How Washington state’s sports ballot measure will impact all girls

When Bella, a high school senior in Washington, heard that a ballot initiative to restrict transgender girls’ participation in school sports would appear before voters in her state this November, she already had her misgivings. She wasn’t trans, but some of her teammates on her school’s ultimate frisbee team were — girls she considered family after years of competing side by side.

Bella, 17, who asked to be identified only by her first name, couldn’t imagine another season without her trans teammates.

“They deserve to be on my team as much as anybody else,” she said. “At the end of the day, we’re just a team trying to play together, and we’re just a group of girls supporting each other and hanging out on and off the field.”

Bella won’t be old enough to vote on November 3, but she still felt a responsibility to stand up for her friends, so she gave the initiative, IL26-638, a closer look. The stakes, she learned, were far higher than she thought.

“My knee-jerk reaction was like, ‘Ew,’” she said. “It was an immediate reaction of, like, disgust and offense.”

An ‘extreme’ outlier

Washington state’s proposal, introduced last year by Let’s Go Washington, a political action committee founded by conservative hedge fund manager and multimillionaire Brian Heywood, is among several this fall asking voters to limit transgender athletes’ participation in school sports. Similar initiatives will appear on the ballot in Arizona and Colorado, and another, in Nebraska, is pending approval from the secretary of state. (Nebraska law already prohibits trans students from competing in line with their gender identity, which the ballot initiative aims to codify in the state constitution).

But unlike those measures, which would broadly require schools to designate athletic programs as definitively male, female or co-ed, Washington state’s initiative applies to only girls’ sports. It’s also the only initiative with a direct bearing on girls who are not transgender: Under the state’s proposal, every girl in kindergarten through 12th grade will have to have her sex assigned at birth verified by a doctor — through either genetic or hormone tests or an examination of her reproductive anatomy — to be eligible to play girls’ sports.

“It’s the most extreme measure of its kind,” said Libby Watson, campaign manager for No Hate in WA State, the primary coalition fighting the initiative. “People are often appalled when they hear that and when they see it in writing on the initiative.”

Watson said her organization is already preparing legal arguments in case the initiative becomes law.

Opponents of the measure say its requirement for girls to verify their sex can be easily exploited, putting both transgender and cisgender girls at risk. Survivors of sexual assault could be retraumatized, Watson said, and students without health insurance or a regular primary care doctor may be at a disadvantage. Some girls, she said, may decide to forgo sports altogether.

“In their witch hunt for a few trans kids in the entire state who play school sports, I-638’s backers will drive thousands of girls out of sports because their parents cannot afford the necessary testing or refuse to submit their daughters to genital inspections,” women’s soccer superstar Megan Rapinoe, a Washington native, wrote in a recent op-ed against the initiative. “That’s a feature, not a bug, of these laws.”

Data on transgender student-athletes is limited. In a 2022 survey, 19 percent of transgender or gender-nonconforming 13- to 17-year-olds reported playing school or recreation league sports — a much smaller percentage than U.S. youth overall. In 2024, NCAA President Charlie Baker said trans athletes accounted for “less than 10” of half a million college athletes nationwide.

Justin Kesterson, assistant executive director of the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association (WIAA), said the organization is aware of around 10 out transgender middle and high schoolers who play sports out of more than 200,000 students who compete statewide. The WIAA has allowed transgender students to compete in line with their gender identity since 2007.

Washington is not the first state to propose physical, genetic or hormone testing in pursuit of restrictions on transgender athletes. Florida’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2021, had initially mandated such tests to settle cases in which a student’s sex assigned at birth is questioned. Lawmakers ultimately removed that language from the bill following widespread criticism that the requirement could be abused.

Of the 27 states that have passed similar laws, none require student-athletes, regardless of gender identity, to verify their birth sex.

In the case of transgender adults, sports governing bodies, including the International Olympic Committee (IOC), have increasingly adopted policies that require genetic sex testing for women, part of a broader push to keep trans women out of women’s professional sports. This week, the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) became the first major independent women’s sports league to do so, announcing it would begin screening all players for the SRY gene, typically found on the Y chromosome, to weed out “biological males” and “maintain fair competition conditions for all players.”

The tennis league’s new policy makes some exceptions for intersex athletes — disproportionately affected by genetic sex testing mandates — but those exceptions require they undergo further testing to prove their identity.

