Maine's Secretary of State, Shenna Bellows, has announced the final wording of a referendum question that would ban transgender athletes from competing in sports that align with their gender identity, and strip trans children of access to bathrooms and other facilities that match who they are. The question failed to qualify for the November ballot this week, after Bellows ruled it did not gather enough valid signatures, but her office released the final wording anyway, because the group behind it is seeking judicial review and the question could still appear if that appeal succeeds.

The wording, if it reaches voters, would ask: "Do you want to change civil rights and education laws to require public schools to restrict access to bathrooms, other private spaces, and sports, based on the sex on every child's original birth certificate, and allow students to sue the schools?"

Read that again. Based on the sex on every child's original birth certificate. Not on who the child is. Not on how they live. Not on what their school knows about them, or what their family knows, or what the child themselves has been telling everyone for years. A document issued at birth, before the child could speak, would become the legal ceiling of their school life.

What this actually means for real children

Behind this question are children who train, compete, change, and use the loo like every other kid in their school. Trans girls who have been part of their swim team for two years. Trans boys who just want to get changed after PE without it becoming a political event. Children who are not symbols or test cases. They are just children, and right now they are waiting to find out whether their neighbours will vote on whether they belong.

That is the part I cannot get past. A referendum is a mechanism for collective decision-making about shared public questions: tax rates, infrastructure, constitutional change. It is not a mechanism for deciding whether a specific group of children gets to use a toilet. When we hold a vote on the rights of a minority group, we are already treating those rights as negotiable. The vote itself is the harm, whatever the outcome.

The birth certificate framing is doing a lot of work here, and it is worth naming precisely what it does. A birth certificate records what a midwife or doctor observed and wrote down in the first moments of a child's life. It does not record gender identity. It never did. Using it as a fixed biological fact, decades later, to govern where a teenager can get changed, is not science. It is a policy choice dressed up as one.

The signatures story matters

Bellows ruled the measure did not qualify because it lacked enough valid signatures. That is not a minor procedural footnote. It means that even getting this question onto the ballot required misrepresentation or error at a significant scale. The group behind it disagreed with that finding and is pursuing judicial review, which is why the final wording has been published now. But the fact that a measure targeting trans children's access to school life struggled to meet the basic democratic threshold for a ballot appearance is something worth knowing.

What I hope

I hope the appeal fails and this question never reaches Maine voters. Not because I think Maine people are hostile to trans children, but because this question should not be put to them at all. Trans children's right to use a bathroom is not a question that belongs on a ballot paper, any more than any other child's right to be treated with basic dignity does.

If it does reach the ballot, I hope the people of Maine read that wording carefully, notice that it targets children specifically, notice that it would hand those children's classmates the right to sue their school, and vote no. Loudly.

And to the trans kids in Maine who have been watching this: you are not a referendum question. You are a person. That has never been up for debate, whatever a ballot paper says.