Seven initiatives in five states would exploit trans people to promote a gender-policing surveillance state.
This story was produced in partnership with the Accountability Journalism Institute.
A political action committee in Washington state has promoted a stream of Republican measures since its founding in 2022, from tax relief for millionaires to repeal of controls on greenhouse gas emissions. This year, the PAC, Let’s Go Washington, and its chairman, Brian Heywood, have turned their focus to schools — in particular girls — with two ballot initiatives that offer a window into Republicans’ nationwide strategy to whip up transphobia in the midterms.
These initiatives — one of which would subject girls from kindergarten through grade 12 to “sex verification” if they want to play sports — are among seven measures in five states, including Colorado, Arizona, Nebraska, and Missouri as well as Washington, that are expected to go before voters in November.
The concerted and widespread use of ballot initiatives to directly enact discriminatory policies is a historic first for the anti-trans movement. The tactic has been used before against queer people, in right-wing activists’ drive a generation ago to block marriage equality, which produced a string of short-term setbacks.
Heywood, the wealthy hedge fund manager behind the Washington initiatives, has waved away concerns that “sex verification” would be inherently invasive, and in an hour-long interview with KUOW Radio last year seemed a tepid champion of girls sports. Heywood described Title IX, the landmark measure responsible for gender equity in school athletics, as “brute force legislation” that helped girls but also “destroyed or decimated some boys sports.”
An analysis by Assigned Media and Important Context has found some common themes in anti-trans initiatives nationwide. Indifference to the well-being of girls, the creation of a surveillance state that encourages the policing of gender, and the exploitation of trans people to promote a broader anti-women agenda are among them.
The interests of children are placed last in some cases, as in the second Washington state measure. Legal analysts say the “parental rights” initiative could compel school personnel to out children questioning their sexuality or gender identity, and narrow the protections for children who confide in school counselors or nurses about abuse at home.
“It places the rights of the parents above the safety and the privacy of these young people themselves,” said Gabriel Neuman, a trans man who has written about the life-saving help he received from his own school counselors and is among those working to defeat the measure. “Having this confidentiality abridged means students will no longer go to their school counselors at a time when mental health crises for young people are worsening.”
False Advertising
In Missouri, Republicans seeking to repeal reproductive rights adopted by voters just two years ago are using transphobia to sell their effort. Missouri’s Amendment 3 would add a Constitutional ban on surgery for young trans people to the ban already in state law, a step affecting virtually no one.
Amendment 3’s main policy thrust, which would have direct implications for hundreds of thousands of Missouri women and families, is the repeal of abortion protections that voters passed in 2024. That fact is obscured by billboards and campaign materials in support of the amendment, which invoke trans kids and barely mention the word “abortion.”
“This illustrates how trans people’s lives are being used and exploited for political gain in a broader, coordinated campaign, not only against LGBTQ rights, but against women and reproductive rights,” said Logan Casey, director of policy research at the progressive nonprofit think tank Movement Advancement Project, and a Missouri resident.
“The folks pushing Amendment 3 are trying to make it entirely about transgender kids,” he added, “and covering up the fact that they’re also trying to ban abortion.”
“If this were a polling question, Amendment 3 wouldn’t be allowed because it violates the fundamentals of polling,” said Kenneth Warren, professor emeritus of political science at St. Louis University and associate director of the SLU/YouGov poll. “You’re asking two different questions at once.”
Yet this is indeed the question being put to voters.
A new poll released Thursday by SLU/You Gov reflected a notable shift away from support for Amendment 3, with voters now equally divided. Polling in February had shown voters favoring the proposal by several percentage points.
Steven Rogers, a professor of political science at SLU and the director of its poll, said in a recent interview that the February survey had found that the unpopularity of medical care for young trans people among voters “appeared to predict their expressed vote preference on Amendment 3 more than their views on abortion.”
“For opponents of Amendment 3, it may be advantageous to try to inform voters that Amendment 3 would not change whether minors receive transgender care,” Rogers added, “as Missouri statute already forbids it.”
The new poll shows 13 percent are still undecided.
The Genital Police
Deception and the exploitation of young people have been hallmarks of the right’s anti-trans movement, and its broader anti-feminist aims. The Washington state sports measure bundles together fundamental misrepresentations that have been promoted by the right for more than a decade, repeated by media like The New York Times, and now accepted as “fact” by many in both parties.
