Court petitions about a child’s request to change their name would be made confidential under a bill working its way through the Colorado Legislature.

Advocates say the policy would protect the privacy of minors who adopt a new name due to changing family circumstances, religious purposes or a gender transition. The bill passed its first committee hearing on Wednesday evening on a party-line vote.

“Passing this bill is simple, but its impact is profound,” bill sponsor Senator Katie Wallace, a Longmont Democrat, said. “It gives children the safety and dignity they deserve, and it treats their private life with the same care we afford in other sensitive cases.”

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Senate Bill 26-18 is sponsored by Wallace and Senator Chris Kolker, a Centennial Democrat. In the House, it is sponsored by Representative Meg Froelich, an Englewood Democrat, and Representative Lorena Garcia, an Adams County Democrat.

Because name changes come in a civil court petition, they are relatively easy for the public to search in an online e-filing system. Parents file petitions on their child’s behalf, and the record often has personal data including the former name and address. Other cases that involve minors, such as juvenile delinquency cases, dependency and neglect cases and adoption cases, suppress the minor’s information, according to Erika Unger, the legal director of Bread and Roses Legal Center.

“As the bill stands now, this is not much more than a technical fix,” Unger said.

Elsie Fierro, the political and policy director at One Colorado, shared a story during the committee hearing about a Colorado family who legally changed the name of their transgender child. When they searched their child’s name online, however, they found a public post that scraped data from court records and included the child’s dead name, birthday, parents’ names and home address.

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“That family spent months trying to remove it and protect their minor child in an increasingly hostile political climate. This is the reality some families are navigating,” Fierro said.

In one instance, a parent suspected one of their child’s classmates to be transgender and looked up the name change petition, said Z Williams, the co-director of Bread and Roses.

That parent “exposed that child is transgender in second grade to the entire school community through flyers and through her own children, not only practicing hate herself, but teaching others how to,” Williams said. “That is why we asked the senators and representatives to run this bill.”

The bill was heavily amended on Wednesday to remove a section that would have required courts to consider whether a parent accepts their child’s identity when determining custody arrangements. Gender identity and sexual orientation are protected classes in Colorado.

“We think the activists from the community that brought this issue forward, first to Faith (Winter) and then to us,” Wallace said, referring to the late Senator Faith Winter, who died in November. “We look forward to fighting another day for this effort.”

Most of the public testimony opposed to the bill centered on that deleted provision, with people contending that “ideological differences” about gender affirmation should not determine custody.

“I understand you struck Section 2, but just as I sat right here last year and you struck it, it was brought back with this bill, and it will surely keep coming back,” said Erin Lee, the leader of Protect Kids Colorado, a group working to place anti-trans measures on this year’s ballot. A bill last year had a similar custody-related section that was amended out.

The bill now heads to the entire Senate for consideration.