of the right-wing political podcast “Engage the Rockies.”

Caldwell has outlined his own legislative strategy to friendly audiences on right-wing talk radio shows and podcasts. That strategy: push Republican talking points out to as wide an audience as possible.

“I’ve kind of made it my goal this session to just bring as much attention to the craziness that’s happening here in the Judiciary Committee as I can,” he said in an interview with Dan Caplis, a right-wing radio host.

That interview was on April 8, at which point the right-wing furor against HB-1312 was reaching a fever pitch. During the radio discussion, Caldwell said that those who were interested in learning more about the issue should go to either House Republicans’ X (formerly Twitter) page or his own. Both these pages have increasingly become hubs for short video clips of Republican legislators’ statements on HB-1312 and other bills.

“If you just go on any social media platform, look up Colorado House Republicans first, because we post a lot of stuff on there about all the issues,” Caldwell told Caplis. “And then for me in particular, if you go on X, you can just go to @repcaldwell and you’ll find me.”

Short clips like these have been fertile ground for misleading content to spread to larger audiences, according to Benjamin Schultz, a researcher at the American Sunlight Project, which studies political disinformation.

“You know, really we are seeing a more democratized media system than ever before. We see all sorts of independent media and the rise of influencers and vertical video and then all of these different new ways that people are consuming and creating information, and that has led to, of course, an explosion in these instant gratification formats in which people are, you know, enthralled by clickbait kind of headlines, titles, and content,” Schultz told the Colorado Times Recorder.

A Colorado Times Recorder analysis found the Republicans whose clips tended to gain the largest reach were from the most extreme voices, including Caldwell himself. The videos tend to highlight their most incendiary claims about the bill, often drawn from misleading interpretations of its contents.

That’s something that has been baked into content creation on many algorithmic social media platforms, Schultz told the Colorado Times Recorder.

“Highly emotional content is — I mean, there’s plenty of literature on this — it spreads much, much faster than truthful, quote unquote ‘boring’ content,” said Schultz. “And we see with, you know, the rise of influencers, whether it is X or other platforms, they make money by how many views they get, how many clicks they get. And so they have an incentive in this case to create content that is [the] most enthralling that it can be. Sometimes it’s false. Sometimes, like I said before, clickbait headlines to draw people in.”

Additionally, Republicans actively attempted to uplift this content to as wide an audience as possible. In a reply to one Colorado House Republican’s post on HB-1312, Caldwell tagged a number of major conservative political figures and media outlets in search of their attention, including President Donald Trump, Colorado’s entire GOP congressional delegation, the Daily Wire, and pundits Matt Walsh and Laura Ingraham.

Some national activists put their fingers on the scale in the campaign against 1312. One of them was Corey DeAngelis of the right-wing American Culture Project, who explicitly referenced viral social media posts as conservatives’ avenue to fight the bill.

“I’m already doing that on social media, amplifying these clips,” DeAngelis said on the Ross Kaminsky Show April 8. “I think that’s why the Democrats started to shut down debate on Final Passage because they saw that things were going viral, not just from my account, others as well.”

The Bill and the Backlash

HB-1312 has been subject to a wide array of misinterpretations. The bill, named “The Kelly Loving Act” after Kelly Loving, a transgender woman who died in the 2023 Club Q shooting, was a package containing a variety of civil protections for trans people, but Republicans mainly raised alarms about the following provisions:

• When a court makes child custody decisions, the bill would mandate that courts consider a parent deadnaming or misgendering their child as a form of “coercive control.” (Amended out.)
• A “shield law” protecting trans people and their families fleeing hostile states to seek trans healthcare from prosecution in those states. (Amended out.)
• Deadnaming and misgendering would be defined within the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA), affecting employment, public accommodations, and housing. “Gender identity” and “gender expression” were already protected by CADA. (Amended to add a stipulation that legal names could be required for identity verification.)

House Republicans’ playbook was to use these provisions to paint the Kelly Loving Act as radical, extreme, and an attempt to compel speech in violation of the First Amendment — even after they were removed in amendments. More than that, many Republicans have denied the premise of the bill, claiming trans people do not exist and branding them as delusional.

