The initiative collected 400,000 signatures, and will be one of the first major attempts to get an anti-trans law onto the ballot in a state that has dubbed itself a "refuge" for transgender people.
A reminder that not all of WA is like Seattle and Olympia. Even just a couple hours drive away from city centers is the same transphobic rural hell hole that the rest of the country is, culturally speaking.
I saw these people hassling customers on-premises of large grocery stores. From the looks of it they were doing quite well. This shit is already normalized outside of the increasingly rare sanctuaries for trans people.
The hypocrisy of wanting young girls quitting school to marry some old perv while demonizing trans people in the next breath, well, yeah, out of their nonexistent minds.
They actually want to be the ones to verify the gender of 12-17 year old girls. In a room with no windows so no one can see in. And with a key operated only lock, and guess who is holding the key? Soundproof to protect the young women from being harassed by people outside the room…and so their screams cannot be heard.
Horrifying and appalling. These people should be ashamed. This period of history will be looked back on as one of the most needlessly cruel, corrupt, and bigoted in modern times.
The increase in potential for child sexual abuse across the board is unbelievable. I shudder to think of the harm done to all girls if this passes. Any sane or moral individual would recognize this, so one can only assume that it is intentional.
I am certain that most people who signed the petition do not know the content. The paid signature gathers did a great job making it a jovial "keep girls out of boys sports". They also were aggressive and unrelenting often blocking people's entrance into stores, likely "forcing" people to sign to move on with their daily lives. I am confident the people of Washington will see through this and vote it down.
I hope you're right that people will see through this. However I do *not* absolve the "I'll just sign to get this a-hole off my case" folks. They should be more responsible--especially *now*--about endorsing something with their signature without knowing precisely what they are agreeing to. And yeah, I know we all ok all sorts of infamy by "agreeing" to online terms of service every time we turn around. Guilty. But when some rw huckster is in my face with a smarmy grin and a whole lotta secret (and not so) agenda, I am not going to sign their bloody petition.
My personal policy is to *never* reflexively sign political petitions in the street. For anything. If there's an initiative I actually want to support, I'll do the research myself beforehand and then seek out a signature gatherer and sign.
Exactly, I've had this experience being in MoCo MD, where the few Republicans do these lame initiatives but they don't identify accurately who they are and what they're representing, hoping people won't figure it out. When one outside the grocery store once tried to ask me to sign something, I responded "I'm a Democrat", and he tried to just play it off. Scoundrels.
There was some yokel outside my polling place in November, gathering signatures to keep MEN out of girl’s sports. Anybody else have trouble with that wording? She didn’t like me very well when I started supplying the truth to anyone who stopped by. Funny, nobody signed while I was there, and it’s not like I’m threatening (5’4”, fat, bald, old).
I long since stopped being surprised at the ignorance and bigotry of so many of my fellow Americans. However, should this bill, or anything like it, pass the legislature of Washington State, I will be very disappointed in the residents of a state that has long been at the forefront of the expansion of liberty.
So, a blood test or genital inspection for EVERY female and EVERY male athelete. Surely they can't pick and choose only the ones that look link they might have been assigned the wrong gender at birth. This is nuts!!!! And I don't mean the genital kind of nuts.
Because endogenously produced testosterone is a supposed qualification spelled out in the law, this may yet be stretched to include medically transitioning boys.
Prosecutors are not known for lack of overarching ambition.
I've frequently thought the same thing, but I figger it's cause, I mean, really, we all KNOW that some girl "boy" couldn't compete with a REAL boy, so it's no threat, amirite?
Yep, trans women as perceived basically as delusional gay men (generally speaking), despite the overwhelming evidence that they really have developed into women despite their sex chromosomes, so the hysteria says they're infiltrating various female spaces, they're violent, they're a material threat yet who are the people saying this rubbish? Are they peaceful people? Should we trust *them*? What a load of crap. Sarah McBride was chased into the bathroom by two of her colleagues, is that reasonable, necessary, or at best a political stunt, and more likely just an expression of hatred, despite there being literally nothing that affects them about it? They would have her use the men's room, well that too isn't really that big a deal I guess, but why should she have to, what does that possibly do there to change anything for others? At the end of the day, it's a smokescreen, they are pissed off that McBride's constituents voted as they chose to and elected her, how dare they, how could they force her into congress and disrupt the power structure? Well, if the power structure can't adapt to her, *that* should be the only concern, people are behaving like toddlers when they're supposed to be governing the public.
I still like my idea of how McBride should have handled the whole bathroom business: cooperate very loudly.
Specifically, call a press conference outside a men's room and get herself videoed going in after emphasizing "This is what they want. They WANT me in there - which also means that they WANT trans men to use the women's room. They really didn't think this through, did they?"
