Voters in four states this week approved or tightened limits on transgender athletes competing in girls’ and women’s sports — a rare conservative win in an otherwise historic blue-wave midterm, as the Washington Post’s Annie Gowen and Todd Wallack report.
Two Democratic-led states, Colorado and Washington, joined the more than two dozen Republican-led states that already bar transgender girls and women from female teams. Arizona expanded its limits to all schools and athletic associations and restricted locker rooms by birth-certificate sex, while Nebraska wrote its existing ban into the state constitution.
Colorado voters also narrowly approved a ban on gender-affirming surgeries for minors, a race so close the Associated Press didn’t call it until Friday. In Missouri, a transition-surgery prohibition tied to a measure revoking abortion rights failed.
Supporters turned to ballot initiatives after legislatures balked. “Protecting children and safeguarding single-sex spaces isn’t Republican or Democrat — it’s common sense,” said Erin Lee, founder of Protect Kids Colorado. LGBTQ+ advocates called the campaigns an end run around Democratic legislatures.
The results track public opinion. A Gallup poll last year found support for trans athletes playing on teams matching their gender identity fell about 10 percentage points among Democrats and independents between 2021 and 2025.
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“Voters overwhelmingly think it’s wrong for a transgender person to be fired or discriminated at work because they’re trans, but a large portion of those people also think eligibility for sports should be based on biology,” said Abigail Saguy, a UCLA sociologist and author of Gender Flashpoints: The Power of Dialogue. “Those two things can be true at the same time.”
Washington’s measure, bankrolled largely by a conservative private-equity mogul, requires a health care provider to verify a student-athlete’s “biological sex, based on reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels.” Physicians’ and nurses’ groups warned that could mean intrusive genital exams; proponents called the check routine. The law takes effect Dec. 3.
