Meet the woman behind the Colorado transgender ballot measures
A mother in Wellington is the driving force behind two Colorado ballot measures on transgender youth — one that would outlaw surgeries to change a child’s sex characteristics and another that would require transgender kids to play on sports teams that match their biological sex.
Erin Lee, who also is pushing a third ballot measure that would put child sex traffickers in prison for life, says all three issues up for vote in next month’s election are part of her fight against the “sexualization of children.”
Lee’s catapult into politics, and her founding of an issue committee in 2024 called Protect Kids Colorado, stems from an invitation her 12-year-old daughter received to a middle school gender and sexualities club.
The three proposals are some of the most contentious on the November ballot and track with a national Republican movement that calls for increased parental rights and shielding children from sexuality and gender influences. In Colorado, Lee has become a lightning rod for controversy, to the point that she said she is called an “anti-trans bigot just about every day” and had to increase security at her home because of death threats against her and her husband, she told The Colorado Sun in an interview.
Lee’s experience with her daughter’s middle school club propelled her into a prominent role in Colorado’s debate over transgender youth. But the ballot measures she helped put before voters do not address school clubs or parental guidance over school issues. Instead, opponents say the initiatives would have a broad impact on medical care and criminal sentencing, going far beyond any personal experience that drew Lee into politics.
Lee’s social media content is an impassioned blast against the various laws that Colorado has passed in recent years on transgender rights, including at school, in foster homes and in the workplace.
Her least favorite law, one she calls the “worst bill ever in the history of the world,” is a 2025 measure passed by the legislature that expanded the Colorado Discrimination Act to include misgendering or using a person’s “dead name” at school or work.
“It forces all Coloradans to call that man a woman,” Lee said, although the law does not make it illegal to use someone’s dead name or misgender them. “You cannot misgender or deadname or else face the penalties of Jack the cake baker,” she said, referring to a Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple and a gender reveal cake for a gender transition. Jack Phillips won a partial victory at the U.S. Supreme Court but his business suffered because many Coloradans refused to buy his cakes.
Lee also calls Attorney General Phil Weiser, who is the Democratic nominee for governor, Colorado’s “chief kiddie cutter” for fighting the Trump administration’s ban on federal dollars going to gender transition care for children. Gender-affirming care, which includes puberty blockers, is legal for minors in Colorado, though doctors at Children’s Hospital Colorado are no longer prescribing those medications as the hospital faces a federal investigation. The Aurora hospital does not perform gender-affirming surgeries for patients under 18 and never has.
“We have to fight back,” Lee says on Instagram. “We can right this ship and the first step is to pass these three ballot measures.”
Opponents of the measures, and of Lee’s language, have called her out for the damage they say she’s causing Colorado’s transgender community.
Her issue committee “built its campaign on mocking kids for exploring who they are,” said Jax Gonzalez, political director at One Colorado, a gay and transgender advocacy organization.
“That isn’t protecting kids,” Gonzalez said. “Every kid in Colorado deserves to grow up safe, supported, and surrounded by neighbors who have their back, and that includes transgender kids.”
Colorado for several years has been considered a haven for families with transgender children because of state laws that allow gender-affirming medical care and require that insurance companies cover it. The state also has one of the easiest processes in the nation to change a gender marker on a birth certificate and has anti-discrimination protections for transgender kids in schools.
The three measures from Protect Kids Colorado on the ballot this year are Proposition 134, which would ban transgender girls, kindergarten through college, from playing on girls’ sports teams; Proposition 135, which would outlaw gender-affirming surgeries for children 17 and younger; and Proposition 133 would require life imprisonment for child sex traffickers.
The middle school sexualities club that Lee says started it all
Lee moved to Colorado from Florida in 2018. She was working in corporate human resources and raising three kids, with no time to get worked up about politics. She was a “typical, politically disengaged, apathetic, overly trusting, Democrat-voting mom,” she said. What happened at her daughter’s Wellington middle school in 2021 changed all that.
That’s when Lee said she found out that her 12-year-old daughter had been attending a gender and sexualities alliance club that was “disguised” as an art club. The then-sixth-grader, sitting alone on the school bleachers one day, was invited to the club by an art teacher, said Lee, who sued Poudre School District in Larimer County in 2023. The lawsuit was dismissed in federal court in Denver and the U.S. Supreme Court declined last year to take up the case.
At a club meeting, Lee’s daughter heard a guest speaker talk about puberty blockers, gender transitioning, the definition of polyamory and how to contact a gender-affirming therapist, all without her parents’ knowledge, Lee said. Soon after, the girl told her parents she was transgender and picked out a new name.
“She was such an innocent 12-year-old and she came home completely confused,” Lee said. “She had never thought about kissing anyone, a boy or girl, and was still playing with dolls and eating macaroni and cheese on the kids’ menu.
