The Democratic nominee in one of the nation's most competitive House races pushed legislation mandating insurance coverage for gender-affirming procedures with no age restriction, in a district Donald Trump carried in 2024.
Colorado state Rep. Manny Rutinel, now running for the Eighth Congressional District seat held by Republican Rep. Gabe Evans, sponsored HB25-1309, titled "Protect Access to Gender-Affirming Health Care." The bill bars health insurance companies from denying coverage for gender-affirming care, which could include hormone therapy or surgery, when a health care provider deems it "medically necessary." It contains no age cutoff. The measure passed the Colorado House along party lines in 2025 and was signed into law. Insurers who fail to comply face fines of up to $3,000 per violation.
Rutinel did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Free Beacon, which first reported on the legislation and Rutinel's broader record. The bill is now law in a state where the issue of taxpayer involvement in gender-transition procedures has become a flashpoint, and where Rutinel is asking voters in a Trump-won district to send him to Congress.
The insurance mandate is not the only gender-related measure Rutinel has backed. He also cosponsored HB25-1084, a bill that replaced gendered language with gender-neutral terms in the statute governing the Colorado Department of Agriculture. Under the change, "man" became "human," and "his" became "the person's" or "their." That bill also became law.
Between 2024 and 2026, Rutinel voted each year for appropriations bills that directed a total of $12 million in taxpayer money toward transgender health care for prisoners, including sex-change surgeries.
Earlier this year, he supported a custody bill that, in its original form, categorized "deadnaming", calling a person by the name they used before transitioning, and "misgendering" as forms of coercive control. The bill also ordered courts to weigh whether a parent uses a child's preferred pronouns when deciding custody disputes. Those provisions were ultimately stripped before the bill passed, but Rutinel backed the original version.
Taken together, the record amounts to a sustained legislative push on transgender policy, one that could prove difficult to defend in a district Trump won by nearly two points in 2024. In that campaign, Trump aggressively targeted then-Vice President Kamala Harris over her support for taxpayer-funded sex-change surgeries. The issue moved voters then. Rutinel is betting it won't move them now.
The gender-policy record is only one layer of a candidacy built on reinvention. Rutinel, a Yale Law School graduate and former attorney for the environmental group Earthjustice, has spent years trying to sand down a political biography that reads like a progressive activist's résumé.
As a student at the University of Florida, he staged protests urging peers to "change their lifestyle" and "go vegan." He wore a sign that read "Animal liberation is human liberation." On Reddit, he called for giving animals the same legal rights as people. When those posts surfaced, Rutinel told the Colorado Sun:
"Views that I put in those posts when I was 22 are not my views today."
But the timeline complicates that defense. In December 2022, when he was nearly 28, Rutinel coauthored an article titled "Reducing Animal Agriculture Emissions: The Viability of a Farm Transition Carbon Offset Protocol," published by the Brooks Institute while he worked at Earthjustice. The paper called animal agriculture "one of the leading sources of greenhouse gas emissions" and advocated paying meat producers to switch to farming plants. It went further, calling for a "moratorium on the expansion or creation" of large-scale livestock farms to prevent them from "compensat[ing] for the exogenous decrease in herds elsewhere."
That is not the position of a 22-year-old firing off late-night Reddit posts. It is a policy paper, coauthored by a practicing attorney, published four years after the Reddit posts Rutinel now disowns.
In 2019, Rutinel was arrested for storming the field during the Yale-Harvard football game alongside other protesters demanding both schools divest from fossil fuels. The demonstration delayed the game by nearly an hour. Protesters chanted "hey hey, ho ho, fossil fuels have got to go" and accused the two universities of being "complicit in climate injustice."
And in 2014, he published blog posts headlined "Why a More Socialistic Society Is Superior" and "What Would Jesus Do? Socialism." His father is part of a long-running socialist political dynasty in the Dominican Republic.
Now Rutinel wears a cowboy hat and tells voters he supports the Eighth District's ranching and oil industries. At a June debate, he declared:
"It's important for me to be able to enjoy the delicious products that Colorado ranchers make."
He ran to the left of his primary opponent, former state Rep. Shannon Bird, and won the nomination. Unlike Melat Kiros, a Democratic congressional candidate from Denver, Rutinel has actively worked to distance himself from his socialist past.
Colorado's Eighth Congressional District is expected to produce one of the closest House races in the country. Rutinel needs moderate and independent voters in a district with vast ranching and oil industries, the same industries his published work targeted for government-managed downsizing barely four years ago.
His legislative record in Denver tells one story: insurance mandates for gender transitions with no age limit, $12 million for prisoner sex-change surgeries, gender-neutral rewrites of agriculture law, and support for penalizing parents who use the wrong pronouns. His campaign trail persona tells another: cowboy hat, meat on the plate, and love for Colorado ranchers.
Voters will have to decide which version of Manny Rutinel they're actually electing. His record suggests the answer is already on paper.