These broad misrepresentations claim that trans girls and women have an inherent physical advantage at all ages, even in prepubescence, and that they retain this advantage forever. But a steady drumbeat of research has shown that such claims, first seeded by the Alliance Defending Freedom and other far-right political groups, are untrue.
“There’s a massive disconnect between what’s actually in the science and what public policies say is in the science,” said Anna Posbergh, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who studies sports policy.
A systematic review of 50 studies published in February in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, for example, concluded that “while transgender women exhibited higher lean mass than cisgender women, their physical fitness was comparable.” The article went on to say that current evidence “does not support theories of inherent athletic advantages for transgender women over cisgender.”
In Washington state, the sports initiative is “really a witch hunt to find the five to 10 trans girls who want to play a sport that they love with their friends and their community,” according to Lauren Hipp, a Washington resident, mother of three, and the national director of early education at the family policy focused nonprofit MomsRising. “This is subjecting all girls to a potentially very harmful experience where they have to prove, through a genital exam, that they are eligible to play a school sport.”
The Washington state initiative’s language is quite specific that sex verification would be based on a girl’s “reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels” as attested by a health care provider. These standards are not part of the routine physicals that girls now go through and boys would not be required to undergo sex verification to play sports under the measure.
The ballot initiative vests enforcement and implementation in local officials, meaning that the less invasive swab tests performed at elite levels would be prohibitively expensive, Posbergh noted. This would leave genital exams as the cheapest and most efficient way to verify sex in accordance with the initiative’s language.
Genital exams, she added, pose the most potential for abuse.
Defining Sex, Expanding Prejudice
Though Washington’s initiative is the most extreme, anti-trans sports measures are on ballots in the blue state of Colorado and in the purple state of Arizona.
Arizona law already bars trans girls from school sports, but the proposed Proposition 318 goes further in several ways that may not be evident to voters.
For example, Proposition 318 authorizes private lawsuits against schools suspected of having a trans athlete, raising the potential for false accusations and harassment.
“These kinds of measures promote surveillance of each other, of our neighbors and our fellow community members,” Casey, the policy analyst, said. They foster the notion that self-appointed gender police might always be watching. “You might be out playing, or watching your kids play sports or going to the bathroom or even getting health care,” Casey added. “That is a really cynical and awful way for politicians to be using the responsibility that they have.”
Proposition 318 also would prohibit “schools and athletic associations from authorizing a student, athlete, employee, or other individual from using a restroom, locker room, shower room, or other private space that is not designated for their sex.” The proposition defines sex as the “biological status as male or female as recorded at birth on the individual’s original birth certificate.”
Though these two provisions apply to school sports settings only, they introduce policies and definitions not otherwise in Arizona state law, which has no trans restroom ban or definitional restrictions.
And anti-trans activists nationwide have often leveraged the language introduced as part of one measure to push anti-trans policies into other areas. “So in Arizona, even though this initiative is specific to sports, putting a measure, a definition like that into law, even into one part of law, could easily be then used in other areas of law,” Casey said.
In Kansas, the sudden implementation of such definitional standards as “original birth certificate” have disrupted trans people going about their normal lives or exercising their rights as citizens.
Blue States Are Not Immune
Trans Continental Pipeline, a nonprofit based in Colorado, has helped hundreds of trans and queer people relocate from states like Kansas that have been overtly hostile to their existence.
“These folks are being displaced by the legislation of their governments,” the group’s founder, Keira Richards, said in an interview. “So I would consider the folks that we are helping to be internal refugees in the United States.”
What began in late 2023 as an ad hoc effort among Richards and her friends to meet the needs of trans and queer people fearful of a spike in anti-LGBTQ legislation eventually grew into a full-time commitment. Richards quit her job in the state auditor’s office the next year to begin TCP as a nonprofit.
“We heard about folks that bought one-way plane tickets, packed everything they could into a couple of checked bags and came to Colorado with no plan past that,” Richards said. “I know a woman who packed her car in Texas and just drove. What this was highlighting was the fear and desperation of these folks faced with state-level attacks on their very existence.”