“We’re really lucky that we have such a good relationship with our daughter that she came home and told us what was going on, despite the rule of the club being ‘what you hear in here, keep in here.’”
The family spent the next year working through it. Lee said her daughter saw a therapist, who affirmed her daughter’s thoughts that she was transgender instead of helping “her be comfortable in her sex or make sense of her feelings.” When the girl became suicidal, her parents took her to a pediatrician, who prescribed antidepressants, Lee said.
“We eventually got her through it,” Lee said. “She really came out on the other side and went, ‘I can’t believe that happened to me. I’m mortified. I’m ashamed. They took advantage of me. I don’t trust anybody anymore,’ and we decided to go public with what happened.”
Her daughter, now 17, spoke publicly last year about the experience, calling her parents’ approach “rough” but what she needed.
“To be honest, even now, it makes me embarrassed and a little disappointed with myself,” she said, tearfully, during a Colorado Parent Advocacy Network panel. “They asked me, ‘Is this really who you are? Are you really a boy?’”
“They were right. I’m not a boy. I was just really, really confused.”
The Poudre School District cut ties with the nonprofit that was facilitating the gender and sexualities club in 2022. In September, the Poudre School District Board voted to officially oppose the ballot measure that would keep transgender students off gendered sports teams.
While she acknowledged that none of the three measures are about gender and sexualities clubs, Lee said her family’s experience connected her to other parents across the nation who have stories about children’s attempted gender transition, inequality in sports and sharing locker rooms with children of the opposite sex, and children taken into sex trafficking.
To her, the measures are about protecting kids at school, in sports and everywhere else.
“I had so many people reach out, and they were afraid to say it out loud, and they were still going through it with their kids,’” Lee said. “I’m already out here … and so that’s what keeps me going in this public sphere that is very uncomfortable for me. I’m in a position to do it on their behalf.”
Legislature could rewrite or eliminate any of the three measures if they pass
When Lee decided to speak out about the school club, the story of what her daughter went through caught fire.
“It just went viral really fast,” Lee said. “It was a whirlwind for me. It was only conservative outlets that would cover our story, and I wasn’t a conservative. I didn’t know who these people were. It was on (radio and television commentator) Glenn Beck.
“Another family reached out, and then another one, and then another one, and I learned that it was a very pervasive problem.”
Lee and her husband, along with the parents of another Poudre School District student, sued the district. She lost her job because of the controversy, she said. And soon she was spending hours at the state Capitol, supporting bills that would protect parents’ rights.
All three of the ballot measures were once legislation — all voted down by the majority-Democratic legislature.
The ballot initiatives would change state law, not the state constitution, which means that if voters pass them, the legislature could come back next year and change them or eliminate them entirely.
Lee believes that won’t happen, that lawmakers have an “ethical obligation to respect the will of the people.”
“Politically, I also think lawmakers would act to their own detriment if they overturned something Coloradans had just directly voted into law,” she said.
“We’re the lucky ones”
Lee and former state Sen. Kevin Lundberg, a Larimer County Republican, cofounded Protect Kids Colorado two years ago. Lundberg also made a documentary called “Art Club” about Lee’s family story, billed as a “first-hand account of transgender social contagion.”
Protect Kids Colorado has volunteers in all 64 counties, and as those volunteers spread out to grocery stores and community events, they had little trouble collecting the required 124,238 signatures to get each measure on the ballot, Lee said. More than 3,000 volunteers gathered 170,000 signatures for each measure, with a 91% validity rate, she said. The group used mainly volunteers but also paid some signature gatherers, she said.
“We didn’t have any money,” Lee said. “We just activated the citizenry to get this done, and it defied everyone’s expectations. We had young people who had never voted before, registered and carried a petition. We had the feminists who believe in abortion up until birth, which I don’t personally agree with, but we agree on these issues of protecting children.”
Critics of Lee’s three measures have strong opinions, and have raised a lot more money to fight them — opponents of the transgender athlete initiative had raised $1.3 million through mid-September, eight times as much as the proponents.
Opposition to the three measures isn’t entirely based on their sentiment — the measures would also create a pile of unintended consequences, critics said. Opponents say that victims of child trafficking, who are often coerced to recruit others, could end up with life sentences under the sex trafficking measure. Better to let a judge consider the circumstances when handing down sentences, is their argument.
Gonzalez, with One Colorado, said one transgender measure would “open the door to invasive gender checks on student athletes” and another “puts politicians between doctors and patients and could block care for kids with dozens of medical conditions.”
To Lee, the measures are “very simple, very clearly written and really commonsense protections.”
She’s done the work, she said, to help other parents. Lee’s daughter is now a happy teenager, “comfortable in who she is,” Lee said. “But we’re one of the lucky ones. I’ve just met so many families who are not so lucky.”
