Girls Won the Vote in Washington. Lawyers Want a Rematch.

Six days after Washington voters passed Initiative 638 with 56 percent of the vote, a teachers’ union, an advocacy group, and a handful of parents sued to stop it. The measure bars transgender girls from girls’ school sports and requires verification of sex before a student joins a girls’ team, and it takes effect December 3 unless a judge intervenes. I think the voters read it correctly. Girls’ teams exist for biological females, and the lawsuit’s strongest complaint, privacy, has a fix that leaves the law standing.

I coached boys and girls in youth sports for years. I raised three sons. I’ve stepped away from coaching, but the lesson stuck: the stopwatch is the most honest official in sports. It has no politics, and nobody can sue it. Hurdles taught me that a few hundredths of a second decide who stands on the podium, and girls train for years to earn those hundredths.

Washington isn’t an outlier. The same night, voters in Colorado, Nebraska, and Arizona approved similar limits, Colorado’s by a thin 52 percent to 48 percent. Gallup found in May 2025 that 69 percent of Americans want transgender athletes on teams that match their birth sex. Pew found 66 percent in favor of laws requiring it in February 2025, including 45 percent of Democrats, and 73 percent uncomfortable with the alternative that November. The governor, a U.S. senator, the Seattle School Board, and the state PTA all opposed I-638. Voters heard them out and said no.

The reason is physiology. After puberty, the performance gap between males and females runs 10 percent to 50 percent depending on the sport, according to a peer-reviewed review in Sports Medicine, and a year of testosterone suppression trimmed muscle strength by only about 5 percent. A British Journal of Sports Medicine study of U.S. Air Force personnel found that transgender women still posted run times 12 percent faster than other women after two years of hormone therapy, down from a 21 percent edge before treatment. Hormones change some things, but the advantage built by male puberty mostly stays. Aristotle saw the problem long ago: quarrels start when equals get unequal shares, or unequals get equal ones. Separate girls’ categories apply that rule to sport.

Sports bodies that study the question land in the same place. In March, the International Olympic Committee limited female events to biological females starting with the 2028 Los Angeles Games, and World Rugby concluded in 2020 that safety and fairness cannot presently be assured in contact rugby.

Gender dysphoria is a psychiatric diagnosis in the DSM-5-TR. Children who live with that distress deserve compassion and competent care. They also deserve honesty, and a girls’ team is a place for just girls.

Parents carry the rest of this. Social media can amplify ideas, and about one in five say they’re on TikTok or YouTube almost constantly, according to Pew’s December survey of 1,458 teens. In a German study of 114 adolescents with gender dysphoria, 36 percent named social media as an influence on how they experienced their gender, though the authors call their work descriptive and claim no cause. A UC Santa Cruz psychologist describes the algorithm as responding to the user. That is influence and reinforcement, not proof of a coordinated campaign. England’s Cass Review called the evidence for medical treatment of gender-distressed minors “remarkably weak.” Pirates of the Caribbean made every kid in America want a cutlass. It didn’t make a single one want a peg leg. Real distress deserves a doctor, not a hashtag, and Colorado voters banned surgeries on minors last week.

Now the law. On June 30, the Supreme Court upheld Idaho and West Virginia bans on transgender athletes in girls’ sports. Washington’s challengers rely on the state constitution and state antidiscrimination law, citing privacy, equal rights, and equal education. The plaintiffs aren’t lawmakers. They’re the Washington Education Association, TransFamilies, and parents, although the state Democratic Party has pledged to support court challenges. As a designated expert witness since 2015, I can report that litigation takes a while to play out in the court system.

The opposition’s best argument deserves a straight answer. The initiative requires no sex verification for boys’ teams, and in 2008 the state Supreme Court struck down random drug testing of student athletes under its privacy clause. Roughly 10 students have disclosed being transgender to the state activities association, yet the rules reach every girl who plays.

Answers exist. Every Washington student athlete already needs a doctor’s OK before playing. The initiative lets a provider rely on reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal testosterone levels, so a cheek swab or blood draw can do the job. A judge must decide whether a sports physical resembles a random urine test, and the state can make that question easy.

Courts should hesitate to freeze a law before they see it work, so let it take effect December 3 and hear privacy claims against the actual rules. The activities association and doctors should pick the least intrusive method the text allows, a one-time confidential cheek swab with no physical exam. That mirrors the IOC policy, which tells sports bodies to avoid physical exams and screen athletes once, and the IOC says its screening is accurate more than 99 percent of the time. Schools should also add open divisions. Colorado’s measure lets transgender students play on coed teams, so everyone competes and nobody has to explain themselves to a stopwatch.

Dostoevsky wrote, “The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than any one.” Washington’s voters declined to take offense at arithmetic. Ask your school board and your legislators where they stand, because the next ballot measure starts at a school board meeting.

Hollywood built a hit, "A League of Their Own," on the idea that women deserve a field of their own. I’m off the track these days, but I’ll keep showing up where the decisions get made, and the stopwatch will keep telling the truth either way.

Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.

Editor's Note: Do you enjoy Townhall's conservative reporting exposing the radical left and woke media? Support our work so we can keep bringing you the truth.

Join Townhall VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.