Voters in Washington and Colorado, both states with Democratic governors and Democratic-controlled legislatures, have passed ballot measures to ban transgender athletes from participating in female school sports. Washington's Measure 638 passed with more than 56% of the vote. Colorado's Proposition 134 passed with 52%. In the same election cycle, Arizona expanded its existing restrictions, Nebraska wrote its ban into the state constitution, and Democrats won back both chambers of Congress on a wave of discontent about bigger things. And somewhere in the middle of all that, trans girls lost the right to play.

I want to stay with that for a moment, because it is easy to let the political analysis swallow the human reality. We are talking about young people. Girls who want to run, swim, kick a ball, be part of a team, feel the ordinary joy of sport with their classmates. That is what has been voted away. Not some abstract policy position: an ordinary, decent, human experience.

When the partisan geography no longer holds

For years, the argument made by those of us watching these bans spread across Republican-led states was that they were a conservative political project, a culture-war tool designed to energise a base. And that was largely true. But Washington and Colorado have punctured that framing, and we have to be honest about it.

Doriane Lambelet Coleman, a professor at Duke Law School, made the point plainly: politicians in those states had been ignoring their constituents, and eventually that stops working. She is not wrong about the political mechanics, even if I disagree profoundly about what the right policy response should be.

What the results show is that the argument about fairness in sport has travelled across party lines in a way that most other anti-trans arguments have not. Missouri voters, for example, rejected Amendment 3, which would have banned gender-affirming care for minors and repealed abortion rights. That is a significant data point. When you bundle trans healthcare into a broader rightwing package, it fails. But when you isolate the sports question and frame it around fairness and female categories, it passes, even in blue states.

That tells me something uncomfortable. It tells me that the sustained, well-funded campaign to frame trans inclusion as a threat to women's sport has been effective. Not honest, but effective.

What the bans actually do

Washington's measure prevents students assigned male at birth from participating in sports designated for female athletes, and requires athletes wanting to play in female sports to produce a statement from a healthcare provider verifying their gender. Think about that for a teenage girl. She wants to join the netball team. She has to produce documentation. She has to involve a clinician. She has to justify her existence to a school administrator before she can do something her classmates do without a second thought.

Colorado's measure requires educational institutions and athletic associations to categorise sports as male, female, or coed, and limits athletes to competing in the category they were assigned at birth. Arizona's Proposition 318 goes further still: it prohibits transgender girls from female sports across all schools and associations, restricts bathroom access, requires that an athlete's sex reflect their birth certificate, and allows athletes to sue schools that violate the law.

Sue someone, for letting a girl play sport.

Nebraska has gone further than any of them, writing the ban into the state constitution, which makes it considerably harder to challenge or repeal.

The fig leaf has fallen

GLAAD's president and chief executive Sarah Kate Ellis said that fearmongering about transgender people is a losing strategy, and pointed to these midterms as a moment that should mark the end of that approach. I hope she is right. The Democrats did win the House and Senate, and the dominant issues were economic and foreign policy, not trans rights. So there is genuine evidence that trans people are not the electoral liability that some have claimed.

But the sports bans passed anyway. And they passed in states where the Democratic establishment had chosen not to legislate on this, hoping the question would not be forced. Supporters of the bans went around them, put the measures on the ballot directly, and won.

The lesson I draw from that is not that trans inclusion is unpopular. It is that when the question is narrowed to sport, framed around fairness, and stripped of everything else a trans young person is, the political conditions are hard. The opposition has had years to build that frame. We have been slower to build ours.

Who is carrying this

A county-level ban in Nassau County, New York, was struck down by an appeals court on the same day these results came in. So the courts are still a live avenue. Trump's executive order on what he called "Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports" gave federal agencies latitude to enforce Title IX in line with an interpretation that treats sex as birth-assigned, but courts have been willing to push back on specific implementations of that agenda.

None of that is much comfort to a trans girl in Washington or Colorado who wanted to try out for the team next semester.

What I know, from years of listening to trans young people and their families, is that sport is rarely just sport. It is belonging. It is friendship. It is the moment after school when you are not defined by the thing that makes you different, because everyone is just trying to get the ball in the net. Removing that is not a neutral administrative act. It is a message, delivered by ballot, to a child: you are not fully one of us.

The people who voted for these measures are not all motivated by hatred. I do not think that is true, and I do not think saying so would help anyone. But the effect on trans girls is the same regardless of motivation. And the people in Washington and Colorado who voted for inclusion, who turned out and lost, deserve to know that what they were fighting for was worth fighting for.

The battle over trans inclusion in sport is not over. Courts will keep ruling, evidence will keep accumulating, and trans athletes will keep being human beings who want to run and jump and belong. That does not change because of a ballot measure, however wide its margin.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Specialist, Medical Educator, and advocate for trans rights and gender diversity.