At a time when state lawmakers are pushing a radical bill to decriminalize prostitution with no regulation or restrictions, concerned Colorado parents are stepping in where our legislators fear to tread: protecting Colorado’s kids.

A grassroots coalition led by the appropriately named Protect Kids Colorado is advancing three citizens ballot measures for November’s ballot. Signatures are being turned in this week, and they’re well-positioned to qualify.

The first, Initiative 108, would raise penalties for child sex trafficking from a Class 2 felony to a Class 1. The real risks to children that would be posed by decriminalizing prostitution underscore the need for tougher penalties for sex trafficking minors — and for parents to intervene when lawmakers won’t.

“Decriminalizing prostitution will make adult trafficking more prominent because there is no consequence for the behavior, and (it) will further child sex trafficking because it will get bigger and nearly impossible to stop,” warned retired 45-year law enforcement veteran George Mumma, who specialized in targeting crimes against children.

“I haven’t seen this level of incompetence in a state legislature in my whole career,” Mumma told me.

The second measure, Initiative 109, would protect girls and women in sports by designating school athletic teams as male, female or coed. It would bar male students from girls’ teams while permitting girls to play on boys’ teams if no girls’ team exists, and it would ensure federal protections for students with intersex conditions.

The final measure, Initiative 110, would prohibit sex change surgeries on minors. While such procedures remain relatively rare, they do occur — which is precisely why organizations like the American Society of Plastic Surgeons have begun speaking out.

ASPS recently urged surgeons to “delay gender-related breast/chest, genital, and facial surgery until a patient is at least 19 years old,” calling its guidance “a forward-looking response” to evolving science.

While the organization opposes criminalization and prefers “self-regulation,” its conclusion on the central question is significant: there is “insufficient evidence demonstrating a favorable risk-benefit ratio” for “gender-related endocrine and surgical interventions in children and adolescents.” ASPS cited concerns over “potential long-term harms and the irreversible nature of surgical interventions” — reinforcing that caution is now the medically responsible posture.

Notably, Initiative 110 largely aligns with ASPS’s recommendations. It prohibits minors’ gender surgeries and forbids taxpayer funding and insurance coverage, but it does so without imposing criminal penalties.

That’s a reasonable middle ground: doctors who perform these procedures would not be criminalized under state law but could still face professional and civil consequences — including loss of license or specialty board certification, contract violations, uninsured malpractice exposure and negligence claims.

It also aligns with a growing body of research showing that trans and nonbinary identification among young people is now “in free fall.” An October report from the University of Buckingham’s Centre for Heterodox Social Science found trans/nonbinary identification “peaked in 2023 and has halved” since, according to author Prof. Eric Kaufmann.

He argued the data indicates transgenderism was largely “a social contagion that rose and fell,” and health practitioners enabled “ideology to trump their responsibility to safeguard their patients from a fad, and to do no harm.”

San Diego State psychology professor Jean Twenge corroborated Kaufmann’s findings. Trans identification among 18- to 22-year-olds was “cut nearly in half from 2022 to 2024,” she found, while nonbinary identification “dropped by more than half between 2023 and 2024.”

In Switzerland, the University of Zurich’s gender clinic saw referrals slashed by more than half, from a peak of 134 in 2021 to 60 by 2024.

The data is particularly acute among Americans born in the early 2000s, or Gen Z, surging amid pandemic-era isolation before plateauing. As journalist Pamela Paul documented in The New York Times, many teens discovered transgender influencers online, transitioned — and later detransitioned after realizing their error.

Yet since 2021, Colorado laws and school district policies have increasingly enforced gender-affirming ideology out-of-step with the science. Initiatives 109 and 110 address that.

Dr. Travis Morrell, chair of Colorado Principled Physicians, said the ballot initiatives would “let kids grow up — and put Colorado in line with the best evidence we have.”

“No woman is Mrs. Potato Head. Surgeons can’t remove working body parts and just replace them later,” Morrell said, citing pediatric gender researcher Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy. Healthy women, he noted, can give their future babies both milk and immune defense. “Taking away this option, and the neurohormonal bonding of nursing, and even sensation from women while they are still girls is wrong.”

“Even the passionately activist ACLU has admitted there is no evidence that gender surgery helps reduce suicide in kids,” Morrell added, noting “every systematic review of studies failed to find ‘gender’ interventions help kids.”

He stressed that empathy must be guided by evidence — which means holding off on “unproven, permanent surgeries” until at least adulthood.

That’s why, when lawmakers won’t protect Colorado’s kids, it’s encouraging — and telling — that citizens will step up and do it themselves.

“What’s given me the most hope is watching everyday Coloradans step forward to protect children and use the tools available to them when lawmakers stop listening,” Protect Kids Colorado board member Lori Gimelshteyn told me. “With only six months to act, this effort is a reminder that the people still have the ability to make change.”

Jimmy Sengenberger is an investigative journalist, public speaker, and longtime local talk-radio host. Reach Jimmy online at Jimmysengenberger.com or on X (formerly Twitter) @SengCenter.