Editor’s note: This article discusses mature themes.
Distraction, deflection, misdirection. Don’t read the “news” to figure out how to vote.
In Colorado this year, Proposition 134 would limit participation in school sports on the basis of sex: boys on teams for boys, girls on teams for girls. You can read the unremarkable language of the ballot measure on the website of the Colorado Secretary of State. If passed, it would have the effect of “restricting participation in all K-12 and collegiate school sports based on the participant’s sex as determined by certain aspects of their biological reproductive system.”
You probably don’t need help understanding those biological reproductive systems, some portion of which you can identify in the shower. We all know the difference between boys and girls, a distinction that human beings have not typically struggled to figure out.
So here’s how opponents of the measure characterize it:
Prop 134 is the “invasive genital inspection” measure. It’s not even a clever lie.
1.) Boys should play sports on teams for boys
2.) OH NO WHY ARE YOU SAYING THAT STRANGERS SHOULD MAKE LITTLE CHILDREN TAKE OFF THEIR CLOTHES SO STRANGERS CAN SEE THEIR GENITALS!?!?!?
News headline from the pro-trans Advocate:
Not just genital exams, forced genital exams. You sign up for football and pretty soon strangers come and pin you down to rip your pants off. All those poor little kids, tied to an examination table so strangers can point between their legs.
Protect Kids Colorado, the group sponsoring Prop 134, offers a fact check on the genital inspection claim, but they shouldn’t need to. Fifty years ago, or twenty years ago, no one found the idea of boys and girls enormously hard to puzzle out, and high schools weren’t staring at everyone’s penises and vaginas to resolve the mystery. A return to the long-established reality of normal behavior is framed as a bizarre act of sexual aggression.
This is bad faith 101: An argument about a ballot measure isn’t about the question raised by the ballot measure, but instead revolves around fake panic and shameless lying.
The other maneuver in the “news” is the herding mechanism of associating a measure with an identity. The group behind Prop 134 is also backing two other measures this year, one to more severely punish people who traffic children for sexual exploitation and one to ban sex-rejecting procedures for minors. Here’s how the Colorado Times Recorder just explained the three measures:
The opening of the discussion doesn’t center on the point of the measures. Instead, it opens on identity framing. If you don’t think children should have their healthy bodies mutilated in the service of trans ideology, you’re basically handling serpents and speaking in tongues at this very moment. No other explanation will suffice. The way you vote isn’t about the actual things the ballot measures really do. The only point is about what kind of person you are. Just imagine what the other “progressive” moms in Boulder will think of you at social events!
Of course, none of the framing is real. A New York Times poll conducted in 2025 found that “just 18 percent of Americans believe transgender female athletes — those who were male at birth — should be allowed to compete in women’s sports. Nearly 80 percent say they should not.” The point of framing a measure on sexual identity and children’s sports as a benchmark of cultural status isn’t to report on reality; rather, the point is to stigmatize and corral voters, pointing people away from what they actually believe. Sharing a belief with 80 percent of the population makes you a dangerous extremist.
These are the games the media will be playing through election day. Skip all of it. If you want to know how to vote on a ballot measure, read the ballot measure. See what it does, not what the endlessly dishonest legacy media want you to think it does.
Protect Kids Colorado offers the plain and unedited language of their three Colorado ballot measures on their website, and they also offer a list of “Colorado laws that mandate gender ideology.” Start with reality, and figure out the rest for yourself.
