A ballot initiative to bar transgender girls from girls’ teams would require all girls to “verify” their identity.

This story was originally reported by Brooke Migdon of The 19th, and republished through Rewire News Group’s partnership with the 19th News Network.

When Bella, a high school senior in Washington, heard that a ballot initiative to restrict transgender girls’ participation in school sports would appear before voters in her state this November, she already had her misgivings. She wasn’t trans, but some of her teammates on her school’s ultimate frisbee team were—girls she considered family after years of competing side by side. Bella, 17, who asked to be identified only by her first name, couldn’t imagine another season without her trans teammates.

“They deserve to be on my team as much as anybody else,” she said. “At the end of the day, we’re just a team trying to play together, and we’re just a group of girls supporting each other and hanging out on and off the field.”

Bella won’t be old enough to vote on November 3, but she still felt a responsibility to stand up for her friends, so she gave the initiative, IL26-638, a closer look. The stakes, she learned, were far higher than she thought.

“My knee-jerk reaction was like, ‘Ew,’” she said. “It was an immediate reaction of, like, disgust and offense.”

Washington state’s proposal, introduced last year by Let’s Go Washington, a political action committee founded by conservative hedge fund manager and multimillionaire Brian Heywood, is among several this fall asking voters to limit transgender athletes’ participation in school sports. Similar initiatives will appear on the ballot in Arizona and Colorado, and another, in Nebraska, is pending approval from the secretary of state. (Nebraska law already prohibits trans students from competing in line with their gender identity, which the ballot initiative aims to codify in the state constitution.)

But unlike those measures, which would broadly require schools to designate athletic programs as definitively male, female, or co-ed, Washington state’s initiative applies to only girls’ sports. It’s also the only initiative with a direct bearing on girls who are not transgender: Under the state’s proposal, every girl in kindergarten through 12th grade will have to have her sex assigned at birth verified by a doctor—through either genetic or hormone tests, or an examination of her reproductive anatomy—to be eligible to play girls’ sports.

“It’s the most extreme measure of its kind,” said Libby Watson, campaign manager for No Hate in WA State, the primary coalition fighting the initiative. “People are often appalled when they hear that and when they see it in writing on the initiative.”

Watson said her organization is already preparing legal arguments in case the initiative becomes law.

Opponents of the measure say........

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