‘Not the reality’

Hallie Herzberg, Let’s Go Washington’s communications director, said the organization’s ballot initiative merely builds off an existing WIAA requirement that students complete a routine physical exam before being cleared for sports and that concerns over its sex verification component are overblown.

“It’s not the reality of the initiative at all,” she said.

Previously, physicians in Washington had been required to indicate a student’s sex on sports evaluation forms, but that requirement was rolled back in 2019 to better align with the WIAA’s policy on trans athletes. Current state-recommended clearance forms do not ask for verification of a student’s sex, and sports physicals don’t often include a genital exam, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.

Herzberg said the initiative would effectively restore the prior requirement for sports physicals. A student’s birth certificate is not enough to prove their sex assigned at birth, she said, because Washington state law allows people  — including minors, with their parents’ permission — to change their gender marker on state-issued identity documents. Students may be able to assert their reproductive anatomy using other medical records, she said.

Herzberg said opponents’ messaging on the initiative has been damaging, but not detrimental. Early on, signature gatherers faced verbal threats and harassment over their support for the proposal, and, on several occasions, had their petitions stolen or defaced, forcing them to start from scratch, she said. In the end, Let’s Go Washington’s initiative qualified for the November ballot with more than 440,000 signatures, far more than the roughly 300,000 that were needed.

“People overall are excited to have the opportunity to stand up for girls,” Herzberg said. “But when they have access to all of this misinformation and the inflammatory language and just, you know, blatant lies coming from the opposition campaigns, it obviously makes it a little bit more of an uphill battle.”

Let’s Go Washington plans to ramp up its ground game this month, she said, with an emphasis on quelling concerns about the initiative’s requirement for sex verification. The group has qualified two other proposals for the November ballot: one that would allow parents to review classroom materials and opt their children out of certain lessons, and another to repeal a new state income tax on its highest earners.

Frances Staudt, a 17-year-old high school senior in Washington, said she supports the ballot initiative on trans athletes, even if it means that she, as a cisgender girl, will have to prove her own identity.

“It is to make sure that a boy should be playing in the boys’ category and a girl should be playing in the girls’ category,” she said. “It’s not scary, and it shouldn’t be something to be afraid of.”

Staudt made national headlines last winter, when she refused to play a girls’ junior varsity basketball game against another high school with a transgender player. Staudt, 15 at the time, had called the transgender student “a man” as she walked past the other team’s bench on her way out of the gymnasium, a comment her school district later investigated as a possible violation of its anti-bullying policy.

Staudt’s team still won that game, just a day after President Donald Trump signed an executive order to ban trans women and girls from girls’ sports, 33-16.

“I am not a hateful person. I am fine with people living their life the way that they want to live, and I am friends with people who have all different beliefs and values,” Staudt said. “But when it comes to my personal space as a girl, as a biological girl, then it does upset me, and it does put me on the spot to be uncomfortable.”

‘She would be devastated if she was banned’

Tori, the mother of a transgender 7-year-old in Washington, who spoke on condition that only her first name be used to protect her family’s privacy, said the initiative would cause “direct and immediate harm” to her family. Tori’s daughter runs girls’ cross country and track with her school and plays soccer on a local club team.

“As a mother, my job is to ensure the safety of my children from things that could cause them physical and mental harm. Undergoing an invasive sex verification test will cause all girls far more harm than running around the same soccer field as someone that is different from them.”

Tori said she’s protected her daughter from anti-trans rhetoric and news of the ballot measure. “She would be devastated if she was banned from sports just because of who she is,”  she said.

Stella Keating, a 21-year-old college student in Washington, wouldn’t be directly affected by the initiative if it passes in November, but, as a transgender woman, she can’t help but feel the measure is still leveled at her. 

The feeling has taken her back in time to 2015, when she was in middle school and another initiative on Washington state’s ballot was trying to block her from using the girls’ bathroom at school. That measure ultimately failed, but Keating still internalized its underlying message — that she was different in a way that could not be accepted. Now, she suspects other young trans girls in Washington are harboring similar emotions, exacerbated by the initiative’s broad impact on their peers across the state.

“Me in middle school absolutely would be like, ‘Well, if I didn’t exist as a trans person, then this wouldn’t be happening,’” she said. “That’s not true at all, of course, that’s just, like, young anxiety.”

“That’s the message that they want me to be telling myself,” she said of the measure’s backers, “because the more that I tell myself that, the less I believe I have value — and I have value.”