I feel close to as bad for the parents as I do for the kids, I can only imagine what you go through, there's nothing more powerful than the love you have for your child, and you have to see them treated like cattle. If it were me, I'd have a really difficult time staying objective and focused on winning the argument, I'd have to try, but man would I want to get in the phobes' faces.
People have suggested before that to become a millionaire you need, on the whole, to be quite ruthless and possibly have a whole slew of character faults … why are we letting such people get involved in policy suggestions. Shouldn’t we be educating the masses that these oligarchs are not to be trusted
As a new Washington resident I can't wait for the opportunity to vote this down. I made this state my new home because of its trans protections. I won't let them be eroded after I just fled here.
A campaign to leaflet all the polling locations would probably defeat this bill handily. The leaflet would only need to say to vote "NO" on Resolution ___, because it would require all female athletes to submit to genital inspection prior to competition.
Good idea, although there should be a campaign before election day. People hearing about it for the first time just then would be more likely to just dismiss it. (Also, be aware of any electioneering restrictions.)
Thank you for covering this! One of the complicated nuances of what’s ahead is that if the legislature passes the initiatives as-written, they can amend them in one year. If they go to ballot and pass, then the legislature has to wait two years to amend them. So it becomes this super complicated calculus that could result in Dem leaders deciding to pass them in order to shorten the time til they can change them. Hoping that regardless of the outcome, there are wins in court. Either way, trans youth in WA are going to be subjected to an awful PR nightmare by the sponsor of these initiatives. They started holding rallies at schools statewide, greatly impacting trans students’, teachers’, and staffs’ sense of safety.
Definitely agree with your strategy! In case it’s of interest for future reporting, this coalition is backed by the WA ACLU, the Gender Justice League, and the statewide association of teachers unions, and they are well positioned to fight, both at the legislative level and voter outreach- https://wafamiliesforfreedom.org/. There are also more localized, grass roots efforts taking place, but this is the one with the greatest opportunity for impact at the scale we need.
Tactically, I think the best course is for the legislature to reject it outright.
Passing it with the idea of amending it next year not only legitimizes the idea, it puts opponents in the position of trying to undo damage already done with a very high likelihood that any undoing will be partial at best.
Proposing revised text must by definition embrace some of the original petition, again legitimizing it, and more importantly (pardon the all caps but I don't know how to emphasize it otherwise) IT WILL NOT SATISFY THE BIGOTS!
Rejecting it, OTOH, not only avoids legitimizing the idea, it can be employed as an argument to vote against this "already rejected" "extremist" ballot measure.
I certainly hope that if this “Pedophile Provisioning and Protection Act” hits the ballot that the good folks of Washington will see it for what it actually is and vote it down.
Unlike other countries the USA has no formal recognition of a right to privacy or bodily autonomy. That means we get to regularly deal with folks who want control over the bodies of other people. I’m surprised that we haven’t legislated up some sort of “protection” for some people that declares others to be involuntary organ donors.
Let’s not create a protected class of Genital Police.
I'm old enough to remember when this kind of talk about looking at kids' genitals would have been considered perverted. Nobody should be looking at anybody's junk (kids or adult) for shit like this, this is a pedophile, anti-trans politician's agenda. Nobody other than yourself has a right to your body and all others need your consent! Ya know damn well they just want to take away bodily autonomy. Just leave trans people alone--it's none of your damn business
Washington is arguably one of the most liberal states in the union. This should be a warning that nowhere is safe. It may not pass but being on the ground in Washington I suspect it will be close depending upon voter turnout. The time for complacency is over. Please donate to the opposition when it gets organized. There will be opposition but this needs to be taken seriously. No one ever thought America would turn to fascism and here we are. Washington needs your support
The fact that hundreds of thousands of people are OK with children having their bodies examined is disgusting and alarming!
It's othering, plain and simple. They never consider that such broad, privacy gutting provisions might ever directly affect *them*.
Famous last words " it won't happen to Me "
A reminder that not all of WA is like Seattle and Olympia. Even just a couple hours drive away from city centers is the same transphobic rural hell hole that the rest of the country is, culturally speaking.
I saw these people hassling customers on-premises of large grocery stores. From the looks of it they were doing quite well. This shit is already normalized outside of the increasingly rare sanctuaries for trans people.
That's true pretty anywhere in the country. In the end, blue states are just really red states with blue cities... 😥
These are the men who like teenage girls.
Including the orange fool in the White House.
The hypocrisy of wanting young girls quitting school to marry some old perv while demonizing trans people in the next breath, well, yeah, out of their nonexistent minds.
