Let’s Talk About the Anti-Trans Sports Initiative in Washington

Washington passed I-638 on the same ballot where voters are rejecting forced outing and a Seattle district elected the state’s first openly trans lawmaker. Here’s what I’ve been telling reporters.

Tuesday’s blue tsunami was a historic win for Democrats and the millennial takeover of American politics, but here in my home state of Washington, we took a disappointing loss on I-638, the anti-trans sports initiative. The Associated Press called the measure for the Yes side on Wednesday, and Yes stands at 56.8% with ballots still being counted.

Unless a court stops it, trans girls will be banned from girls’ school sports starting Dec. 3, and every girl who wants to play on a girls’ school team will need a form signed by her own health care provider verifying her sex. This one hurts, and reporters have spent the last two days asking me what it means for trans people and for Democrats.

I think I-638 is a terrible law that will hurt a handful of trans kids and burden every girl who plays on a girls’ school team in this state, but it doesn’t show that voters have turned on us or that Democrats would be better off running from us. So let’s talk about it.

Tuesday was a good night for us in a lot of other places

Let’s start with the national picture on trans issues, where voters trust Democrats more than Republicans by a wide margin. In an Economist/YouGov poll last month, 52% of registered voters said Democrats would do a better job handling transgender rights, compared with 23% who said Republicans would.

NBC’s national exit poll pointed the same way on Tuesday, with voters saying Democrats were better able than Republicans to handle policies about transgender people, 45% to 34%. That 11-point lead came after Republicans spent nearly $400 million on anti-trans ads across TV and digital this cycle, according to the Transgender Freedom Alliance, and the party still lost both chambers of Congress.

At least a dozen trans and nonbinary people also won their races on Tuesday, including the first trans people elected to the Michigan and Wisconsin legislatures and Georgia’s first nonbinary lawmaker. In Alabama, Democrat Allison Montgomery flipped a Huntsville-area state House seat that a Republican had won by 16 points in 2022, in a district that voted for Trump three times, after the chair of the state Republican Party attacked her for being trans.

In Delaware, Rep. Sarah McBride, the first openly trans member of Congress, ran ahead of every other Democrat on the statewide ballot, winning 64.3% of the vote, to Sen. Chris Coons’s 63.6%, and about 53% in historically red Sussex County. Delaware voters have had nearly two years to watch a trans woman do this job, and I think it says a lot that they made her the top vote-getter on their ballot.

We also beat Amendment 3 in Missouri, which tied a ban on gender transition care for minors to a repeal of abortion rights, with 55.5% of voters saying no. With abortion tied in, that campaign had far more money than the campaigns against the sports measures.

Those wins came inside the bigger story of the night, the millennial takeover of American politics. Voters ages 30 to 44, which is roughly the millennial generation, backed Democrats for the House 62% to 36% in NBC’s exit poll, after backing Kamala Harris by just four points in 2024.

Voters 45 and older barely favored Democrats, 51% to 48%, while voters under 45 went for them 66% to 32%. Millennials won Senate races too, including Jon Ossoff, 39, in Georgia and James Talarico, 37, in Texas.

It now seems not just possible but plausible that by 2028 we will see Democratic majorities unheard of since LBJ, whose party held 295 House seats and 68 Senate seats in 1965. Democrats have at least 253 House seats and, counting two independents, 54 Senate seats as of Thursday, and Republicans will be defending 18 of the 34 Senate seats on the regular 2028 ballot.

Voters under 45 were only 30% of Tuesday’s electorate in NBC’s exit poll, compared with 37% in the 2024 presidential race. If they turn out in 2028 the way they did in 2024 and vote the way they did on Tuesday, Democrats will start from a stronger position than they had this year.

Trans athletes are not 80-20 at the ballot box

We’ve heard for years that this was an 80-20 issue, including from White House adviser Stephen Miller, who said last year that Trump was “winning on these 80/20 issues” and put trans athletes on that list. I think that story did real damage, because people don’t fund a fight they’ve been told is lost.

Stop the Ban, the campaign against Amendment 3, reported more than $27 million by mid-October, while No Hate in WA State, the main campaign against I-638, has reported raising about $4.9 million to fight both I-638 and I-001. The campaign to keep Washington’s millionaires tax raised more than $13 million, and as I told KUOW last month, “This is something that the right is just invested in bringing attention to and the left is focused elsewhere.”

To be fair, No Hate raised about as much this year as Let’s Go Washington, the conservative group behind I-638, and through Oct. 26 it had bought far more TV and digital advertising. But polling described by the Northwest Progressive Institute showed majority support for I-638’s ballot language, so that money had a lot of ground to make up.

No Hate also spun up slowly. The state certified the signatures for I-638 in January, but the campaign didn’t officially kick off until June 17, and it had raised less than $800,000 by the end of May.

About half of its 2026 money came in during October, including the two largest checks of its whole campaign, and 73% of what it spent this year through Oct. 26 went out that month. Its first big digital video buys are dated Oct. 7, and its first reported TV buys aren’t dated until Oct. 20, after ballots went out.

All four of those TV buys went to Seattle stations, with no Spokane, Yakima or Tri-Cities TV buy in its filings through Oct. 26. I don’t think a campaign on that timeline could reach every voter in time, and I think the 80-20 story is part of why the big money came so late.

