Colorado spent three decades trying to kill the “Hate State” nickname. This November, voters get to decide whether it ever really died — and that’s mainly because the tactics that earned Colorado that nickname are being used all over again.

In 1992, Colorado voters were asked to decide whether gay and lesbian people should be protected from discrimination. The campaign for Amendment 2 warned that LGBTQ+ people were demanding “special rights,” put the issue directly before voters and ultimately succeeded in turning Colorado into a national symbol of anti-gay politics.

This time, the target is transgender people.

Propositions 134 and 135 would restrict transgender students’ participation in school sports and ban gender-affirming medical care for minors. Like Amendment 2, they take a fight over LGBTQ+ rights out of the halls of the state Capitol and put it directly before voters. And also like Amendment 2, the campaigns surrounding them have centered on the idea that protecting LGBTQ+ people comes at the expense of someone else — in this case, children.

The similarities are not lost on people who lived through Colorado’s fight over LGBTQ+ rights more than three decades ago, even when the political circumstances today are different. The underlying political question is the same: What happens when the rights of a small, politically vulnerable group are put directly to a statewide vote?

Gay people didn’t just want equal rights, the campaign argued. They wanted “special rights.”

That question carries particular weight in Colorado, where the defeat of Amendment 2 became part of a decades-long political transformation of the state itself.

Now, that history is being tested again, but the results this time, advocates argue, could be even more consequential.

The election that made Colorado the “Hate State”

In November 1992, Colorado voters faced a constitutional amendment that would have made it illegal for towns and cities to pass laws that criminalized LGBTQ+ discrimination. At the time, some of the state’s largest cities, including Boulder and Denver, already had such laws on the books.

The campaign for Amendment 2 was built on a steady stream of demonizing rhetoric from religious and conservative organizations that had migrated to the state in droves in the mid-20th century, earning Colorado Springs its own nickname in the ’90s: the “Evangelical Vatican.”

The amendment was drafted by the Christian political advocacy group Colorado for Family Values and picked up support across the state, in part, because of a sticky campaign slogan: Gay people didn’t just want equal rights, the campaign argued. They wanted “special rights.”

In the run-up to the election, polling and media coverage indicated that Amendment 2 would fail. So when writer and activist Phil Nash showed up at an election night watch party on East Colfax On Nov. 3, he assumed it would be a victory party.

But as ballots poured in from more rural parts of the state, the “yes” votes on Amendment 2 started to climb, eventually toppling the “no” votes and pushing the amendment to a win. 

“I just remember feeling this just ghastly icy feeling going down my spine, like ‘this is not turning out well, this is not what we expected, this is horrible, we are now in a new world,’” Nash said.

He remembered people spontaneously marching into the street toward the downtown hotel where Democrats were celebrating the victory of Bill Clinton. Tensions grew on the street until Gov. Roy Romer and Denver Mayor Wellington Webb emerged from the hotel to calm the crowd.

“There was just an incredible amount of rage and anger and hurt in the days following that election, and there was just a feeling of desperation,” Nash said. “I know people in my family voted for this. I know people I work with voted for this. I know people that live next door to me that voted for this, and they didn’t know what they were doing and they don’t know how much it hurts me.”

“It wasn’t just a political defeat, it felt personal to everyone,” he said.

As the amendment neared passage, former state judge Mary Celeste, a practicing attorney with the Colorado Legal Initiatives Project, said she was busy crafting a case against it.

“We were gonna stop it dead in its tracks with an injunction,” she said.

Before it could take effect, Amendment 2 was put on ice by the Denver District Court. It was eventually overturned four years later by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1996.

But in that time, Amendment 2’s passage threatened Colorado’s reputation on the national stage, as stars including Barbara Streisand, Whoopi Goldberg and Madonna called for a boycott of what they called the “Hate State.”

Colorado lost millions of dollars in tourism and entertainment revenue as a result of the boycott, with notable examples including Stephen King’s “The Stand” moving production from Colorado to Utah and the showrunners of “Frasier” deciding to set the show in Seattle instead of Denver.

“There was no rational basis for the law,” Celeste said, summarizing the Supreme Court’s decision. “The law was sought to be brought on the basis of just hating a group of people. That’s essentially what happened.”

The landmark decision laid the groundwork for decisive Supreme Court rulings in the following years that expanded legal protections for LGBTQ+ people, including Lawrence v. Texas and Obergefell v. Hodges.

“So, I always characterized it as the LGBT Brown vs. Board of Education-like case,” Celeste said.

