Colorado Governor Jared Polis (D) has signed a law to protect trans children by sealing name changes for those who are under 18 when they file for one. The legislation will protect trans children

“Passing this bill is simple, but its impact is profound,” Colorado state Senator Katie Wallace (D), a sponsor of the bill, said in February. “It gives children the safety and dignity they deserve, and it treats their private life with the same care we afford in other sensitive cases.”

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Colorado’s Senate Bill 18, “Legal Protections for Dignity of Minors,” simply makes it so that starting July 1, when anyone who is under 18 years old petitions for a name change, the court is required to suppress the record. That means the petition will not be part of the public record and cannot be collected through searches or data harvesting.

The only exception to the process is if the petitioner was previously convicted of a felony.

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While the court will keep a record for administrative purposes, it cannot publish the petitioners’ names or their deadnames. The record can only be accessed by the petitioner or by someone who has obtained the petitioner’s verbal consent and submitted an affidavit to that effect.

The bill will easily benefit anyone who might want to change their name as a child, whether to have a name they feel more connected to or to distance themselves from a family name. While the language of the bill itself does not mention trans people, it will have a huge impact for trans kids, which has always been the mission of the legislation.

At a senate committee hearing in February, Z Williams, co-director of Bread and Roses Legal Center, spoke of how a parent thought someone in their child’s class might be trans and was able to search for their name change document online and out the second grader to the school, Colorado Newsline reported.

Williams said the parent “exposed that child is transgender in second grade to the entire school community through flyers and through her own children, not only practicing hate herself, but teaching others how to. That is why we asked the senators and representatives to run this bill.”

At the same hearing, Elsie Fierro, the political and policy director at LGBTQ+ advocacy organization One Colorado, shared the story of a Colorado family who had petitioned for a name change on behalf of their trans child. But when they searched the new name online, a search engine returned results that included the child’s deadname along with identifying information that had been scraped from public court documents. “That family spent months trying to remove it and protect their minor child in an increasingly hostile political climate. This is the reality some families are navigating,” Fierro told the committee.

In the face of Republican opposition, state Sen. Wallace said, “This bill will protect children from AI data-scraping of those public records, the potential of bullying if they should be found and from hostile individuals in the wider world.”

The bill was originally intended to do even more good, but had a section stripped from it in February. It originally sought to instruct family court judges to consider acceptance of a child’s gender identity when determining custody cases. Several studies, including one by The Trevor Project, have linked trans children being connected to accepting adults to lower risk for depression and suicide attempts.

The custody clauses had originally been included in an earlier bill, HB 1312, which passed last year and introduced legal protections for trans people against deadnaming, misgendering, and more. However, they were removed before it passed after LGBTQ+ groups raised concerns that the language could erode existing protections.

For SB 18, the clauses had been reworked, but Polis threatened to veto the bill unless the clauses were removed, claiming to have received word of similar concerns once again. However, state Sen. Wallace and Williams both suggested that Polis’ view of the provisions being “substantially the same” was incorrect and that they had been amended to assuage concerns.

Colorado Republicans have opposed this bill and other pro-trans legislation, pushing anti-trans bills in their place. However, Democrats currently hold a supermajority in the state and have been defending trans rights with new protections.

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