LAKEWOOD, Snohomish County, Wash. — Runners huddled under team tents as parents and family dogs walked across the grounds of Lakewood High School, waiting for the next race to start. The Nike Hole in the Wall cross-country invite on Oct. 10 was the classic annual high school athletic event by many measures. Coaches chased down missing athletes and finishers ate edible cookie dough from a food ...

A safety officer watches as an athlete runs during a 4 A GSHL District Cross-Country Meet on Oct. 21, 2026, in Camas, Washington.

Nick Wagner/The Seattle Times/TNS

LAKEWOOD, Snohomish County, Wash. — Runners huddled under team tents as parents and family dogs walked across the grounds of Lakewood High School, waiting for the next race to start.

The Nike Hole in the Wall cross-country invite on Oct. 10 was the classic annual high school athletic event by many measures. Coaches chased down missing athletes and finishers ate edible cookie dough from a food truck. But for the varsity girls from Camas High School in Southwest Washington, it wasn’t normal.

Camas traveled to the meet in an unmarked charter bus with a district security guard — unusual measures taken in response to a barrage of social-media derision directed toward a runner in the Camas girls program, who is transgender.

That race, and Camas’ other meets since, suddenly became a focal point in a statewide political fight over transgender girls’ participation in K-12 sports.

But a longstanding Washington policy and state law grants K-12 student-athletes the right to participate in the category consistent with their gender identity.

The policy — designed to encourage all kids to compete in sports — was first of its kind in the nation when implemented in 2008. The Washington Interscholastic Activities Association says there has been only one situation requiring an eligibility hearing related to the policy in 18 years, which was not granted because the hearing panel agreed the student met eligibility requirements.

The WIAA says it is aware of no more than 10 transgender athletes competing each year out of an overall number of approximately 225,000 students. There is no requirement for schools to notify the WIAA if they have a transgender athlete competing, and the organization acknowledged the number may be higher.

It took 16 years before the first out trans runner, Verónica Garcia, won a state title in 2024. She won the same title in 2025.

Conservative campaigns and politicians have turned a spotlight on transgender girls and women athletes in recent years, including President Donald Trump who vowed to ban transgender girls and women from sports when campaigning for his second term. Twenty-seven states have passed laws restricting transgender kids from playing in school sports since 2020, when Idaho passed the first piece of legislation.

The debate has made it in front of Washington voters via Initiative 638 that seeks to ban trans girls from participating on K-12 girls teams. The initiative is bankrolled by conservative hedge fund manager Brian Heywood who has pushed other measures on the ballot. Election Day is Tuesday.

Here is a look at the policy, why the state created it, where research about the athletic performance of trans girls stands and what comes next.

Why does Washington have its gender inclusive policy

The WIAA says a core value behind the gender identity policy is “recognizing the value of and maximizing participation in extracurricular athletics for all students.”

The benefits of exercise and participation in school sports for all kids are well-documented.

Any club that brings kids together around their passion is healthy social interacting,” said Dr. Ken Gass, a retired Bellingham pediatrician. Sports are a place where “a lot of people find meaning and safety,” said Dr. Glenna Martin, a Seattle community clinic physician.

Ken McGee, a Seattle-area physical therapist, said that exercise can help with self-esteem and emotional regulation. Competition can push people to perform their best, but McGee said, “the root reason we're bringing competition into the K-12 system is for those benefits of developing exercise habits, self-esteem and leadership.”

The WIAA wrote its first policy addressing kids questioning their gender identity in 2007. It drew on existing U.S. Olympic Committee and NCAA rules and required that athletes undergo “sex reassignment before puberty” or meet a slew of requirements including “surgical anatomical changes,” hormone therapy and more. That policy raised questions about whether policies governing the highest levels of sport were appropriate for K-12 kids, and imposed access barriers.

In 2008, the WIAA implemented a simple approach that still stands today: let kids participate in the category that aligns with their gender identity.

Have there been attempts to change Washington’s policy before?

There have been two unsuccessful attempts to change the gender identity policy through the WIAA’s amendment process. Those amendments, proposed by member schools during the 2024-25 and the 2025-26 school year, would have barred transgender girls from competing in the girls category. Both were designated as advisory votes after a legal review concluded that, if implemented, the amendment would violate state law.

“My first couple of years in the office, we didn’t hear about the topic as much,” WIAA Assistant Executive Director Justin Kesterson, who has worked there for eight years, said. “It’s always been there, but we’ve certainly seen an uptick as this topic has received more national and global attention in the last couple of years.”

Before the 2025 legislative session, Republican state senators filed a bill that would allow the WIAA to restrict participation “where the competitor would have an unfair advantage based on endocrine characteristics.” The bill saw no progress in Washington’s Legislature, which is controlled by Democrats.

Let’s Go Washington and Heywood turned to the state’s initiative system in 2025 and gathered more than the 308,911 signatures required to put the issue in front of voters on the Nov. 3 ballot.

How the initiative would change state policy

The ballot initiative would ban transgender girls from participating with cisgender girls in athletic programs at public K-12 schools that are “intended for female students only,” per the initiative's language.

