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Why It Matters
Washington voters will face two high-stakes ballot initiatives this November — one involving parental rights in schools and another that would bar transgender students from competing in girls’ K-12 sports. The campaigns on both sides are already spending heavily, and the fight is drawing national attention and dollars into the state.
What Happened
The opposition campaign known as No Hate in WA State held its formal kickoff event on June 17 at Neumos, a club in Seattle, drawing a few hundred attendees. U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington was among the featured speakers, and she personally committed $5,000 from her congressional campaign to the effort.
The event was aimed squarely at countering two Let’s Go Washington initiatives headed to the November ballot. Both began as initiatives to the Legislature, but the Democratic majority declined to take them up, sending them directly to voters instead.
The first measure, Initiative IL26-001, would roll back changes Democratic lawmakers made in 2025 to a 2024 parental rights proposal. That original proposal was designed to guarantee parents access to school materials and their child’s medical records. The 2025 legislative changes removed the medical records provision — a change that was recently upheld in court.
The second measure, Initiative IL26-638, would prohibit transgender K-12 students from participating in girls’ sports and would require children’s sex to be confirmed at birth through standard athletic physicals. By most accounts, only a handful of transgender students currently compete in girls’ sports across Washington state.
By the Numbers
- $1.9 million+ raised by Let’s Go Washington, the initiative-backing group, with most of that already spent
- 2,200+ small-dollar donors have contributed to Let’s Go Washington since the start of the year
- $736,000 raised by No Hate in WA State in 2026; $383,000 already spent
- $400,000+ raised by the opposition campaign in 2025
- $5,000 committed by Rep. Jayapal from her campaign funds at the kickoff event
Who’s Funding Each Side
The No Hate in WA State campaign draws major institutional support from the National Education Association, its Washington state affiliate, the ACLU, the Gender Justice League, and Service Employees International Union 775. The kickoff event itself functioned partly as a fundraiser, with suggested donation tiers ranging from $50 for yard signs to $5,000 to cover a monthly field organizer salary.
Let’s Go Washington, led by Brian Heywood, is simultaneously funding a potential ballot challenge to the state’s new income tax on high earners — a separate political fight that has also generated significant grassroots activity. You can read more about that effort here.
Heywood pushed back firmly on the opposition campaign’s framing. “Our campaign is just the opposite: we are standing for girls who are being told their safe spaces and opportunities don’t matter if boys want to take them,” he said in a public statement.
King County Executive Girmay Zahilay, who spoke in opposition to the initiatives, framed the parental rights measure as a potential risk to vulnerable children. “We have to balance the rights of loving parents with the additional life-saving duty to protect the safety of youth who are victims of domestic violence and child abuse,” he said.
Zoom Out
Washington is not alone in wrestling with these questions at the ballot box. Colorado has a similar transgender sports measure on its ballot this year. In Maine, a related initiative that would have limited transgender students’ access to school sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms was invalidated by that state’s secretary of state before it could reach voters.
The national trajectory on transgender policies in schools has accelerated in recent years, with several states enacting legislative restrictions while others, including Washington, have taken the opposite approach through statute. Washington’s November vote will put the question directly to the electorate for the first time.
What’s Next
Both campaigns are expected to intensify fundraising and voter outreach through the summer ahead of the November election. Let’s Go Washington has already held listening sessions at the state Capitol, while the opposition is building out field operations and targeted advertising. The outcome could reshape key provisions of Washington’s education and parental rights laws heading into 2027. Washington’s broader budget and fiscal pressures, covered here, could also factor into how voters weigh government mandates this fall.
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