Did you know search engines like Google are changing the way you see news? Keep Chalkbeat’s valuable education coverage at the top of your feeds by clicking here and checking the box next to our name.
Activists who want to keep transgender athletes out of girls’ sports think they now have a playbook that works in Democratic states: Put the issue on the ballot.
Even amid an overwhelming blue wave on Nov. 3, voters in four states chose to restrict transgender rights in youth athletics. Two of those states — Washington and Colorado — have been havens of inclusive transgender policy. But their voters easily approved ballot measures limiting transgender sports participation while also handing Democrats supermajorities in their state legislatures.
Those and other results highlight an increasingly hostile political landscape for transgender rights in schools and elsewhere. Yet LGBTQ advocates and their allies in elected office are not backing down.
Parents of trans and cisgender athletes, along with the Washington state teachers union, sued Monday to block Initiative 638, which requires healthcare providers to verify girls are girls before they can play sports. And the Seattle school board voted unanimously to pursue its own legal action over fears that complying with the initiative would mean violating other state laws.
And in Colorado, Democratic Governor-elect Phil Weiser is already talking about making “adjustments” to ballot measures that say students must play on teams that match their biological sex and that bar gender-affirming surgeries for minors.
School sports have become a fierce battleground over the rights of transgender children, even though most states count fewer than a dozen such athletes at any given time. Conservatives found that restricting sports participation did much better in focus groups and in polls than banning transgender adults from using bathrooms that matched their gender identity. They built a broader cultural agenda that includes parental rights and curriculum restrictions around the issue.
Starting with Idaho in 2020, 29 states have adopted laws or policies restricting transgender athletes — most often transgender girls — from joining teams that match their gender identity. President Donald Trump made the issue a centerpiece of his approach to Title IX, and this June, the U.S. Supreme Court found these bans to be constitutional.
But the court did not rule that states must exclude transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports teams. That kicked the issue back to the states.
Both supporters and opponents of restricting transgender sports participation expect to see ballot measures in more states.
“Voters generally don’t like discrimination, but conservative groups have been very successful about framing the sports issue as not about discrimination but about fairness and about biology,” said Joanna Wuest, a political scientist at Stony Brook University who has written extensively about LGBTQ rights.
Anti-transgender ballot initiatives could mark turning point
Supporters of sports restrictions describe them as common sense steps that recognize innate biological differences between the sexes and protect athletic opportunities for girls and women.
Jennifer Sey, a backer of the Colorado ballot measure and an activist who achieved prominence by opposing COVID-era school closures, said Democratic leaders need to pay attention to what she called a “watershed moment.”
“The midterm results proved — despite deep-pocketed interest groups efforts to label the initiatives as ‘right wing’ and ‘bigoted’ — that protecting girls’ sports was never about right versus left; it’s about right versus wrong,” Sey said in an emailed statement. “Now party leaders must take heed: Your own base has spoken decisively.”
This year, Arizona voters expanded an existing ban about school sports to include recreational sports like Little League, even as Democrats flipped control of the state legislature and the state superintendent’s office. In Nebraska, voters enshrined an existing ban into their state constitution by a far wider margin than the one by which they reelected their Republican U.S. senator.
But Aidan Key, co-founder of the Washington state advocacy group Gender Diversity, who helped develop the state’s transgender sports policies, believes those policies have been working.
Since 2007, Washington state has allowed K-12 students to participate in sports that match their gender identity without having to undergo medical treatment. The Washington Interscholastic Activities Association estimates that roughly 10 transgender athletes participate each year out of roughly 250,000 student athletes.
Dozens of athletes have participated over the years without drawing much notice at all while getting the benefits of physical activity and team comradery, said Key, who also heads TransFamilies, one of the organizations suing over Initiative 638. Even those transgender athletes who have excelled locally post stats well within the normal range for high school girls nationally.
“I want the will of the people to be an informed will,” he said. “I want them to know the bragging rights we should have as a state for how well this policy has worked. If a legal challenge can help us continue the conversation, then that seems worthwhile.”
Seattle school board member Joe Mizrahi opposed Initiative 638 as a father of three daughters who play sports. But he said at Monday’s meeting that his vote to sue was about legal concerns.
The school district, he said, doesn’t know how to comply with the new law while also abiding state laws protecting student privacy, barring discrimination, and guaranteeing equal access to educational opportunities.
“Those laws didn’t come out of nowhere,” Mizrahi said. “They came from the democratic process, from representatives, from votes, and from our constitutional principles. So those protections also reflect the will of the people.”
But in 2024 and 2025, a transgender track athlete won back to back state titles in the 400 meter event. This fall, another Washington transgender runner made national news when teammates protested her inclusion.
And a high school female wrestler who said a transgender opponent sexually assaulted her during a match is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to find that inclusive sports policies violate the civil rights of female athletes.
Brian Heywood, a hedge fund founder who put his personal wealth behind Washington Initiative 638, said female athletes there felt pressured by “bureaucratic bullies” to accept what they viewed as unfair competition and intrusions into private spaces. “Someone had to punch back,” he said.
In an interview, Heywood consistently referred to transgender girls as boys, but said the initiative is “not a MAGA thing,” not part of a national movement, and not a step toward broader discrimination.
But Sey argued in her Substack that people who agree with her on sports “know that a person is male” and can’t change sex, which means public policy shouldn’t accommodate gender identity.
The 2026 midterms did deliver wins for out transgender lawmakers in Alabama and Georgia. And voters in Vermont overwhelmingly approved a state constitutional amendment that bars discrimination on the basis of gender identity.
At the same time, some red-state Democrats ran ads promising to keep biological males — a term many transgender people find derogatory — off girls’ and women’s sports teams.
Wuest said the rhetoric used to support sport restrictions often depicts transgender women and girls as threatening or predatory. That “puts a target on trans kids’ and trans teachers’ backs,” she said, and also gets used to justify restricting bathroom access, another Trump administration priority.
At the same time, she said, “I don’t think most Democrats want to go out of their way to talk about trans issues right now.”
Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.
Erica Meltzer 2026-11-10 19:11:27
Source link