From the Rockies to Aoraki, so-called gender affirming care is playing defense globally against lawmakers, regulators, activists and overwhelmingly young people who regret the medical procedures they undertook to more closely resemble the opposite sex, seek to hold their providers accountable and want to spare others from the same regret.

The Colorado General Assembly's House Judiciary Committee late Tuesday considered legislation, introduced last week, to allow patients who underwent "youth gender transition procedures" – puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries to remove healthy genitals and breasts – before age 26 to sue their providers for damages up to age 38.

Genspect, an international organization that promotes a "non-medicalised approach to gender-related distress," asked detransitioners and "allies" Monday to flood the hearing with their written testimony or sign up to testify remotely. (Colorado does not limit testimony to state residents. The signup form, fittingly, asks for preferred pronouns.)

It was a rare example of a Democrat-dominated state considering relief for detransitioners but ended the same as a complementary bill two weeks earlier to squeeze providers on malpractice insurance: Democrats "postponed" both bills "indefinitely" for the legislative session.

HB 25-1254 lead sponsor GOP Rep. Ken DeGraaf warned the "eugenicists" who froze the bill in an X thread late Tuesday that "the next stop for the bill is the east coast," alluding to federal legislation the GOP-controlled Congress would send President Trump. 

 It's not clear how many detransitioners' testimonies were heard. DeGraaf promised to post clips from the hearing Wednesday, but Just the News couldn't find any as of deadline.

"Committee serves mostly as an ideological filter," he wrote in an email. "Last night, after several dems dismissed themselves from listening to much/most of the witness testimony they wrapped up the committee hearing by mischaracterizing the bill and discounting the brutal lived experience of the witnesses. It was an opportunity to pontificate their wokeness."

Genspect is also co-organizing Detransitioner Awareness Day on March 12 with Moms for Liberty, medical advocacy group Do No Harm and former Olympian Jennifer Sey's gender-critical clothing brand XX-XY Athletics among others, with a Capitol Hill briefing featuring detransitioners, doctors and lawyers. The annual event goes back to 2021.

It's keeping close tabs on other countries' medical and legal reviews of gender affirming care and sometimes directing its grassroots firepower against them. 

A U.K. National Health Service three-year trial starts next month on puberty blockers, new prescriptions for which were banned indefinitely in December following a years-long government-commissioned review that found "poor quality" evidence for them and discouraged "the medical pathway" for most confused youth.

It was supposed to release trial details such as eligibility criteria in December but delayed them until this month, prompting complaints from transgender advocates to The Independent, which said more than 5,000 youth are estimated to be on the waiting list for blockers.

Pioneering detransitioner Keira Bell, whose lawsuit led to the shutdown of NHS's clinic for gender-confused youth and prompted the review by former Royal College of Paediatrics President Hilary Cass, and gender confusion psychotherapist James Esses threatened to sue if the "unethical and unlawful" trial goes forward.

"The potentially unlimited numbers of children" in the trial "would be treated worse than guinea pigs" because the government already knows "the significant, irreversible, physical and emotional harm" as validated by the Cass review, which is now "being misappropriated to justify" the trial, Esses told The Telegraph.

Genspect frowned on the trial in an analysis in December 2024  that faulted its breakneck pace and "puzzling" omission of "psychological or psychosocial interventions" for study, which the Cass review found far safer than medical interventions based on evidence for each. It hosted a webinar on the trial last month and summarized its advocacy against the trial this week. 

The New Zealand Ministry of Health reviewed evidence through September 2023 and published its findings, which largely resemble the Cass findings, last November.

Studies that found puberty blockers associated with "significant improvement in depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation" were low quality "with a high risk of bias," the review found, emphasizing that "bone health and metabolic parameters in particular need ongoing monitoring" in youth prescribed blockers.

The Australian state of Queensland threw last year's external evaluation of its youth gender services' practices under the bus last month, imposing an "immediate pause" on both blockers and cross-sex hormones for patients under 18 in its public health system pending its own review, noting Denmark, Finland, France, Norway and Sweden all tightened access.

If HB 25-1254 had made it through Colorado's Democrat-controlled General Assembly and was signed by occasionally heterodox Democratic Gov. Jared Polis – profiled by The New York Times last fall as a "dissenter" from common Democratic policies on COVID-19 – it could massively expand potential liability in a field already struggling with rising malpractice insurance. 

The current statute of limitations is just two years, and "interventions (drugs, hormones, or blades) could render damages unknown until much farther down the road because of the continuum of human physical, psychological and emotional development," sponsor DeGraaf wrote in the X thread after Tuesday night's anticlimactic hearing.

Even the World Professional Association for Transgender Health "recognizes that about 30% stop or seek to reverse their transition," not including pre-transition desisters, he said.

DeGraaf compared the treatment to the disturbing history of eugenics in the Indian Health Service. "Because Native Americans were dependent on these government organizations for health services, they were more at risk for forced sterilization than other groups," he wrote in a thread Monday on the bill's particulars and historical context.

Colorado Democrats froze the bill in committee Tuesday night on a 7-4 party line vote by postponing it indefinitely, meaning it cannot be reconsidered this session, as they did to a complementary bill on malpractice insurance two weeks earlier.

DeGraaf savaged Democrats for putting "profits over people," denying the existence of a detransitioner Reddit group with 56,000 members and ignoring the pullback in more liberal European countries that have closely reviewed the evidence.

"Since there are apparently no botched surgeries from unscrupulous doctors, these must represent the handiwork of highly competent professionals," he wrote sarcastically, posting nauseating photos of the surgeries, long known casually as sex changes. 

DeGraaf directed X users to Do No Harm's Stop the Harm Database, which tracks pediatric medicalized gender confusion treatment.

Complementary legislation introduced a month earlier would exempt gender affirming care for minors from state restrictions on medical malpractice insurers "increasing premiums for, refusing to issue, canceling, terminating, or refusing to renew" a policy. 

HB 25-1068 would let insurers take those "prohibited actions" against healthcare professionals, businesses and facilities such as clinics, and prohibit them from accepting state money for premiums if the malpractice policy covers such care. 

The House Health and Human Services Committee voted to postpone the bill indefinitely Feb. 5. Sponsoring GOP Rep. Scott Bottoms told Just the News that means he cannot reintroduce it this session.

Kaiser Family Foundation Health News, which tracks state restrictions on gender affirming care for youth, reported a year ago that malpractice rates were skyrocketing for providers. 

An Illinois clinic on the border of Iowa, which bans youth care, said its malpractice rate quote was five times higher than it was expecting, and an insurance trade group said they were adjusting premiums "accordingly and appropriately" in light of laws.

As of Nov. 26, KFF said 26 states limit "youth access," 39% of gender-confused 13-17 year olds live in one, and 24 impose "professional or legal penalties" on youth-care practitioners. Six states including Colorado require insurers to treat gender affirming care the same as any other.

The advocacy journalism organization falsely claims blockers are "reversible" and asserts that youth care – now severely restricted in Europe for its potential harm and lack of evidence – is "medically necessary" and its effectiveness "well-documented."