Republicans had their largest breakthrough on the issue after House Democrats passed the bill on Sunday, April 6. During the Sunday meeting, Democratic House Majority Leader Monica Duran invoked House Rule 16 to end debate and bring HB-1312 and other bills to an immediate vote. Duran said at the time the chamber had already spent 12 hours discussing the bills during the week before.

In a video from Caldwell, posted that Sunday shortly after Colorado’s state House passed the bill, the lawmaker claimed that Republicans were being procedurally silenced by House Democrats, and went on to tar transgender identity as “delusion.”

“They silenced us and did not let us represent our constituents, and talk about the issues that we have with this bill,” Caldwell said in the video. “If you recall, HB1312 says that if your child is confused about their identity, and you don’t affirm that confusion, that delusion, then you are guilty of child abuse and you can lose custody of your children.”

Caldwell went on to combine LGBTQ advocacy groups, Democratic legislators, and the judges who would rule in these custody cases together as part of one nebulous “they” that is actively scheming to take children away from their parents: “What they want to do with this bill is say that if they confuse your children, and you don’t affirm that confusion, they will take your child from you.”

Analyzing Caldwell’s messaging, Schultz had this to say: “Hearing that line, which is firstly, sort of the use of ‘they’ as a sort of pejorative, you know, lumping everyone together in a group, it creates kind of a common enemy. You know, it’s a pretty standard sort of operating tactic for this kind of messaging. And I think also, oversimplified messaging, but very emotional messaging, right? ‘They will take your kid from you.’ That’s very personal. That’s a very direct threat to people with children who might be on the fence about this issue.”

Other Republicans’ messaging around HB-1312 also tended to center around the idea of children being taken from parents. Caldwell’s video was among the most successful in terms of reach, and was played unedited on Fox News several days later. According to an Adweek analysis, Fox News averaged over 3 million viewers per day in the first quarter of 2025.

At the time, Caldwell pinned the viral video to his X profile, making sure that it was the first thing anyone who looked at his account would see. In early May, it was replaced with another far-reaching video railing against HB-1312.

In the days that followed, other clips like it were picked up by national conservative X accounts. Another Caldwell clip was directly reposted by the account Libs of TikTok. This post was viewed more than 300,000 times.

Libs of TikTok’s role in promoting online misinformation, far-right propaganda, and particularly anti-LGBTQ extremism has been well documented. In past years, the account’s posts have been connected to bomb threats against hospitals offering youth gender-affirming care. American Sunlight is among the groups for whom Libs of TikTok’s often-incendiary rhetoric has raised alarms.

“You’ll have a half-truth a lot of times, with disinformation,” Schultz said. “There is some little tiny grain of truth at the beginning, and then as people play telephone with this content, they repost it, they share it in whatever capacity. You know, it is just like a game of telephone. It gets totally manipulated, warped, and you end up with complete falsehoods at the end of it. And with Libs of TikTok, we’ve seen this plenty.”

Another such post came from State Rep. Brandi Bradley (R-Littleton), who, outside the Capitol, is the leader of a Douglas County chapter of the extremist anti-LGBTQ group Moms for Liberty. Bradley posted a video of her testimony on HB-1312 on X in which she reverses the language of the bill’s family law section, branding gender-affirming care as “coercion” and “abuse.”

“It’s coercion telling a kid that God got it wrong, and I think it’s one of the most abusive things I’ve ever heard,” Bradley says in the opening of the video. “… Coercion is lying to your children. There’s nothing beautiful about that.”

She goes on to reference the lack of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for gender-affirming care. While this is true, many of the medications used for gender-affirming care are FDA-approved for other purposes. For instance, puberty blockers, used in trans or gender-questioning children, are approved by the FDA for use in treating precocious puberty in children. And estradiol, used in transfeminine hormone replacement therapy, is approved for use to treat menopause in cisgender women. Under the Biden administration, the FDA had signalled approval for a late-stage trial studying the use of estradiol in gender-affirming care, which would have been a step along the path to FDA approval.

Even without FDA approval, there is still a wide range of peer-reviewed scientific evidence indicating that the use of gender-affirming care, including those off-label medications, is beneficial to patients.

Bradley’s post was quote-tweeted by the national Moms for Liberty X account, along with the national Gays Against Groomers account. Both organizations, which have played large roles in ratcheting up anti-trans rhetoric in the U.S., pushed the misleading video onto the feeds of roughly 202,000 and 493,000 followers, respectively.

