Republicans have been turning transgender athletes into a wedge issue since Idaho passed the first state ban in 2020. This year, it’s already playing a major role in midterm ads, with Democrats in competitive races almost always on the defensive. At this point, the fight doesn’t even need a trans athlete: The WNBA spent the summer at the center of a culture war over a hypothetical conflict, after two ex-NBA players declared themselves eligible for the women’s draft as a stunt. There have been no known trans women on any team, and the league confirmed it had “no immediate eligibility matters” on its hands.
It became such a political priority in part because it polls well: Surveys show most Americans, including many otherwise Democratic-leaning voters, favor barring trans women from sports leagues. This November, though, marks the first time voters will confront the issue directly at the ballot box themselves.
Most notably, in Washington state, the public will decide whether to go further than any red-state legislature has even managed. A ballot initiative, I-638, would require every girl who wants to play school sports to first prove their sex assigned at birth, via an inspection of their reproductive anatomy or a test of their sex chromosomes or hormone levels. Competing campaigns in the state are mobilizing voters for and against the measure, which will deliver the clearest test yet of how liberal and moderate voters feel about this issue.
Twenty-seven other states have already imposed measures to restrict trans athletes from participating in girls’ and women’s sports in recent years, and the US Supreme Court ruled earlier this summer that such bans are constitutional. Yet nearly all of those bans passed through Republican-controlled legislatures, mostly in states Donald Trump won three times, and none went directly before voters. That changes this fall, not only in Washington but also with Arizona, Colorado, and Nebraska voters weighing in.
The blue-state ballot battle comes at a time when the Democratic Party is still struggling to figure out how it wants to talk about transgender athletes. Democrats have broadly supported anti-discrimination protections for trans people, but on the specific questions that have dominated the political debate — namely whether trans women and girls should play on sports teams matching their gender identity, and whether minors should have access to gender-related medical treatment — most Democrats have been reluctant to adopt clear positions, while some swing-state candidates have actively distanced themselves from the party.
But the Washington state referendum is forcing its opponents, and allied Democratic politicians, to tackle the issue head-on. And they think they may have found a way to win — by convincing even voters who agree with the ban’s goals that enforcing it will create more problems than it solves.
What’s different about the Washington sports ban
The measure in Washington state is more far-reaching than other state bans in one key way, as it would require verification from every student seeking to join a girls’ sports team, not just those whose eligibility has been challenged. According to the text for I-638, athletes would need to document their sex assigned at birth based “only on one or more of the following: the student’s reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels.”
Opponents, organizing under the banner of No Hate in WA State, are seeking to defeat the measure by framing it as the most extreme proposal of its kind. On paper, they face an uphill battle: 73 percent of Americans told Pew last year they were uncomfortable with transgender athletes playing on teams that don’t match their assigned birth sex. Opponents are also being massively outspent by Let’s Go Washington, the PAC campaigning for the measure, which is bankrolled by the conservative hedge fund manager Brian Heywood.
But No Hate in WA State hopes the ballot text will help them show that the proposed ban on transgender athletes would be a nightmare to implement. Even if Let’s Go Washington didn’t intend the outcome, they argue, no defensible reading of I-638 could avoid the conclusion that thousands of children will face either invasive new genital exams or the loss of a spot on a girls’ team altogether because their families can’t afford the genetic or testosterone testing the initiative offers as alternatives.
“Brian Heywood’s Initiative Wants To Inspect Your Daughter’s Body” reads a typical post from the No Hate in WA State campaign account, warning the initiative would yield “medically unnecessary” and “potentially traumatizing” genital or pelvic exams.
Let’s Go Washington disputes this, saying documentation of a genital exam from any routine past checkup, including the physical performed at birth, would suffice. But more than 150,000 school-age girls in Washington lack a regular family doctor with the medical records the campaign says would already be on file, and many schools conduct sports physicals publicly in group settings, where examining a student’s reproductive anatomy would be unthinkable.
Let’s Go Washington could not connect me with an attorney willing to defend its interpretation of the legislative text on the record, though campaign spokespeople Darren Littell and Hallie Herzberg said they consulted lawyers while crafting the ballot language. “I agree with you that it should have been explicit to say, ‘Here’s all the ways in the universe that you could verify a child’s sex’ and we didn’t do that, and that’s where we are now,” Herzberg told me.
Critics of the initiative warn the campaign will stir up more anti-trans sentiment and put vulnerable students in danger. The lead supporters say I-638 is necessary to protect the “integrity and fairness” of girls’ sports, and has nothing to do with targeting trans children. “This is not being motivated because we don’t like trans kids,” Littell said. “I’ve got family members who are trans, and I still love them and care about them.”
The Washington Interscholastic Activities Association is aware of about 10 transgender middle and high schoolers who play sports, out of more than 200,000 student-athletes statewide. Since 2007, the organization has allowed trans students to play on teams that align with their gender identity, with their handbook stating once a student-athlete is granted eligibility, they do not need to seek to renew eligibility every season or school year.
“School sports is a place where kids can belong, a place of inclusion, where they can learn to work as a team and learn dedication,” Kelsey Gellner, a pediatric nurse based in Seattle, told me. “Tens of thousands of girls will be impacted by this to purposely exclude 10 children. That’s insane.”
