By Erica C. Barnett

Some Washington state voters received a poll this week testing messages on two new initiatives from Brian Heywood, the right-wing megamillionaire who tried unsuccessfully last year to overturn the Washington Climate Commitment Act and do away with the state’s long-term care insurance program.

The first initiative would prohibit “biologically male” students from competing in girls’ sports in public schools, while they second would undo legislative changes to the so-called “parent’s bill of rights.” Heywood proposed the “bill of rights” as an initiative two years ago and the state legislature passed it into law; they’ve since softened the language of the bill, which gave parents unprecedented access to their kids’ school health records, including notes from confidential sessions with school counselors.

As we noted at the time, “Legislators and most media outlets described the legislation as a simple ‘parental rights’ measure, but it goes much further, intervening in the lives of kids who may have good reasons to feel unsafe talking to their families about sex and identity.”

The poll tests several messages voters could hear later this year, many of them relying on dangerous and unfounded tropes about trans girls threatening the safety of their cisgender female peers. “We need a statewide ban to guarantee every girl can compete and participate without worrying about injury or losing her privacy,” one test message reads.

Other questions are designed to suggest that while cis “girls” are weak and vulnerable, trans children are actually hulking “men” who are undoing landmark civil rights laws protecting women.  “Biological men are competing in girls’ sports in Washington State, and it’s destroying fairness in girls’ sports,” one of the questions says. “[W]hen biological males compete in girls’ events, they have an unfair advantage that no amount of training can overcome. We can’t allow the opportunities Title 9 created for girls to be erased.”

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Most of the studies that purport to show that adult trans women outcompete adult cis women have compared cisgender men and cisgender women. Overall, the number of trans women in competitive sports is so small that it’s hard to come to reliable conclusions about performance, but even in elite sports such as professional running, cis women frequently defeat trans women, since ability isn’t defined just by things like physical size; and that’s in professional sports, not K-12 gym classes and school teams.

Another question suggests that cis girls will be “ridiculed” and are already dropping out of sports across the state because of the presence of trans girls on their teams. (In fact, the evidence is exactly the opposite—trans girls are afraid to participate in sports because the nationwide obsession with girls’ sports has made them targets.)

Heywood’s test messages are framed as a matter of fairness in women’s sports, a topic right-wing activists have seized on not because they’re invested in women’s sports (the audience for Storm games is not furious men in MAGA hats) but because low-information voters see girls’ sports as an edge case.

The test messages also include arguments for restoring parents’ ability to read their kids’ school medical records, including notes about conversations with school counselors about things like birth control, sexuality, gender, and abortion.

“No government employee can love or care for a child like their family. Parents have the fundamental right and moral duty to guide their kids’ upbringing—children belong to families, not the government,” the poll says. The ability to speak to a counselor in confidence is critical for kids whose parents may be abusive or unsupportive—and who, it apparently must be said, are human beings in their own right who don’t “belong” to anyone.