Moms for Liberty’s national directors would go on to host an anti-1312 town hall event last month.  During the event, Caldwell and Bradley appeared alongside representatives from the Heritage Foundation and the Alliance Defending Freedom, both far-right groups with a history of spreading anti-LGBTQ hate.

Legislators React

Following the national transphobic firestorm against HB-1312, multiple pro-LGBTQ organizations raised concerns about the bill. Most prominently, One Colorado changed its position to “Amend” — though at the time, it did not publicly say which amendments it wanted —  before ultimately returning to “Support” after amendments were made.

Even in its amended form, two Democratic state senators voted ‘no’ on the bill, and two state representatives voted against accepting the Senate’s amendments. Those lawmakers, state Rep. Regina English (D-Colorado Springs) and state Rep. Naquetta Ricks (D-Aurora) had both been excused from the original house vote. English, last year, voted against a resolution to protect same-sex marriage in Colorado.

“I received multiple emails and phone calls from many constituents expressing their concerns about the bill and my vote reflects their concerns,” said Ricks in an email.

“If you bombard Democrats with calls there’s a chance you might change their mind on voting on whatever issue,” Schultz told the Colorado Times Recorder. “And so I think in this case, being on Fox News 24-7, getting Libs of TikTok, Daily Wire’s attention — they’re probably sending tens of thousands of calls to Democratic offices and Democrats tend to listen to their constituents.”

While the most controversial parts of the bill were amended out in response to the backlash, the damage had largely already been done. A quote from state Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer (R-Weld County) was particularly telling: many constituents, she said, “don’t understand about first readings, second readings, third readings, amendments. They understand what an amendment is, but they don’t understand how it impacts the bill.”

The alterations from Democrats and LGBTQ advocates did not protect the bill from conservative scrutiny. Just days after Polis signed The Kelly Loving Act into law, many of the same groups who had opposed it from the start filed a lawsuit alleging violations of the 1st and 14th amendments.

While Republicans’ campaign against HB-1312 ultimately ended in defeat, Colorado Republican leaders have been heartened by their ability to mobilize both local grassroots activists and national media around their message.

“I mean we’re being shared by influencers, Libs of TikTok,” said Assistant Minority Leader Ty Winter (R-Las Animas County) on the Dan Caplis Show in April. “… We’re starting to get the word out where people are even calling and going, ‘what the hell is going on in Colorado?’ So Fox News, we’ve started to hit some of the big news. So the more attention we can bring on the insanity in this building, not only the better it will be for Republicans and people with great values in this state. It’ll be good for the electorate because they’re going to get to see what’s going on.”

House Minority Leader Rose Pugliese (R-El Paso County) agreed with Winter, saying that the campaign against 1312 has given them momentum they can take into the next election cycle.

“I think 1312 really has opened people’s eyes and I think the more egregious the legislation that comes forward,” Pugliese said on KNUS’ The Jeff & Bill Show on April 28. “I believe this immigration bill is also one that will really get people motivated to get their voices heard during the legislative process. And we’ve seen a national movement against 1312. And so I think we’re gonna see more and more of that, especially as we go into the next election cycle in 2026.”

Bradley was even more confident in a recent interview, telling KOA radio host Mandy Connell she thought that anti-trans backlash would let Republicans take back Colorado: “This is, we’re the tip of the spear in Colorado. There’s hope for the state. We’re shining light into the darkness. And I think we win back the state. I do.”

Schultz told the Colorado Times Recorder that social media-centric tactics like those used by Colorado Republicans may well become the new normal for conservatives in areas where they lack legislative power.

“I think this is going to be an interesting trend to watch in the coming months and years of this administration, especially in areas that are, you know, majority Democratic with little isolated Republican spots,” he said. “It will be very interesting to see, you know, what the officials in further local jurisdictions try to reach up and get the spotlight shown down on whatever issue they might be having or advocating for.”

Following the bill’s amended passage out of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Pugliese brought the issue back to Fox News — which continued spotlighting HB-1312 following its coverage of Caldwell’s viral video — and gave Republicans’ outrage campaign credit for the amendments. She went on to thank the hosts for their sympathetic coverage.

“I want to say thank you to all of you, who have helped make this issue into a national issue, cause we know what happens in Colorado will not stay in Colorado,” Pugliese told the hosts.