Defending Education Files Joint Lawsuit Against Colorado State Over New “Anti-Discrimination” Law

On May 19, 2025, Defending Education, Colorado Parent Advocacy Network, Protect Kids Colorado, Do No Harm, and Dr. Travis Morrell brought a complaint against Defendants, various Colorado state officials, under 42 U.S.C. §1983 for violations of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.

1. “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” West Virginia v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 642 (1943). The state cannot place its thumb on the scale to favor one side of a contentious public debate. It certainly cannot stifle viewpoints it doesn’t like simply because it finds those views offensive or disagreeable.
2. Colorado is flouting that fundamental constitutional principle. Over fierce opposition from many Coloradans, the State recently adopted a law—House Bill 25-1312—that punishes Coloradans for their speech and compels them to use language endorsing the State’s views on highly contested and highly political matters of sex and gender.
3. H.B. 25-1312 enacts a number of controversial policies designed to promote gender ideology—the notion that sex is not fixed at birth, that people can be “born in the wrong body,” and that individuals experiencing gender dysphoria should use potentially irreversible procedures (including hormone treatments and surgery) to change their body to conform to an internal sense of “gender identity.”
4. Relevant here, Section 8 of H.B. 25-1312 amends the State’s Anti-Discrimination Act to compel Coloradans to refer to transgender-identifying individuals using their “chosen name” and preferred pronouns.
5. Specifically, H.B. 25-1312 amends the definition of “gender expression,” a protected category under the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, to include the use of a “chosen name” and other words by which an individual “chooses to be addressed.”
6. Thus, it is now a “discriminatory practice” under Colorado law to refer to transgender-identifying individuals by their birth name (i.e., not their “chosen name”) or to use biological pronouns (i.e., not their preferred pronouns) in a place of public accommodation.
7. It is also a “discriminatory practice” under Colorado law to “publish,” “display,” “circulate,” or “mail” any communication that “indicates” that a person’s presence at a place of public accommodation is “unwelcome, objectionable, unacceptable, or undesirable” because of “gender expression.” Accordingly, H.B. 25-1312’s revision to the definition of “gender expression” means that Coloradans who operate in a place of public accommodation are prohibited from publishing or sending materials that refer to a transgender-identifying individual by their birth name (i.e., not their “chosen name”) or use their biological pronouns (i.e., not their preferred pronouns).
8. Coloradans need not use the name that “an individual requests to be known as” only in limited circumstances: when the requested name “contain[s] offensive language” or when the individual is “requesting the name for frivolous purposes.” The law contains no exception for using an individual’s preferred pronouns.
9. Defending Education (“DE”), Colorado Parent Advocacy Network (“CPAN”), Protect Kids Colorado (“PKC”), Do No Harm (“DNH”), and Dr. Travis Morrell bring this lawsuit to stop Colorado from abridging the fundamental speech rights of its citizens. All four organizations and Dr. Morrell believe that sex is immutable and fixed at birth, and they oppose the spread of controversial gender ideologies among Colorado’s youth. The groups, their leadership, their members, and Dr. Morrell want to speak consistently with that view. They do not want to be forced to affirm—through the use of pronouns, names, or other language—that a biological man is actually a woman or vice versa. Yet that is precisely what H.B. 25-1312 requires.
10. The challenged provisions of the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act violate the First Amendment, both facially and as applied, and are impermissibly vague in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.
11. Plaintiffs bring this action to protect their rights, their members’ rights, and the rights of every person in Colorado who does not want to be punished for expressing their sincerely held views about sex and gender. The challenged provisions should be declared unconstitutional, and Defendants should be enjoined from enforcing them.