For Kelsey Gellner, a Seattle-based pediatric nurse, a statewide proposal to bar trans girls from sports participation feels like a violation of her duty as a medical professional. The ballot initiative includes a requirement she calls “invasive and extreme”: all students who wish to compete on girls’ teams would have to undergo genital exams. Over the past few weeks, as midterm election organizing has ramped up, Gellner and nurses across the state have campaigned against the initiative by speaking at press conferences, canvassing and door-knocking.
They are among more than 140 healthcare providers who have issued a statement opposing Initiative 638, while unions like the Washington Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers are actively mobilizing members across the state, organizers said. Washington’s ballot measure was introduced last year by Let’s Go Washington, a political action committee founded by the hedge fund manager Brian Heywood, a multimillionaire who has bankrolled many conservative initiatives. It’s widely considered to be the most restrictive of the four statewide measures, mandating that girls show proof of female anatomy through expensive genetic or hormone tests, or a genital exam.
Boys are not required to undergo the same sex-verification process. At the same time, dozens of hospitals have discontinued care for trans youth after Trump threatened to withhold federal funding. Yet the groups that such policies are supposedly targeting are often exceptionally small: the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association has said that it is aware of only about 10 student athletes who identify as transgender out of more than 200,000 in the state.
A sex-verification requirement adds another barrier for girls to participate in team sports, Loft said, when they are already twice as likely as boys to drop out by age 14. Let’s Go Washington and I638’s proponents have argued in the voter guide that the sex verification requirement is a standard procedure endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics – a claim the medical group has publicly rejected. Gellner said a genital exam was wholly different from a sports physical, which is used to determine metrics like vision and heart health and, crucially, doesn’t require a student to remove her clothing.
She added that any policy that puts girls through intrusive medical procedures “opens up a can of worms” given the horrific crimes of Larry Nassar, an ex-USA Gymnastics doctor who was convicted in 2023 of sexually abusing girls for decades. Libby Watson, campaign manager for No Hate in Washington State, said organizers have spent the past year and a half building a broad coalition against two ballot measures they consider detrimental to LGBTQ+ rights: the one that targets trans sports athletes, and another that would expand parents’ rights to access public school records. The No Hate campaign has amassed nearly 600 endorsers, including prominent Democratic politicians like the US senator Patty Murray and groups such as Planned Parenthood and the Washington State Nurses Association.
The group is now ramping up its door-knocking, phone-banking and canvassing efforts, powered by more than 6,300 volunteers, Watson said. Public awareness about the anti-trans sports measure had increased dramatically over the past couple of months, Watson said, as the No Hate campaign held up to four phone-banking sessions a week. Organizers also found that messaging around the unjustness of the policy – the fact that only girls would be affected – and the invasiveness of the genital exams resonated most with voters, she said.
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