Some opponents doubt the measure is really about protecting competition in female sports at all. Earlier this summer, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank closely aligned with the Trump administration, released a report attacking Title IX, the federal law barring sex discrimination in federally funded schools and programs. The report argues for “unwinding our current regime” and blames the law for imposing a male model of competition on women, encouraging girls toward dominance and aggression, and pulling them away from femininity and motherhood.
“Preventing girls from playing sports is the whole point,” Megan Rapinoe, a two-time World Cup champion and Olympic gold medalist, wrote in a recent op-ed lambasting the ballot measure in Washington. “Spaces that leave girls and women feeling empowered are the spaces they want to constrict — and then eliminate.”
Bringing adult restrictions down to children
The initiative’s proponents point to alternative means of verifying sex at birth, rather than genital exams. But hormone and genetic testing, the less invasive alternatives on offer, are very unusual for minors, and typically have only been required for certain elite adult athletes.
Earlier this summer, for example, the Women’s Tennis Association announced it would require all players to undergo genetic sex testing in order to compete on the WTA Tour, a move that came on the heels of World Athletics requiring the same for participation in the female category for world ranking competitions. The goal would be to provide blood, saliva, or a cheek swab to test for any presence of the gene associated with the Y chromosome.
These tests are expensive, though, and require specialized training that public school staff virtually never have.
“The language in the [Washington state] measure is quite alarming because it quite literally would codify sex testing for youth athletes into law,” Anna Posbergh, a professor at the University of Illinois Department of Recreation, Sport, and Tourism, told The Cut.
I-638 doesn’t specify how these tests would work in practice or who would pay for them. The ballot measure is also silent on intersex students, whose anatomy, chromosomes, and hormones may not point to the same answer. Littell says they would leave these questions “up to the doctors and patients, and at the end of the day this is common sense.”
I asked the Washington State Medical Association what share of primary care and family medicine practices in the state could even run genetic or hormone testing in-house, and what referrals would look like for a rural practice.
“We don’t have that level of data, unfortunately,” Graham Short, a spokesperson for WSMA, told me. He added that his association does not yet have a formal position on the ballot measure, though their policymaking delegation convenes in September and may formulate a stance then.
The Washington State Nurses Association has come out against the proposal. Gellner, who sits on its board, said it’s been disturbing to watch the idea of sports physicals shift from checking whether a student is healthy to play — i.e., checking their muscles, joints, blood pressure, and signs of asthma — to determining “whether the child themselves is a risk.”
The state chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which has not taken a formal position, asked Let’s Go Washington to stop invoking the national group in the state’s official voter pamphlet, where the campaign cites AAP guidelines on routine childhood checkups. (The campaign refused.) Dr. Erica Li, a Spokane-based pediatrician who has been Let’s Go Washington’s most vocal physician in support of the measure, insisted to me that the process outlined in I-638 just “does not pose any barriers to any female” looking to participate in school sports.
Yet other states have backed away from language like this. A 2021 Florida law signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis originally had language saying that students would have to undergo a genital exam or get hormone or genetic testing if there were ever disputes over a student’s eligibility. That language sparked major controversy and was ultimately stripped from the final bill. House Republicans in Ohio also passed a bill in 2022 that would have required any student athlete whose sex was disputed to prove their sex assigned at birth through those same three options. After backlash, lawmakers removed the language from the Senate version, and put in a birth certificate requirement instead.
A time of Democratic hesitance
Democrats have broadly supported anti-discrimination protections for trans people, but on sports specifically, the party has struggled to find agreement.
The Biden administration proposed a Title IX rule in 2023 that would have rejected blanket bans but allowed schools to restrict trans athletes’ participation in some cases, but the president never spoke about this nuanced rule publicly. Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign didn’t raise trans rights either, even as Republicans made them a centerpiece of their attacks against her.
Democratic strategists have urged candidates to address transgender-related attacks more directly this time, but that hasn’t translated to a policy consensus. Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger spent millions on ads acknowledging concerns about fairness and safety in school sports, for example, although even Spanberger’s actual position on the subject remains vague.
Nationally, as the New York Times recently reported, Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts appears to be the only high-profile Democrat “eagerly campaigning as a supporter of transgender rights” this cycle.
In Washington state, some prominent Democrats have come out against I-638, including five Democratic members of Congress, such as Rep. Suzan DelBene, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The state’s top two legislative leaders, Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen and House Speaker Laurie Jinkins, have also come out against it. Gov. Bob Ferguson and Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, though, have not publicly joined them.
Polling thus far is unclear. A September 2025 poll of Washingtonians found 69 percent statewide support for the school-sports initiative, although the survey used language highly favorable to the measure, describing it as protecting “integrity and fairness” and did not explicitly say it would bar transgender girls from girls’ teams.
No Hate in WA State referred me to May polling conducted by the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a progressive group that tracks state ballot measures. Their survey rated I-638 a toss-up, finding voters sharply divided, with 43 percent strongly in favor, 21 percent strongly opposed, 17 percent fully undecided, and another 11 to 14 percent not firmly committed. BISC said they did not have more recent polling to share.
The measure, however it ultimately goes at the ballot box, will be a verdict on how the issue is playing out beyond red states, and directly with voters. For the handful of trans students the WIAA knows about, and for every other girl who wants to play sports, November will decide something more immediate. Voter pamphlets go out October 1.