This session, the Colorado legislature got into name calling. 

A new state law requires educators to address students with the name they choose to be called to “reflect gender identity.” Any educator who fails to address the student with their preferred name or engages in “intentional avoidance or refusal to use a student’s chosen name” can be subject to a formal discrimination complaint. 

Is this merely a mark of governmental compassion, providing a legal tool to aid kids struggling with gender identity? After all, if a student wants to be a boy named Sue, shouldn’t that be the end of it? 

This is precisely what the bill’s advocates want us to do: embrace emotion, and don’t dare raise real-world questions and concerns — including citing the findings of a new landmark research study from a highly respected pediatrician. 

Here is why the bill is anything but a sweet, consequence-free pat on the head for troubled Colorado kids. 

First, it risks shutting out parents while improperly elevating the role of educators. Though the bill is very specific on how teachers and schools must comply, it is deliberately silent on whether mom and dad must be informed their son Mark now is legally entitled to be addressed as Mary Lou.

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The measure also includes no provision for conscience objections. Even a teacher who wishes to remain politely silent could be charged with discrimination. Many people, not all of whom are conservatives, object to aspects of the current gender debate, including biological males participating on girls’ school sports teams. Others have deeply held religious beliefs in which they will not countenance “naming” a boy with a girl’s name, or in any other way affirming changing one’s biological sex. 

Prediction: this exact point will end up in court when a teacher will not comply. 

And then there is the inconvenient hurdle of science.

A landmark, 388-page study commissioned by the British health service, and authored by Dr. Hilary Cass, one of the nation’s most prominent pediatricians, detonated all the “settled” questions on adolescent gender dysphoria. The study provides a powerful rejoinder to liberals who stiff-arm and ignorantly gloss over honest concerns. 

Dr. Cass, who has no ideological axe to grind, demonstrated in detail gender issues in adolescence are not at all guaranteed to extend into adulthood, so making permanent decisions now could result in devastating regret later. The study shows that the contention puberty blockers are essentially harmless and can be doled out to kids with a Pez dispenser is false. And the study stresses this crisis in a child’s life may not warrant medical intervention at all, but rather psychological care. 

This study has not gotten the widespread attention it deserves because it methodically and credibly upends the liberal contention, inherent in legally requiring educators to affirm a name and pronoun choice, that gender dysphoria is just another lifestyle option. In contrast, Dr. Cass makes it clear truly helping a child navigate this very dangerous crossroads in early life requires sound science, not uninformed compassion.  

The report ends the liberal demand that the parents, schools and the medical community be nothing more than an unquestioning conveyor belt toward sex-transition treatments that adolescents think they want and need. 

That is why simplistically compelling educators, who have profound impact on their students, to affirm that indeed a young person is making an informed and appropriate choice to alter their name and pronouns is so problematic. 

We do not let students of this age decide to opt out of school, drive a car or take out a bank loan. They cannot be administered an aspirin without parental consent. Why? Because they are not of an age or the maturity in which to make these decisions or manage these tasks. 

Serving gender-confused adolescents well will not result from naming or pronouns nor from telling them life-changing dangerous drugs will just give them “time and space to think.” 

It requires a unified team of parents, educators, physicians, psychologists and others to use sound science — not woke sound bites — to help every child onto the path of a long, happy and healthy life. 

That’s why we must give Colorado’s student naming bill its proper names:  Misguided. Cruel. Dangerous.

Sean Duffy, a former deputy chief of staff to Gov. Bill Owens, is a communications and media relations strategist and ghostwriter based in the Denver area.