It would also require all students who want to participate in competitive girls sports to submit medical documentation that “verifies” their “biological sex.” According to the initiative’s text, this confirmation can come from a typical sports physical’s examination of “the student’s reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels.”

Sports physicals typically do not include any official confirmation of a student’s assigned sex at birth by a healthcare provider, according to several Washington primary care and family medicine doctors.

The initiative does not mention transgender boys or people who are intersex. It also does not distinguish between a transgender girl who may have begun a medical transition before puberty and transgender girl in high school who has not.

Hallie Herzberg, Let’s Go Washington’s director of communications, said the main focus when writing the initiative was to make sure that girls had access to their sports.” The group feels it is unfair for trans girls to compete in girls sports.

Herzberg said high schoolers Ahnaleigh Wilson and Frances Staudt were part of the reason Let’s Go Washington wrote the initiative. Wilson came in second in the Cashmere Junior Olympics 1600-meter race in 2024 where an athlete who is transgender took first. Staudt sat out the last high school basketball game of her 2025 season in protest of a transgender player on the other team. Both have campaigned in support of I-638.

Herzberg pushed against the argument that transgender girls wouldn’t be able to participate in sports, stating they could compete in the boys category and that the WIAA has the option to create a third league. She added there are also club and rec sports “if a trans girl doesn't want to play in the boys' league.”

Why supporters say the policy has worked

Aidan Key, the founder of Gender Diversity, proposed the WIAA policy implemented in 2008. He has continued to work with the WIAA since and said he wishes the organization had given the public more information about what they learned as the policy played out over time.

“A lot of people out there who really could benefit from having more knowledge about what Washington has done, because then their uncertainty would be relieved, and they would say, ‘Gosh, we're trying to fix something that has gone really well. Why are we trying to fix it?’ ” Key said.

Key added that a transgender girl winning a state championship wasn’t an indication of a broken policy. He said the 18 years that the policy has been in place shows “the fear that transgender students are going to break all the records, take scholarships away from other girls, etc., just didn't play out.”

When the WIAA gets inquiries or concerns about the policy, Kesterson said that the organization typically responds by sharing how long the policy has been in place and explaining that the WIAA is required to follow state law.

What does the research say?

Research on transgender athletes and their performance is very limited, said Joanna Harper, who is currently an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia. Harper was the first person to get a Ph.D. studying the performance of transgender athletes.

Harper was a part of a five-year research study between Oregon Health and Sciences University and three other research universities that would have published the first data on transgender youth fitness performance.

The study was funded by Nike, but the company dropped the research after a group of Republican U.S. senators spoke out against it.

Harper said that politicians are citing research to write policy. The problem, Harper said, is that it’s the “wrong research.”

“There is a wealth of data that suggests that men outperform women, and it’s largely due to the testosterone surges that boys and men get starting at puberty,” Harper said. “There’s absolutely no doubt that we should keep men out of women’s sports. But of course, trans women aren’t men and they don’t perform athletically like men.”

Harper, who is transgender, has focused on how hormone therapy impacts athletic performance. But transgender kids aren’t always ready, or don’t have access to, those therapies. That’s what makes it “really difficult” to address participation in youth sports, especially after puberty.

Before puberty, Harper said it’s challenging to make an argument against letting kids, including cisgender and transgender girls, play together. But “things change pretty quickly” when puberty starts.

“I’m not saying that I have an answer for it,” she said. “My answer is to continue to try to do research. Unfortunately policy has been driven more by politics and by people claiming that sex differences between men and women in sport are definitive when it comes to trans athletes … and I don’t know how to change that narrative.”

Harper said that transgender girls should be allowed to participate in girls sports, because there is no compelling evidence to support otherwise.

She felt a May 2025 rule change in California that allowed one extra competitor in each of the events that a transgender athlete competed in, and an additional medal to be won in events that transgender athletes medal in was “pretty reasonable.”

“That way you can’t say that you’re denying anything to the cis girls from somebody who may have a substantial athletic advantage, but you're allowing a trans girl to compete and to win stuff on a state level,” Harper said.

Elana Redfield, the federal policy director at the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, echoed that there is “very little research” in almost every area of transgender sports participation. She said the Trump administration has brought on additional challenges by cutting federal funding for research on LGBTQ+ issues, including transgender sports participation, and removing gender identity from hundreds of federal data sets.

“In the near term, not only is the federal government not interested in supporting it,” Redfield said, “it's actually actively trying to prevent research into trans sport participation.”

She added that in conversations about transgender athletes’ participation, people often think about the NCAA level and beyond where “people have money on the line and reputation and the highest stakes.”

“But these laws also apply to, in many cases, really young children … And you really have to ask the question of ‘does it help anybody to exclude trans kids in that kind of low stakes competition or participation where really the purpose is like to build their physical well-being or to build relationships or teach them life skills?’ ” Redfield said.

What happens next?

If the initiative doesn’t pass, the WIAA policy will remain in effect. Students could continue to participate on the team that matches their gender identity.

If the initiative passes, it will take effect on Dec. 3. The WIAA is required to comply with state law and the executive board has the power to amend policies in the case that state law changes. The measure is expected to face legal challenges.