Now Colorado has two anti-trans ballot initiatives of its own. As in Washington state, the measures are seen as a test of the transphobic movement’s ability to make inroads in a blue state.
One would ban trans youth in sports from kindergarten through college. Colorado does not currently restrict trans athletes, and the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act provides broad protections from prejudice based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The second would impose a ban on gender-affirming surgery for young people. Colorado has no restrictions on care, which is routinely given with parental knowledge and support.
The two measures have been financed by a group called Protect Kids Colorado, founded by the anti-trans activist Erin Lee. Lee’s message has been championed by the far-right Heritage Foundation and organizations such as the Alliance Defending Freedom and Focus on the Family, both of which have been designated as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“I believe that the Colorado propositions are being watched very closely because we have been seen as a safe haven,” Richards said. “I mean, personally I worry about the precedent these propositions set. Will Colorado still feel safe for families to relocate if these propositions pass?”
The Politics of ‘Boys’
The raw calculus of politics appears to be driving some ballot initiatives.
Nebraska, like Arizona, already bans trans athletes by law, but a petition drive seeking to codify the ban into the state constitution, was funded exclusively by $3.1 million from a ‘dark money’ group.
The group, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit called Restore the Good Life Inc., has multiple connections to Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts, who is seeking re-election in November, Nebraska Public Radio reported. Restore the Good Life has no public website or online presence and has not disclosed its donors.
Its petition drive, which the secretary of state recently certified for the November ballot, refers to trans girls as “biological males,” a commonly used tactic in the transphobic movement.
The Nebraska initiative shares this approach with Heywood, the Washington state hedge fund manager chairing the ballot effort there.
On KUOW Radio Heywood consistently described trans girls as “boys” and “biological males.”
“Trans has become a “dominating force” in the legislature and schools, he said, and trans people who speak up for human rights are “almost dangerous activists” and “trantifa.”
He objected to any suggestion of bigotry in his group’s message before repeating several right-wing myths: that parents are not involved in young people’s gender-affirming care; and that trans athletes always “dominate,” which many years of evidence disproves.
And he promoted the falsehood that trans athletes are a new phenomenon. “There used to be zero … Go back five years ago.” As Assigned Media and others have documented, trans athletes have competed for 15 years or more, with little controversy until the Alliance Defending Freedom first saw political gain in contesting their presence in a 2018 lawsuit.
What’s new is the right wing’s zeal in demonizing kids and denying their existence.
“Our young people are very well aware of what’s happening in the political environment, and how their lives and very identities have become a political football,” Casey, the policy analyst, said. “Even when these initiatives don’t pass, they’re still causing harm to our young people. It’s changing what it’s like to be at school, potentially increasing instances of bullying.”
After the Fall
If you count only ballot initiatives, trans and queer people are on the defensive, While seven questions nationwide would abridge human rights, only Vermont and Virginia voters are being asked to support them. Virginians would be striking down a 2006 same-sex marriage ban that still exists in their constitution, a holdover from the marriage equity battles of that era.
Vermont will ask voters to amend its constitution to state explicitly that “the state shall not deny equal treatment under the law on account of a person’s race, ethnicity, sex, religion, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or national origin.”
But Casey said counting ballot questions alone may not be the proper calculation. “They’re not always a great tool for protecting minority rights, particularly when you’re talking about a minority most of the public doesn’t know. The majority of Americans do not know a trans person.”
“This otherwise benign lack of information about trans people and our lives can easily be exploited to advance somebody else’s political agenda,” he said, especially when LGBTQ groups are massively outfunded by the right wing.
Harking back to the struggle for marriage equality of a generation ago, when setbacks were many, Casey added: “A ballot measure is only a moment in time. It’s not a final statement. It’s not a public demand for more bad policy.
“Marriage equality became the law of the land, and someday trans equality will be too.”
Billie Jean Sweeney (she/her), a freelance journalist and advocate, is a regular contributor to Assigned Media and a board member of the Accountability Journalism Institute. She helped direct international news coverage for The New York Times and coverage of New York City for The Associated Press. She also served as editorial director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, where she defended international press freedom. At The Hartford Courant she led an investigation into the deadly use of restraints in mental health institutions. For Assigned Media, she’s written about the right wing’s attacks on trans athletes and how mainstream media adopted anti-trans disinformation.