The old playbook, aimed at a new target

Propositions 134 and 135 landed on the ballot in May after receiving enough signatures to qualify.

Put forward by Protect Kids Colorado, led by activist Erin Lee and former Republican state Sen. Kevin Lundberg, the measures are part of an effort to “stop the transgender plague in Colorado.” Proposition 134 mirrors language that will be put before voters in Arizona and Washington state. It came shortly after the Supreme Court ruled in June that states can ban trans youth from women’s sports teams.

While Proposition 134 is explicit about who is considered a “man” or a “woman” according to their reproductive organs, it is silent on enforcement. If the measure passes, school districts and sports leagues will be left to determine how to verify the gender of every player.

“If I go to Texas and use the bathroom, I could be charged with a felony. If I go to Idaho, someone could call the cops on me and get a bounty put out on me.”

Proposition 135 proposes a blanket ban on gender-affirming surgeries for minors, a practice that is already extremely rare. A research study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association evaluated data from 2019 and found that these procedures are not common among people ages 15-17. When they did happen, the procedures were most often chest surgery performed on cisgender males. There were no affirming surgeries performed on anyone under the age of 12.

However, the measure is worded to broadly ban “medical treatments” that alter a child’s “biological sex,” potentially providing a legal argument for prohibiting nonsurgical medical care for people seeking access to puberty blockers.

The measures, combined with the federal government’s aggressive actions toward hospitals and school districts in Colorado, aim to drag the state into the middle of the right’s moral panic over trans rights.

“They want to make Colorado an example, right?” said Nadine Bridges, executive director of One Colorado, one of the groups organizing against Propositions 134 and 135. “They want to prove that this state is winnable, and I believe Colorado is the last domino right now.”

Bridges has helped organize a statewide grassroots coalition called Families Not Politics to campaign against the measures in the weeks leading up to the November election. She is in touch with a lot of families, including those who have relocated to Colorado from states such as Texas or Oklahoma in search of gender-affirming care and more trans-inclusive laws.

For example, Colorado passed a law in 2024 protecting certain procedures from interstate criminal prosecution, including abortion and gender-affirming care. The state also has laws that make it easier for trans people to change their gender on their birth certificates or driver’s licenses. Crucially, for families who lost access to care in surrounding states, Colorado was the nearest state where they could find it.

“I mean, families are pissed,” Bridges laughed bitterly, pointing to how Children’s Hospital Colorado and Denver Health stopped providing affirming care for those families who relocated in January, in response to threats from the Trump administration to withhold federal funding.

While four other states are voting on anti-trans measures in this election, former state Rep. Kevin Lundberg, who helped get them on the Colorado ballot, says it would be a significant victory for conservatives if these measures were to pass.

“We would be the first blue state to pass a law of this kind,” he said on a radio show in July. “We would be the first to do it by the will of the people.”

Even bigger stakes

June Churchill said she’s unsure if she can travel internationally because of the federal government’s policy of changing the gender markers on the passports of trans Americans. 

As a trans woman, she’s also anxious about travelling around her own country, given the federal and patchwork of state laws that attempt to erase — or in many cases criminalize — her identity. 

Her fears aren’t unsubstantiated: the U.S. military moved to discharge trans servicemembers, more than half of U.S. states are limiting access to gender-affirming care for minors, and 21 states are banning trans people from using the restroom that corresponds with their gender identities. In Kansas, lawmakers voted to invalidate driver’s licenses and birth certificates from Kansans who had changed their gender marker in the past.

“If I go to Texas and use the bathroom, I could be charged with a felony,” Churchill said. “If I go to Idaho, someone could call the cops on me and get a bounty put out on me.”

That kind of anxiety could come home, as the bans that are on Colorado’s ballot has found a unique place among some Democrats, not just in Colorado, but nationally.

National Democratic figures such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom have suggested that there’s room for compromise when it comes to sports bans — rhetoric that’s been echoed by other Democrats, including U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur and Iowa gubernatorial nominee Rob Sand. That signals that the fight against Propositions 134 and 135 will hinge, in part, on convincing liberal voters who think trans acceptance has gone too far.

And a recent poll by The 19th and YouGov showed that 45% of adults nationwide, across political parties, would be more likely to vote for a candidate supportive of trans-athlete bans.

Churchill, who is running for Denver City Council in District 10 and currently works as a legislative aide to state Rep. Bob Marshall, said that she is witnessing the early stages of a trans genocide, echoing similar warnings from international genocide watch groups such as The Lemkin Institute.

“I don’t use that term lightly, but it’s the steps we’re taking right now as a country.”