Fewer people involved in sports
Or chess club, or anything social.
Fracturing, isolating, and disempowering the next generation of voters
… Tell me this isn’t part of the fucking plan!
They are trying to separate us at every possible intersection; they know damn well "¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!" and we scare them to death.
They claim to care about girls in sport, then require them to show their genitals to compete
They actually want to be the ones to verify the gender of 12-17 year old girls. In a room with no windows so no one can see in. And with a key operated only lock, and guess who is holding the key? Soundproof to protect the young women from being harassed by people outside the room…and so their screams cannot be heard.
Horrifying and appalling. These people should be ashamed. This period of history will be looked back on as one of the most needlessly cruel, corrupt, and bigoted in modern times.
The increase in potential for child sexual abuse across the board is unbelievable. I shudder to think of the harm done to all girls if this passes. Any sane or moral individual would recognize this, so one can only assume that it is intentional.
It's sick, like if you don't want some stranger looking at your stuff you can get your blood drawn as an alternative. I'd rather shoot someone.
I am certain that most people who signed the petition do not know the content. The paid signature gathers did a great job making it a jovial "keep girls out of boys sports". They also were aggressive and unrelenting often blocking people's entrance into stores, likely "forcing" people to sign to move on with their daily lives. I am confident the people of Washington will see through this and vote it down.
I hope you're right that people will see through this. However I do *not* absolve the "I'll just sign to get this a-hole off my case" folks. They should be more responsible--especially *now*--about endorsing something with their signature without knowing precisely what they are agreeing to. And yeah, I know we all ok all sorts of infamy by "agreeing" to online terms of service every time we turn around. Guilty. But when some rw huckster is in my face with a smarmy grin and a whole lotta secret (and not so) agenda, I am not going to sign their bloody petition.
My personal policy is to *never* reflexively sign political petitions in the street. For anything. If there's an initiative I actually want to support, I'll do the research myself beforehand and then seek out a signature gatherer and sign.
Very wise advice, thanks.
Exactly, I've had this experience being in MoCo MD, where the few Republicans do these lame initiatives but they don't identify accurately who they are and what they're representing, hoping people won't figure it out. When one outside the grocery store once tried to ask me to sign something, I responded "I'm a Democrat", and he tried to just play it off. Scoundrels.
There was some yokel outside my polling place in November, gathering signatures to keep MEN out of girl’s sports. Anybody else have trouble with that wording? She didn’t like me very well when I started supplying the truth to anyone who stopped by. Funny, nobody signed while I was there, and it’s not like I’m threatening (5’4”, fat, bald, old).
Not really an excuse. It's easy to tell these people to shove off.
"I am confident the people of Washington will see through this and vote it down."
I hope you are right!
Thanks for this report, Erin.
I long since stopped being surprised at the ignorance and bigotry of so many of my fellow Americans. However, should this bill, or anything like it, pass the legislature of Washington State, I will be very disappointed in the residents of a state that has long been at the forefront of the expansion of liberty.
Trans Derangement Syndrome at its finest. This is bats*** crazy.
So, a blood test or genital inspection for EVERY female and EVERY male athelete. Surely they can't pick and choose only the ones that look link they might have been assigned the wrong gender at birth. This is nuts!!!! And I don't mean the genital kind of nuts.
Yeah, funny how trans boys and men are never an issue. No one even notices them. Trans girls and women, though, are treated like mice.
Because endogenously produced testosterone is a supposed qualification spelled out in the law, this may yet be stretched to include medically transitioning boys.
Prosecutors are not known for lack of overarching ambition.
I've frequently thought the same thing, but I figger it's cause, I mean, really, we all KNOW that some girl "boy" couldn't compete with a REAL boy, so it's no threat, amirite?
Yep, trans women as perceived basically as delusional gay men (generally speaking), despite the overwhelming evidence that they really have developed into women despite their sex chromosomes, so the hysteria says they're infiltrating various female spaces, they're violent, they're a material threat yet who are the people saying this rubbish? Are they peaceful people? Should we trust *them*? What a load of crap. Sarah McBride was chased into the bathroom by two of her colleagues, is that reasonable, necessary, or at best a political stunt, and more likely just an expression of hatred, despite there being literally nothing that affects them about it? They would have her use the men's room, well that too isn't really that big a deal I guess, but why should she have to, what does that possibly do there to change anything for others? At the end of the day, it's a smokescreen, they are pissed off that McBride's constituents voted as they chose to and elected her, how dare they, how could they force her into congress and disrupt the power structure? Well, if the power structure can't adapt to her, *that* should be the only concern, people are behaving like toddlers when they're supposed to be governing the public.
