The Democratic nominee in Colorado's competitive Eighth Congressional District, Manny Rutinel, sponsored legislation requiring health insurers to cover "gender-affirming health care," including sex changes—with no age restrictions.
The 2025 bill, "Protect Access to Gender-Affirming Health Care," passed the House along party lines and was eventually signed into law. It prohibits health insurance companies from denying coverage for "gender-affirming care" when it's deemed "medically necessary" and prescribed by a health care provider. That could include hormone therapy or surgery, and the legislation does not include an age cutoff.
Failure to comply could result in up to a $3,000 fine per violation.
Another bill Rutinel, a state representative, cosponsored that year, which also became law, substituted "gender-neutral language for gendered language" in the text that governs the Department of Agriculture. "Man" became "human," while "his" became "the person's" or "their."
Rutinel did not respond to a request for comment.
Rutinel's support for those bills comes as he faces a competitive election against Rep. Gabe Evans, which is expected to be among the closest races in the nation and will play a central role in determining which party controls the House. In 2024, President Donald Trump won Colorado's Eighth Congressional District by nearly 2 points after aggressively targeting his opponent, then-vice president Kamala Harris, over her support for taxpayer-funded sex-change surgeries. Many Democrats have since retracted their support for transgender causes or avoided the issue entirely.
Yet Rutinel established a record of supporting controversial legislation that favored transgender causes well after the 2024 election. He voted to dole out $12 million in taxpayer money for prisoners' "transgender healthcare," including sex-change surgeries. The funds were provided in appropriations bills between 2024 and 2026 and earned Rutinel's support each year.
He also backed a bill earlier this year that ordered courts to consider whether a parent uses their child's preferred pronouns when ruling on custody battles. The bill's original form, which Rutinel supported, categorized "deadnaming" and "misgendering" as coercive control. Those measures were ultimately stripped before it passed.
While Rutinel, whose father is part of a long-running socialist political dynasty in the Dominican Republic, ran to the left of his primary opponent, former state Rep. Shannon Bird, he's made efforts to distance himself from his socialist past, unlike Democratic congressional candidate Melat Kiros of Denver. In 2014, he published blog posts headlined "Why a More Socialistic Society Is Superior," and "What Would Jesus Do? Socialism," the Washington Free Beacon reported. The former vegan and climate activist now dons a cowboy hat and says he supports the Eighth Congressional District's vast ranching and oil industries, claiming during a June debate that he's once again a meat-eater because "it's important for me to be able to enjoy the delicious products that Colorado ranchers make."
But Rutinel's record, both as a member of the state legislature and as an activist, points in a different direction.
He staged protests as a University of Florida student calling on his peers to "change their lifestyle" and "go vegan," at one point donning a sign that read, "Animal liberation is human liberation." While attending Yale Law School, he was arrested for storming the field during the 2019 Yale-Harvard football game to demand the schools divest from fossil fuels. Rutinel and his fellow protesters accused the schools of being "complicit in climate injustice," chanting, "hey hey, ho ho, fossil fuels have got to go" and delaying the game by nearly an hour. He also called to give animals the same legal rights as people in Reddit posts, the Colorado Sun reported.
Rutinel told the outlet the "views that I put in those posts when I was 22 are not my views today," but an article he coauthored in 2022, when he was nearly 28, showed a more nuanced and complex argument opposing the meat industry, the Free Beacon reported.
He wrote the article, titled "Reducing Animal Agriculture Emissions: The Viability of a Farm Transition Carbon Offset Protocol," while working as an attorney for the left-wing climate organization Earthjustice. It advocates for a "farm transition climate policy" through which meat producers would be paid to farm plants rather than raise livestock, arguing that "animal agriculture is one of the leading sources of greenhouse gas emissions." It also calls for a "moratorium on the expansion or creation" of large-scale livestock farms after implementing that transition to prevent them from "compensat[ing] for the exogenous decrease in herds elsewhere."
