Half a million signatures filed for youth medical, girls’ sports and child trafficking measures

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice

More than half a million signatures were gathered and delivered with a single stated aim, placing before Colorado voters a set of measures supporters say are designed to protect children.

Protect Kids Colorado (PKC) says it submitted more than 170,000 signatures for Proposition 109, formally titled the “Protect Women and Girls Sports Act.” The filed text would require school-sponsored athletic teams to be expressly designated as male, female or coeducational, and would prohibit male students from participating on teams reserved for “females, women or girls.”

For Proposition 110, the group reported more than 164,000 signatures. That measure would prohibit a health-care professional from performing surgery on a minor “for the purpose of altering biological sex characteristics,” and would bar the use of state or federal funds for those procedures.

In a post on X, PKC Executive Director Erin Lee called the filing “HISTORIC BREAKING NEWS,” writing that volunteers had turned in more than 503,000 signatures across three ballot measures.

🚨 HISTORIC BREAKING NEWS 🚨

Today @ProtectKidsCO delivered **170,000+** signatures for Ballot Measure # 109 — Protect Women and Girls Act — AND **164,000+** for # 110: Protect Children from Irreversible Sex Change Surgery Act!

This follows **170,000+** signatures turned in… pic.twitter.com/eyrh4weoFI

— Erin for Parental Rights (@Erin4Parents) February 20, 2026

The organization echoed that tone in a Feb. 20 press release, declaring, “WE DID IT AGAIN – AND AGAIN!”

The third proposal turns from schools and medical policy to criminal law. Under Proposition 108, anyone convicted of buying or selling sexual activity with a minor would face life in prison without parole—eliminating a judge’s ability to impose a lesser sentence.

Antoinette De La Cruz, who previously shared her account of trauma, transition and the path back to truth, said the filing carries weight for her.

“It makes me hopeful… hopeful children will be protected,” she wrote. “For children to be protected is paramount.”

Her involvement in the ballot effort did not begin with the signature turn-in. On Dec. 1 in Fort Collins, De La Cruz took the stage at a PKC event connecting youth gender care concerns to the upcoming ballot measures. She appeared alongside Lee and Dr. Travis Morrell, chair of Colorado Principled Physicians. The panel also included Dr. James Lindsay, known for his critiques of postmodern theory and its role in shaping gender ideology, and Erin Friday, a California attorney who has challenged secret school social transitions of minors.

That evening, she described what transition cost her and why she believes statutory guardrails are needed in Colorado.

Nearly three months later, she sees the half-million signatures as evidence that the issue has not faded.

“It’s allowing this to be a discussion and for every side to be heard,” she wrote. 

But momentum still has to pass through the state’s filter.

Colorado’s ballot rules are straightforward, but they are unforgiving. Getting a citizen’s initiative on Colorado’s ballot comes down to voter turnout math. The signature requirement is tied to five percent of the votes cast for Secretary of State in the last general election—about 124,000 valid names per statutory measure this year.

Few campaigns aim for the bare minimum. They build in margin, knowing some entries will be rejected during verification.

Some of those signatures won’t make it through validation. The raw totals are likely to shrink. In past election cycles, the Secretary of State’s sampling has knocked out somewhere between 10 percent and nearly a third of submitted signatures, often for technical errors rather than intentional wrongdoing.

Still, the margin looks substantial. Based on what the campaign submitted, there appears to be a margin of about 40,000 to 50,000 signatures above the legal threshold for each measure.

That’s their math. Now the state still has to test it. The Secretary of State’s office will now begin its review, starting with a random sampling process to project how many signatures are likely to qualify.

Campaign attorney Scott Gessler, a former Colorado Secretary of State, filed the petitions Friday. He “has assembled a team ready to combat any effort to disqualify voter signatures,” the PKC release states.

If certified, the measures would move to the November 2026 ballot—but the debate itself is hardly new.

Similar bills have come and gone under the Capitol dome. Efforts to restrict certain medical procedures for minors or redefine eligibility in girls’ sports have struggled to advance in recent sessions.

Meanwhile, Colorado Springs School District 49 filed a federal lawsuit last year arguing that Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act and CHSAA policies were “irreconcilable” with Title IX protections for girls’ sports. In October, Superintendent Peter Hilts told Rocky Mountain Voice the issue was “too important to improvise,” framing the case as an effort to resolve what he described as conflicting mandates.

In December, D49 and seven partner districts secured a settlement with CHSAA allowing them to maintain biological-sex-based athletic and facility policies without sanction while continuing to participate in state competitions.

The broader legal challenge to state enforcement under Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act remains pending in federal court. In January, a federal magistrate judge recommended dismissing the remaining claims against state officials, though a final ruling has not yet been issued.

To De La Cruz, this isn’t a policy dispute.

“It puts parents in dangerous situations with current Colorado laws pertaining to transgenderism,” she wrote. “I worry the state is basically silencing parents for the sake of inclusion.”

She added, “I feel it blurs the lines between the state raising your kids versus you the parents.”

With more than 500,000 signatures turned in, the debate moves one step closer to voters—but De La Cruz says the stakes go beyond the wording of any ballot measure.

“This is a mental disorder. We do not celebrate any other disorder like we do this one. It’s not an identity, and there is no science to back up this treatment. Transitioning isn’t a solution for gender identity disorder,” De La Cruz wrote.

She continued, “More science is proving it’s not sustainable, and most will do as I have done and detransition—but that is if they survive this process. Suicide and ideation go up exponentially after transitioning. Is that what we want for kiddos?”