I still like my idea of how McBride should have handled the whole bathroom business: cooperate very loudly.
Specifically, call a press conference outside a men's room and get herself videoed going in after emphasizing "This is what they want. They WANT me in there - which also means that they WANT trans men to use the women's room. They really didn't think this through, did they?"
Yeah, it's just ludicrous how little logic they seem capable of applying.
Bigotry does not require logic; indeed it hates the very concept.
I've always felt broader society should bear the negative consequences of hate in very personal ways.
Of course this is only for females, as harmful sexist laws tend to be
We parents of trans kids just want our kids to thrive. Why can't other humans live with this?
I feel close to as bad for the parents as I do for the kids, I can only imagine what you go through, there's nothing more powerful than the love you have for your child, and you have to see them treated like cattle. If it were me, I'd have a really difficult time staying objective and focused on winning the argument, I'd have to try, but man would I want to get in the phobes' faces.
Best wishes to you and your child. If there is ever anything I can do to help, please let me know.
People have suggested before that to become a millionaire you need, on the whole, to be quite ruthless and possibly have a whole slew of character faults … why are we letting such people get involved in policy suggestions. Shouldn’t we be educating the masses that these oligarchs are not to be trusted
Propaganda says otherwise
How would you go about that?
As a new Washington resident I can't wait for the opportunity to vote this down. I made this state my new home because of its trans protections. I won't let them be eroded after I just fled here.
A campaign to leaflet all the polling locations would probably defeat this bill handily. The leaflet would only need to say to vote "NO" on Resolution ___, because it would require all female athletes to submit to genital inspection prior to competition.
At least they are admitting they can't, "always tell" . . .
Good idea, although there should be a campaign before election day. People hearing about it for the first time just then would be more likely to just dismiss it. (Also, be aware of any electioneering restrictions.)
Thank you for covering this! One of the complicated nuances of what’s ahead is that if the legislature passes the initiatives as-written, they can amend them in one year. If they go to ballot and pass, then the legislature has to wait two years to amend them. So it becomes this super complicated calculus that could result in Dem leaders deciding to pass them in order to shorten the time til they can change them. Hoping that regardless of the outcome, there are wins in court. Either way, trans youth in WA are going to be subjected to an awful PR nightmare by the sponsor of these initiatives. They started holding rallies at schools statewide, greatly impacting trans students’, teachers’, and staffs’ sense of safety.
I think you have to fight the ban and not pass it, and worst case scenario, if it passes, take it to state court in WA.
Definitely agree with your strategy! In case it’s of interest for future reporting, this coalition is backed by the WA ACLU, the Gender Justice League, and the statewide association of teachers unions, and they are well positioned to fight, both at the legislative level and voter outreach- https://wafamiliesforfreedom.org/. There are also more localized, grass roots efforts taking place, but this is the one with the greatest opportunity for impact at the scale we need.
Tactically, I think the best course is for the legislature to reject it outright.
Passing it with the idea of amending it next year not only legitimizes the idea, it puts opponents in the position of trying to undo damage already done with a very high likelihood that any undoing will be partial at best.
Proposing revised text must by definition embrace some of the original petition, again legitimizing it, and more importantly (pardon the all caps but I don't know how to emphasize it otherwise) IT WILL NOT SATISFY THE BIGOTS!
Rejecting it, OTOH, not only avoids legitimizing the idea, it can be employed as an argument to vote against this "already rejected" "extremist" ballot measure.
Wow. Thanks for adding this important information to the equation.
I certainly hope that if this “Pedophile Provisioning and Protection Act” hits the ballot that the good folks of Washington will see it for what it actually is and vote it down.
Unlike other countries the USA has no formal recognition of a right to privacy or bodily autonomy. That means we get to regularly deal with folks who want control over the bodies of other people. I’m surprised that we haven’t legislated up some sort of “protection” for some people that declares others to be involuntary organ donors.
Let’s not create a protected class of Genital Police.
I'm old enough to remember when this kind of talk about looking at kids' genitals would have been considered perverted. Nobody should be looking at anybody's junk (kids or adult) for shit like this, this is a pedophile, anti-trans politician's agenda. Nobody other than yourself has a right to your body and all others need your consent! Ya know damn well they just want to take away bodily autonomy. Just leave trans people alone--it's none of your damn business
Disgusting discrimination.
Washington is arguably one of the most liberal states in the union. This should be a warning that nowhere is safe. It may not pass but being on the ground in Washington I suspect it will be close depending upon voter turnout. The time for complacency is over. Please donate to the opposition when it gets organized. There will be opposition but this needs to be taken seriously. No one ever thought America would turn to fascism and here we are. Washington needs your support