“This bill will make it easier for one parent to use gender identity as a weapon in custody battles — as mine has — with the full force of state law behind them,” Hernandez will say in upcoming state Senate testimony on 1312. “It takes something deeply personal, deeply complex, and turns it into a legal sledgehammer.”

What happens when your ex-wife wants to convince your 12-year-old daughter that she isn’t really a girl? In the state of Colorado, if you don’t “affirm” that made-up gender identity, the state will start to take your child away from you.

That’s what is happening to father Robert Hernandez, whose ex-wife Abigail Sanderson has allegedly been working with a groomer school therapist to pursue the new “non-binary” gender status of their daughter. Sanderson has also been successful at using the Colorado court system and its current laws to begin stripping Hernandez of his rights to be a father to his own daughter.

“I’ve kind of faced the extent of the repercussions here — for me, every other weekend is honestly no different from not having it all,” Hernandez told The Federalist on Friday after Colorado magistrate Nicholas Campbell decided to cut his time with his daughter because he raised questions about the social transition regime Jefferson County Public Schools (Jeffco) and Sanderson have implemented for the pre-teen girl.

As The Federalist has reported, a “social transition” — changing names and pronouns, as well as using facilities like restrooms designated for the opposite sex — is a dangerous gateway toward children eventually taking chemical castration drugs to keep “transitioning,” eventually leading to mutilation surgeries. Schools have become an incubator for this kind of behavior, setting up a transition pipeline with the influence of teachers and counselors.

While Hernandez’s daughter, who currently goes by a different name, told him she would never “hurt herself” in that way, “social transitions,” are powerful tools used to convince children that mutilation will make them feel more comfortable.

“My ex has her captured and my daughter is stuck here. She believes I’m the enemy, and she believes my lack of affirmation is the problem,” Hernandez added. “It’s not just the court said something, it’s like, my daughter thinks I hate her because she’s non binary, which couldn’t be the furthest thing from the truth. But, you know, because I wasn’t brought into the conversation — after six months, after she made the decision — I was already the enemy.”

In order to protect the identity of the minor child, The Federalist has given her parents pseudonyms, and removed other information that could lead to identifying her. Sanderson did not return a request for comment.

Hernandez said that fathers, primarily, are under assault in Colorado, given how magistrates use an “affirmation only” framework to decide who gets to see their children more, and who apparently poses a threat to their child for wanting them to grow up without pressure to switch genders. As The Federalist reported, Hernandez’s case is far from the only one like it, and with a new law (HB25-1312) working its way through the state legislature, courts will have the statutes they need to completely shut out parents who do not want to see their children sterilized or mutilated.

While the new law does not target fathers specifically in custody battles, it seems to be that the mother is almost always the one pushing transition for their child (and using it as a weapon to cut the father out entirely), while the father is trying to protect their child from the inevitable harm that comes from the transgender interventions, according to Lori Gimelshteyn, executive director of the Colorado Parent Advocacy Network (CPAN).

“I’m deeply troubled by what we’re seeing — and [Robert’s] story is, heartbreakingly, no longer rare,” Gimelshteyn told The Federalist. “Through our Incident Reporting Tool, families across Colorado — married, divorced, and everything in between — are reaching out with the same devastating pattern: Their children are being socially transitioned in school without their knowledge, and now the state wants to make that secrecy legal.”

Gimelshteyn works with many families in Colorado whose parental rights are being stripped — be it by an ex-spouse or by a school — and is currently circulating a petition to oppose Bill 1312, which she said garnered over 10,000 signatures in the first 24 hours and has been growing exponentially ever since.

‘It Started In The Schools’

Hernandez said his daughter began thinking she was “non-binary” at the age of 11, allegedly at the hands of Leslie Mecca, a K-8 student counselor at Bear Creek in Jeffco.

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