DENVER, STILL A LITTLE HIGH, AND SEATTLE, STILL HAPPILY DANK (The Daily Whatever Press) — In November 2012, Washington and Colorado became the first two states to legalize recreational weed, and an entire generation raised on the 1987 fried-egg “This is your brain on drugs” PSA finally exhaled. Then some of us inhaled and exhaled, and maybe binged a whole lot of Doritos. And it was legal! And it was super chill and great. It didn’t happen because a governor got brave or a legislature got mellow. It happened because both states allow regular people write a law, gather signatures, and hand it straight to voters.
I-502 here, Amendment 64 there. Democracy, but make it dispensary.
I loved that pipeline. The legal one, the one led by the people. I still believe in it, which is exactly why I’m furious about what’s coming out of it this year — because the same plumbing that gave us legal edibles is now being used to send a doctor to verify what’s in your daughter’s underpants.
And in my home state. It’s disgraceful.
Same pipe, different sludge
On November 3, Washington state — my chosen home for the past 30 years — votes on Initiative 638. Its ballot title says it would bar students it defines as “biologically male” from girls’ school sports and require students’ healthcare providers to verify their biological sex. Proof by anatomy, genetics, or testosterone levels. Pick your poison, girls. But either way, the burden of proof falls on your kindergartners.
How many kids is this whole apparatus built to catch? The state athletics association knows of roughly 10 trans athletes among more than 200,000 competitors, per OPB. Ten. Every girl in Washington gets a checkpoint so a hedge fund manager can find 10 kids.
More than 100 pediatricians and nurses have lined up against it, and nurse Kelsey Gellner put it plainly to The Advocate: “girls do not want to have an unnecessary exam that creates an unsafe barrier.”
Let’s Go Washington’s statement in the state voters’ pamphlet — mailed to 3.6 million people — says the sex check would happen during “routine, medically necessary primary care recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics.” The AAP has never weighed in on I-638, said it never approved that use of its name, and asked to be taken out. The Secretary of State’s office told the campaign to pull it too. Let’s Go Washington said no to both.
Consent is apparently a theme.
Colorado’s version comes as a two-pack. Proposition 134 would sort students from elementary school through college onto teams by the measure’s definition of biological sex, and while it doesn’t explicitly require physical exams, it leaves schools and districts to figure out how to verify. No method, no guardrails, just vibes and a clipboard.
Proposition 135 bans surgeries on minors “for the purpose of altering biological sex characteristics” and blocks state and federal funding, including Medicaid, from covering them — a solution in search of a problem, since a review of 2019 insurance claims found no trans youth age 12 and under had received surgery as part of gender-affirming care. As for Colorado’s trans athletes, opponents say they can count them on two hands.
So, we’ve built two statewide body-inspection regimes for a population you could fit in a minivan.
The pipeline exists for a reason. It’s being exploited.
Here’s where the dots connect. Once upon a time, back around the turn of the millennium, Washington had anti-tax champion Tim Eyman loading our ballots with all kinds of ungodly political crap. The guy turned the initiative process into a small business — $30 car tabs, a parade of anti-tax measures, and eventually a court judgment of roughly $2.6 million for campaign-finance violations. After years of testing the limits of the system, Eyman was hit with a sweeping injunction restricting his role in political committees. Washingtonians breathed a sigh of relief for a hot second.
But now we have Brian Heywood, who proved you could just buy the whole fucking building.
Heywood is a Mercer Island hedge fund manager and, by a wide margin, the biggest donor to Let’s Go Washington, which had spent more than $22 million on state ballot campaigns since 2023 as of March — over $13.4 million of it from Heywood personally. The state’s campaign-finance watchdog charged the group with failing to properly report its signature-gathering spending, and in 2024 fined it $20,000 over undisclosed subcontractor costs.
And that matters because of what happened in 2024. Heywood spent millions of his own money getting four initiatives on the ballot, and voters rejected three of them — the long-term care rollback, the carbon market repeal, and the capital gains repeal. The capital gains repeal went down roughly 64% to 36%. His election-night response: a crack about how a lot of people apparently want to pay an income tax.
Voters told him no on his money. So he went looking for a softer target. He found children.
Which is not weird until you remember the slogan. “We don’t co-parent with the government,” Heywood said when he launched this round. Babe. Your initiative literally puts a government-mandated medical sign-off between my kid and the volleyball tryout. That’s not stepping out of co-parenting; that’s moving into the exam room and refusing to leave.
Colorado’s money is cheaper and holier. Protect Kids Colorado says its mission is to mobilize Coloradans and “the Church” around “biblical and biological truth.” It had raised $152,730 for its three measures through mid-September, with top donors including Pikes Peak Citizens for Life, groups tied to Woodland Park evangelist Andrew Wommack, and a 501(c)(4) tied to Protect Kids Colorado itself. Wommack is the televangelist who told his followers in 2021 to “take over” Woodland Park. Founder Erin Lee couldn’t gather enough signatures in 2024; this time the sports measure cleared with 169,000 valid signatures. 9News anchor Kyle Clark aired footage of her describing Colorado legislators as “actual demons.” Totally normal policy discourse. Very common-sense.
Same play in both states: take a direct-democracy process designed to let regular people go around stuck politicians, and use it to go around the doctors, the schools, and the families instead.
The dark side of the high
I’m raising two daughters in Washington. I came up in the era when the scariest thing a coach did was make you run suicides in a non-air-conditioned gym. Nobody demanded a chromosome report to let us play kickball. The idea that my girls — any girls — might need a doctor to certify their genitals before they can join a sports team is the most bullshit thing I’ve read all year, and I write unhinged news for a living.
Here’s the part that keeps me up: Washington voters could be among the first in the country to approve a ban like this through K–12 schools — or the first to reject one.
We were first in 2012. We can be first again, in the other direction.
And so with everything I have inside this politically world-weary soul of mine, I beg you: Washington, vote no on 638. Colorado, vote no on 134 and 135.
This is your democracy. This is your democracy on hedge-fund money. Any questions?
Hi, I’m Dana — and I Write Out Loud
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I'm sorry, but the words 'biblical' and 'biological' should never be used in the same phrase!