Far-right groups planned on putting anti-trans measures on the ballot. They failed completely.

On the steps of the Colorado capital on Monday, the anti-trans advocacy group Protect Kids Colorado threw in the towel on two failed ballot initiatives.

The announcement at a deserted news conference acknowledged the group had failed to garner the required signatures from fellow Coloradans to get two discriminatory measures on the state’s November ballot.

Related:

Colorado allows anti-LGBTQ+ group to pursue law outing trans students to parents

The group wants voters to decide whether to out kids to potentially unsupportive adults, calling it “so supportive” of LGBTQ+ kids.

“We are striving to make Colorado a safer place to live for families and children,” the group’s director Erin Lee said at the lonely press avail, according to the unrelated trans news website Erin in the Morning.

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“Despite falling short of the required signatures to make the 2024 ballot, we consider this ballot initiative effort a major success,” Lee added inexplicably.

The group’s “forced outing” initiative would have required teachers to report “gender incongruence” among students to their parents if minors asked to use a different name, pronoun, or gendered facilities that differ from the gender they were assigned at birth. The group’s second failed ballot measure would have banned transgender students from playing on sports teams that matched their gender identity.  

Like the failed initiatives, the press conference was a dismal failure, attracting maybe two attendees judging from the one recording of the event by a YouTuber named1A Media. The only others present at the conference were half a dozen Protect Kids Colorado members holding signs behind the speaker.

Two other ballot initiatives from the group — one calling for a transgender healthcare ban for minors and another giving parental access to children’s education records — didn’t make it past the Colorado Title Board.

Those publicly supporting the doomed measures included aggrieved transphobic swimmer Riley Gaines, who used the right-wing Rumble social media platform to call on “parents, coaches, spiritual leaders” to support the initiative.

Anti-trans activist Chloe Cole also promoted the Colorado effort on the increasingly trans-hostile X platform after she pushed similar failed initiatives in California.

Like her anti-trans compatriots in Colorado, Cole and her affiliated Protect Kids California group also failed to get enough signatures for a suite of anti-trans ballot initiatives in California earlier this summer. Cole had boasted California could be “one of the first blue states to defeat gender ideology.”

In Arizona, another referendum, which would have banned transgender youth from using bathrooms matching their gender identity, required ballot approval through the legislature. It also failed, coming up one vote short of passage. The deciding thumbs down came from a Republican senator who shared that he had family members who would be affected.

A recent Los Angeles Times/NORC poll found that 77% of U.S. adults believe elected officials use transgender debates to divert attention from more pressing issues.

The self-loathing Gays Against Groomers (GAG) group echoed Protect Kids Colorado’s sunny take on the failed outcome.

“Although we were not successful in this round to get these issues onto the ballot, we were successful in educating Colorado voters about what is happening to children and motivating parents to become involved,” GAG said about an effort that was anything but motivating.

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