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Seattle resident Oliver Wolf speaks during public comment at a meeting
of the Shoreline City Council on Monday, August 19. (David Mendez/The Osprey) |
By David Mendez
The Shoreline City Council on Monday unanimously passed a resolution to oppose a pair of state ballot initiatives targeting children — especially transgender children — in Washington public schools. In doing so, Shoreline became one of the first cities in Washington to publicly oppose the ballot initiatives, titled IL26-001 and IL26-638.
The
resolution, proposed by Councilmembers Laura Mork and Chris Roberts, is a statement of legislative intent. With it, the Shoreline City Council sought to live up to the city’s motto: “
A Welcoming Place for All.”
“We need to be and we ought to be a place where people feel safe,” Roberts said from the council dais Monday night. “We want people to live here, we want people to feel comfortable working here, we want people comfortable going to school here. And that’s something that we, as elected leaders of this city, ought to continue to push for.”
The initiatives
The initiatives, both sponsored by Let’s Go Washington and bankrolled by hedge fund manager Brian Heywood, explicitly target transgender children and programs that aid children in crisis.
One initiative,
IL26-001, seeks to amend the Washington Parents’ Bill of Rights — or, as its proponents suggest, restore its original language — to give parents greater control over their kid’s experiences in public schools. That includes the choice to opt kids out of comprehensive sexual health education, and the right to obtain all public school records kept on their child — including medical or health records, records of mental health counseling, and immediate notifications if their child is taken to a youth shelter or host home.
Opponents to the bill say that it risks student privacy protections and access to mental health care and carves into safety valves for at-risk students — especially those who may be experiencing abuse at home.
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| Text from initiative IL26-638, which would impose biological sex tests for all girls wanting to join girls’ sports in public schools. (Washington Secretary of State) |
The other,
IL26-638, seeks to effectively ban transgender students from participating from school sports. Its most controversial provision requires that all students wanting to play on a girls sports team undergo a “routine sports physical examination” that also verifies their biological sex with genetic testing, hormone testing or — most controversially — a genital exam. Athletes looking to join boys teams would not be required to undergo exams specifically seeking to verify their biological sex.
Ballot proponents for IL26-638 — titled “Protect Fairness in Girls’ Sports” —
argue that “biological men are competing in girls’ sports in Washington State, and it’s destroying fairness.” That argument was signed by Ahnaleigh Wilson and Frances Staudt, a pair of current and former high school athletes who competed against, and lost to, transgender athletes in middle and high school competitions.
It’s unclear how many transgender athletes play in middle and high school sports nationwide, much less in Washington. A
UCLA study suggests that “as many as 122,000 transgender youth could be participating in high school-level team athletics” nationwide. A
nationwide 2025 survey found that about 8.06 million students played high school sports in the 2024-’25 season. Together, that suggests that transgender kids make up about 1.5% of the national high school student-athlete population.
That number may be higher if not for repeated legislative attempts across the nation to discourage transgender athletes from athletics entirely. An
ACLU research brief found that anti-transgender laws “specifically ostracize and exclude transgender and nonbinary youth from the full participation in education,” adding that “transgender and nonbinary youth living in states with a sports ban were, as the law intended, less likely to be involved in school sports.”
Which is the point, suggests American soccer star Megan Rapinoe.
“In their witch hunt for a few trans kids in the entire state who play school sports, I-638’s backers will drive thousands of girls out of sports because their parents cannot afford the necessary testing or refuse to submit their daughters to genital inspections,” Rapinoe wrote in a July essay for Marie Claire.
“That’s a feature, not a bug, of these laws. Preventing girls from playing sports is the whole point. Spaces that leave girls and women feeling empowered are the spaces they want to constrict — and then eliminate.”
Other speakers shared stories of being physically and verbally assaulted in public. Seattle resident Guinevere Godsdaughter was maced while waiting for the bus, she said. Shoreline resident Violet Kawaguchi has been repeatedly harassed while walking to use public transit.
“As a trans person of color in Shoreline, while walking to the 1 Line station, I’ve had people yell at me outside of their cars. I’ve had people yell racial slurs at me. An old decrepit man in a Charlie Kirk shirt and a MAGA hat, yelling the t-slur at me,” Kawaguchi said.
“People in Seattle are harassed daily for being trans. This needs to stop.”
Supporting this legislation is “bare minimum stuff” to Shoreline resident Norbert Steele.
“Realistically, I would like to see the city go much further with this sort of thing and start treating the incidents that are going around right now…take these seriously,” he said.
“As someone else said, these things are the wedge that cracks open basically everything and rots our society.”
The ballot measures found no purchase among the members of the city council.
“The bad news is there's a lot of misunderstanding about what these bills are. It's usually posed around safety, which is ridiculous — and what misses the point is this isn't aimed at adults, right? The first measure is aimed at children,” Councilmember Keith Scully said.
“For me, it's especially insidious because it tells a 12 year old girl that her body has to pass inspection, usually by a man, before she's allowed to participate.”
Councilmember Valerie Snider found that the initiatives would trample on student privacy rights.
“Kids don't always feel safe at home. They need to feel safe at school, talking to a counselor. I know that kids going to therapy will hit that 13-year-old mark and [a parent] can't even log in on their behalf to pay the medical bill — because they're entitled to that privacy,” Snider said.
“It's not to be shared with their parents unless they decide they want to share it with their parents. And that needs to be maintained at our schools as well.”
The resolution passed quickly in a 5-0 vote — with Mayor Betsy Robertson and Deputy Mayor Eben Pobee absent for personal reasons — and the meeting ended shortly after.
When asked why she sought to put this resolution before the council, Councilmember Mork intimated that it was the only correct thing for the city to do.
“We have all sorts of signs and posters calling ourselves ‘A Welcoming Place for All.’ If we’re not going to support this, they should say, ‘A Welcoming Place for Some,’ right?” Mork told The Osprey after the meeting.
“If you’re gonna say that’s our motto, that’s our value, than that’s what you’ve gotta do. It’s not part, it’s all.”
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