These ballot measures show that 80-20 isn’t remotely the case, even where we lost. Nebraska’s constitutional sports ban was the high mark at about 68%, Arizona’s Prop 318, which restricts trans students in school sports, bathrooms and locker rooms, passed with about 59%, and Colorado’s sports measure passed with about 52%.

NBC’s exit poll also found that 52% of voters think support for trans rights has gone too far, so we still have persuading to do. That’s hard work, but I don’t think it’s a lost cause.

We’ve seen this before

On Election Day in 2008, California voters gave Barack Obama 61.1% of their votes and passed Prop 8, the ban on same-sex marriage, with 52.3%. Four years later, Washington voters approved marriage equality with 53.7%, and in 2015 the Supreme Court made it the law of the land.

Prop 8 didn’t prove that voters would always be against us, and neither does I-638. Beating Republicans who attack us is one job, and changing what voters think about us is another, and the second job takes years.

Washington voters rejected forced outing and elected a trans lawmaker

On the same ballot, 52.1% of Washington voters are rejecting I-001, another Let’s Go Washington measure, as of Thursday, and No Hate’s campaign manager, Libby Watson, said it was on the ballot “for the purpose of forcibly outing trans kids to abusive parents.” Voters in southeast Seattle also elected Jaelynn Scott to the state House with 88% of the vote, and she will be the state’s first openly trans lawmaker.

Let’s Go Washington had three measures on the ballot, including a repeal of the millionaires tax, and I-638 is the only one winning. So why did I-638 pass while I-001 is losing, with one campaign fighting both on the same timeline?

The best answer I’ve seen came this week from the X account Trans Spirit, Trans Soul, which wrote in a thread, “Most Americans haven’t gone insane about trans people. They’ve gone insane about youth sports.”

The thread argues that as youth sports and college have gotten more expensive, families have come to “feel like their child’s future is riding on it.” The average U.S. sports family spent $1,016 on a child’s primary sport in 2024, up 46% from 2019, according to the Aspen Institute, and 49% of the sports parents in a New York Life survey last year said they were confident their child would get an athletic scholarship.

So “trans kids just want to play soccer with their friends” can be true, the thread says, and still not “ring true to parents who have kids in expensive privatized leagues.” I think that, along with how each measure was worded on the ballot, helps explain how Washington voters could pass I-638 while rejecting I-001.

I-638 only covers school teams, and it won’t solve a single one of those families’ money problems. It won’t lower a registration fee, and it will add a sex-verification requirement and possibly a new appointment or bill to the cost of playing.

I-638 will burden every girl who plays

If I-638 takes effect, the attorney general’s office says students “would thus have to undergo some type of medical evaluation of their sex” to play on girls’ teams. Lab tests can cost as much as $1,310, according to the Spokesman-Review, and the initiative doesn’t say who would pay.

Washington’s school sports association knows of roughly 10 trans athletes among more than 200,000 kids who compete, so by its count, which isn’t complete, we’re talking about fewer than a dozen kids. To keep the trans girls among them off girls’ teams, I-638 will require verifying the sex of every girl on one.

Those trans kids deserve better than what this state just did to them, and so do the girls and families who will keep dealing with this law long after this election. Under I-638, a girl without a signed form from her own health care provider verifying her sex won’t be able to play on a girls’ school team.

Protecting girls’ sports will mean removing this unfair barrier to girls’ participation. Sports associations should set rules to ensure girls’ sports remain fair and safe, not politicians.

Like Prop 8, this will end up in court

I think I-638 likely violates Washington’s constitution, and legal experts told the Seattle Times before the election that it would almost certainly face a court challenge, though they differed on how a court might rule. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld similar bans in Idaho and West Virginia in June, so that fight will likely turn on Washington’s own constitution and civil rights law.

The state’s Equal Rights Amendment says “equality of rights and responsibility under the law shall not be denied or abridged on account of sex,” and Kai Smith, a lawyer at a firm affiliated with the No campaign, told the Times that I-638 violates it by imposing “a unique sex verification burden” only on girls’ programs. Darren Littell, Let’s Go Washington’s executive director, told the paper the measure is constitutional, though in September the state Supreme Court struck down I-2066, a voter-approved natural gas measure the group helped put on the ballot, on unrelated single-subject grounds.

Trans people face issues beyond access to sports

This law will directly touch very few trans people, and the problems most of us wake up with are the same ones facing most Washingtonians: a weak job market, sky-high gas prices, unaffordable housing and declining access to health care. The state lost an estimated 15,400 jobs in September, and its 4.8% unemployment rate, while falling, is still above the national average.

Gas averaged about $5.13 a gallon in Washington on Thursday, more than a dollar above the national average, and the state is short more than 182,000 affordable rental homes for its lowest-income renters. More than 200,000 Washingtonians are estimated to lose coverage under Apple Health, the state’s Medicaid program, by the end of 2027, and the state’s hospitals expect to lose nearly $6 billion in revenue through 2033 from Medicaid cuts.

Many of the trans candidates who won on Tuesday ran on those same issues. Scott’s pitch centered largely on affordability, universal health care and taxing corporations and billionaires, and Montgomery, who ran on health care, workers’ rights and ending Alabama’s grocery tax, said voters “don’t care that I’m trans, and that’s not what I’m focused on either.”

Nobody in Washington will pay less for gas, rent or a doctor’s visit because of I-638. Those are the fights that will shape how most of us live here, and we better be showing up for them.

The Washington State Capitol in Olympia. Photo by Martin Kraft, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.