Women's sports advocates protest in D.C. in 2022 (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
A small school district burrowed in a deep-blue county is leading the charge against a nearly 20-year-old policy in Washington state that allows biological males to compete in girls' high school sports, highlighting the growing divide surrounding transgender athletes.
After a biological male dominated girls’ track and cross-country contests, culminating with a championship win in the spring, Lynden School District board member Khush Brar launched a rallying cry. She convinced her district to push an amendment that would require the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association (WIAA), which sets the rules for middle and high school sports, to replace its transgender inclusion policy with one requiring student athletes to compete on teams aligning with their birth sex. Brar also won support from 13 other districts, after talking to around 100 school board members from across Washington.
"Everybody just wants to have a solution," Brar told the Washington Free Beacon, emphasizing that she spoke on her own behalf and not for the school board. "It’s a problem that we don’t have a fair, equitable, level playing field for females in Washington state."
Brar, a first-generation immigrant, rallied enough support to force the WIAA to consider the Lynden amendment, with a vote set for April. Another amendment on the table—developed in tandem by a school district in deep-red Douglas County—would similarly bar biological males from competing in girls’ sports, but also create a third category that’s open to any student athlete regardless of sex.
Victory is far from assured. The WIAA’s 53-member representative assembly, made up of school administrators from across the state, will discuss and finalize the language ahead of the April vote, according to WIAA’s communications director.
An amendment needs 60 percent of the vote to pass. Supporters of change acknowledge their tough odds given that the deep-blue Seattle-Takoma region holds the most member schools, but they remain optimistic. The city of Lynden may be culturally conservative, but it sits in a county where Vice President Kamala Harris won by a 25-point margin in the November election and reelected its longtime Democratic congressman by a nearly 30-point spread. And geographically, most of Washington is conservative.
The WIAA "does not advocate one way or another for any proposed amendment," and the executive office won’t know where each voting member stands until the April vote, WIAA’s communications director Sean Bessette said.
Since the election, transgender issues have become divisive within the Democratic Party. Some Democrats, like Rep. Seth Moulton (Mass.), have suggested reconsidering making the topic a priority, which has resulted in fierce backlash.
‘There’s a lot of energy’
The WIAA implemented its transgender-inclusive mandate in 2007, paving the way for other progressive states like California to follow suit. The association refined its first-in-the-nation policy in 2008 with the help of transgender activist Aidan Key and attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Center for Lesbian Rights. Together, they eliminated requirements that athletes must receive medical interventions like puberty blockers and hormones before they could compete with the opposite sex.
In 2017, Key suggested eliminating sex divisions in sports entirely, calling instead to separate athletes by skill level. "We’re still using gender as a shortcut to accomplishing the kind of environments that we want, which makes an assumption that women aren’t competitive or have a high enough skill level," Key told the Seattle Times.
Key and the WIAA in 2021 collaborated on a transgender sports toolkit, which urges coaches and athletic directors across the country to discuss gender identity with their teams. For the 2020-21 season, the WIAA unanimously approved the transgender inclusion policies’ current language.
For years, the policy was largely theoretical. Just three known transgender athletes competed in Washington between 2007 and 2017, according to the Seattle Times. But over the past few years, two biological males won championships in girls' sports nearly back-to-back.
In 2022, Aspen Hoffman made national news after leapfrogging from 72nd place while running in boys’ cross-country to winning a girls’ conference championship the following year.
The next year, Veronica Garcia debuted in girls’ track, consistently notching top-four placements—a vast improvement compared to the athlete’s tenure competing against boys. Before competing with girls, Garcia placed 218th in a 2022 5,000-meter cross country invitational meet for boys, for instance. At the same meet the following year, the runner placed second out of 137 girls.
Garcia went on to win the 400-meter state championship in May and was met with virtual silence during the award ceremony, the Daily Mail reported. Brar, still in her first year as a Lynden board member, felt that Garcia’s win was deeply unfair.
As a conservative Sikh, Brar saw the timing as providential. She had just become Lynden’s WIAA liaison—a post that had been generally considered inconsequential— and immediately began to network across the state with likeminded school board directors, coaches, and WIAA district directors. She estimates she spoke or emailed with about 100 school board members.
What Brar learned was that most people disagreed with the WIAA’s transgender policy but "didn’t know there was something we as school boards could do" to change it, she said. She had also discovered that if at least five school boards could agree on an amendment to overhaul that policy, they could bring it to WIAA’s voting members.
By early June, Brar had a resolution to bring to her board. On June 20, the board unanimously voted to direct Lynden superintendent David VanderYacht to propose a WIAA policy amendment "that will promote fairness in state-level competitions for sex-segregated sports."
Meanwhile, VanderYacht had held his own discussions with WIAA officials. He told his board at the June 20 meeting that he had gleaned from WIAA executive director Mick Hoffman that the sports body had been discussing potential changes to the transgender policy since 2023, although they wanted to make sure they wouldn’t run afoul of Washington state’s prohibition on discrimination against gender identity. Hoffman was not available for an interview before publication.
"What I took away from working with the executive today was: How do we work within the law and do things differently than what we’re currently doing? And how do we get to that change?" VanderYacht said during the June 20 meeting. "And there’s a lot of energy in the state toward working toward that." VanderYacht confirmed to the Free Beacon that the executive in question was Hoffman.
VanderYacht and superintendents from sympathetic school districts began meeting regularly in early September to develop a proposal for WIAA to consider early next year. Ultimately, they landed on an idea modeled on Alaska’s policy for high school sports. Backed by 13 additional school districts, the proposal would replace boys’ sports with a division open to anyone, while restricting girls’ divisions for females.
A few school districts weren’t comfortable with this option. One, Eastmont School District in Douglas County, presented a second idea, developed concurrently with Lynden’s: create a third division open to everyone. Seven districts, including Lynden, backed this amendment, giving it enough support to secure it a WIAA vote as well.
Lynden school board president Tonya Hickman, who served as the district’s WIAA liaison before Brar, said she had raised the prospect of changing the body’s transgender policy early in her term and had not gotten anywhere. She said she hopes that Lynden’s amendment will have a great chance at success in light of President-elect Donald Trump’s November victory following his promise to "keep men out of women’s sports."
Brar told the Free Beacon she hopes her efforts will empower other school boards that fear they can’t override state policies they don’t like.
"Here are people who are actually defying the odds and getting the ball rolling," she said.
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