The Blue States Bringing The Fight For Women’s Sports To The November Ballot

For the first time, voters — not legislators, not athletic associations, not courts — are deciding whether school sports should remain sex-based. Five states have measures on the November 3 ballot. Two of them are deep blue: Washington and Colorado. That fact alone tells you the old consensus is collapsing.

In Washington, Initiative 638 would keep biologically male students out of girls’ K-12 competitions and require verification of biological sex for girls’ events. Let’s Go Washington’s poll of 7,500 likely voters showed 56% support, including nearly half of Democrats. That is not a red-state number. It is a common-sense number in a state that has watched biological males win consecutive girls’ 400-meter state titles (2024 and 2025) and has seen Camas High School girls walk off a cross-country start line rather than race against a teammate who began the season competing in the boys’ division, placing at the bottom of the pack every time, then simply self-ID’d into girls’ races a few weeks later and getting on the podium in every meet.

Frances Staudt, a Tumwater athlete, refused to play basketball against a male and was investigated for “harassment” after stating the obvious. Ahnaleigh Wilson lost a title in middle school and has spoken out ever since. Sarah Burns, a Camas mom, put it simply: “I’m just a mom.” These aren’t activists who planned to spend the fall on the news. They are parents and teenagers who reached the point where silence felt worse than the backlash.

Colorado’s Proposition 134 would require K-12 and college teams to be designated male, female, or co-ed on the basis of biological sex. It reached the ballot with more than the required signatures and no big-money backing. The opposition, led by Families Not Politics, has raised more than $4.4 million. The ACLU put in $250,000. Planned Parenthood is a major donor. Their central message is the familiar one: this transphobic attack will lead to genital checks and is harmful to all girls.

The text of the measure does not require them, of course. But the scare campaign doesn’t need the text to be accurate; it only needs volume, and it has that.

Last weekend in Portland — right next door to Washington — about two dozen women wearing XX-XY Athletics shirts unfurled a “Save Women’s Sports” banner at a Thorns match. They were struck with flagpoles, surrounded, and then forcibly removed by stadium security. The Department of Justice is reviewing the incident. Portland has no ballot measure. It does not need one to feel the pressure of voters next door who are no longer willing to pretend male advantage disappears with a pronoun. When argument fails, force and ejection become the remaining tools.

Colorado has already made refusing to use preferred names or pronouns usable as evidence of discrimination under its anti-discrimination law. That is not a criminal statute, but it functions as compelled speech. If you cannot accurately describe the sex of the person taking the medal, the podium, or the scholarship, the entire debate is pre-censored. The side that cannot win on the merits has an incentive to make the language itself illegal to use, keeping the discussion out of the public square entirely.

We are at a boiling point. The social coercion and cancellation that worked for more than a decade are losing their grip. Parents who once stayed quiet are now speaking in their own names. Girls are walking off courses. Voters in states that have spent years treating biological sex as optional are being asked, directly, whether they still believe in fairness and whether they want it for their daughters.

The response from the other side has been more money, more censorship, and, in Portland, physical force and removal from the arena.

These measures will not finish the work. Laws never change culture by themselves. Even if both pass, 20 states still do not protect female categories. Even if they fail, the girls who have already lost places, titles, and privacy won’t go back to silence. They know if they can be heard, they will win.

The facade is cracking because the reality underneath it has always been visible to anyone willing to look: male advantage is real and significant, and female sports exist precisely because of that fact.

The people who spent years insisting that “trans women are women” and bullying anyone who questioned their pithy little tagline are discovering that ordinary voters —and ordinary mothers — can still tell the difference.

Biology is real, and it matters. And so do our girls. We won’t accept a policy that tells them they don’t matter anymore.

No matter what happens on November 3, we’ll keep speaking up to defend reality and the dignity of women and girls.

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This is republished with permission from the author. The original, “When Deep-Blue States Put Girls’ Sports on the Ballot, the Facade Cracks,” can be found here. Subscribe to Sey Anything here.

Jennifer Sey is the CEO of XX-XY Athletics. She is an author, filmmaker, and retired national champion gymnast.