Washington State voters will decide the fate of a ballot initiative that would require girls from kindergarten through high school to undergo sex-verification testing before playing school sports — a measure critics call the most extreme of its kind in the country.
IL26-638 would bar transgender athletes from girls’ teams by mandating that a health-care provider certify a player’s sex assigned at birth, using genetic screening, testosterone testing or an examination of reproductive anatomy as part of the annual sports physical every young athlete already undergoes, reported The Cut.
“This measure was clearly not written by somebody who practices medicine,” said Dr. Gina Martin, a family medicine physician who offers sports physicals to her patients. “Physicals focus on the two most important aspects of sports. First, musculoskeletal health — thinking about kids’ joints, bones, muscles, and tendons — and then cardiac health, looking into their heart health and finding out if we need to screen for additional cardiac risk factors.”
“What is certainly not medically necessary is for me to do an exam and confirm somebody’s sex, either through hormone testing, genetic testing or a non-indicated genital exam,” Martin added. “I don’t even know how it would work because I’ve never run those tests on a patient.”
The measure doesn’t specify who would perform the exams, who would pay for them, or how schools would carry them out — leaving open questions about whether young girls could be required to disrobe, potentially in group settings where many schools currently offer free physicals.
Lauren Hipp, national director of early education at the advocacy group MomsRising, said she doesn’t know how the policy would apply to her own rising fourth-grader, who played sports last year.
The measure is backed financially by Brian Heywood, a hedge-fund manager funding the effort through his political action committee, Let’s Go Washington, which has raised nearly $3.3 million. The opposing campaign, No Hate in WA State, has raised roughly $1.3 million. Heywood argues the state’s 2007 policy allowing kids to join teams matching their gender identity comes “at the expense of female athletes and their safety.”
“The sad and cynical truth is that people are funding these ballot initiatives because they want to drive Republican voter turnout for a midterm election,” said Chris Erchull of GLAD Law. “It is just like in 2006, when Republicans poured money into ballot initiatives to oppose marriage equality.”
According to the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association, only about 10 transgender athletes participate among more than 200,000 students in the state’s middle and high school sports programs.
Legal experts warn the measure would be difficult to challenge in court if passed, following the Supreme Court’s June ruling in West Virginia v. B.P.J. upholding similar bans. Erchull said potential legal avenues, including privacy and discrimination claims, would be costly and slow to pursue — meaning girls across the state could be forced to undergo testing, or give up their sports, in the meantime.
Maria, a recent high school graduate and longtime basketball player who has been organizing against the measure, said she has never encountered anyone who supports it. “This measure is rooted in such hate,” she said. “It is villainizing children.”
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