Democratic leaders in the Washington state Legislature said Friday they have no plans to hold hearings on two conservative-backed initiatives focused on parental rights of students in public schools and banning transgender athletes from playing girls’ sports.
Both Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle, and House Speaker Laurie Jinkins, D-Tacoma, staked out this position in remarks to reporters. It creates a high likelihood that both of the initiatives will go before Washington voters on midterm ballots this November.
“I’m certain that we will not be passing either of those initiatives,” Pedersen said. “They’ll be up to the voters to decide.”
Washington House Speaker Laurie Jinkins, D-Tacoma, speaks during an event previewing the 2026 legislative session, alongside Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen, D-Tacoma, on Friday, Jan. 9, 2025, in Olympia, Wash.
Bill Lucia / Washington State Standard
The political committee Let’s Go Washington said it turned in more than 400,000 signatures for each of the two initiatives last week. Brian Heywood, the hedge fund manager who leads the group, urged lawmakers to reconsider holding hearings.
“Not only would this be a blatant slap in the face to the hundreds of thousands of Democrat, Independent, and Republican voters who support the measures, it would be a clear sign that they don’t care about the abuses to children, families, and female athletes taking place in the state,” Heywood said in a statement.
Gov. Bob Ferguson, a Democrat, said he hasn’t read the initiatives but “it’d be the first time I ever supported a Bill Heywood initiative,” making an apparent flub of Heywood’s first name.
“If what you’re hearing is the Legislature saying it should go to the voters for a vote, I tend in general, as a general matter, I don’t have a problem,” he told reporters Friday.
The vows from legislative Democrats don’t come as a surprise.
The parental rights measure would immediately undo a new state law Democrats fought to pass last year. That law rewrote a Let’s Go Washington initiative known as the parental “bill of rights” that lawmakers passed in 2024.
IL26-001 would repeal the changes made to the 2024 initiative by House Bill 1296, one of the most controversial bills passed in the 2025 legislative session. Democrats said the rewrite was necessary to clarify the earlier Heywood-backed initiative, which sought to codify rights for parents of public school students under age 18.
The goal of the 2024 initiative was to ensure parents have easy access to school materials, their child’s medical records and immediate notification if a child is involved in a crime. One of the major changes in last year’s legislation removed parental access to medical records.
IL26-638 looks to block transgender girls from competing in girls’ sports.
Even though Ferguson said he wasn’t an expert on the initiatives, he said, “We live in a world right now where trans kids are going through a lot.”
“I want to support trans kids,” he said.
Ferguson also had a brief but tense exchange with conservative commentator Brandi Kruse, who asked about his position on the initiative, given his daughter competes in school sports. The governor responded by suggesting Kruse has an “obsession with trans kids.”
Senate Minority Leader John Braun, R-Centralia, said he was surprised Democrats won’t hear the initiatives.
“I thought that was disrespectful,” he said. “We can have honest disagreements about the policy. But I raised three daughters, they were actively involved in sports. This absolutely is a legitimate conversation on fairness and safety.”
Both measures appear to have enough signatures to move forward to the Legislature, then to voters in November. But the secretary of state’s office still needs to certify the initiatives before they can be considered. That’ll likely take several weeks.
Lawmakers technically have three options with the citizen initiatives. They can approve them and make them law, though that won’t happen in this case. They can send them to the ballot for voters to decide, the presumed outcome here. Or they could pass an alternative to an initiative, leaving it up for voters to weigh in on both.
The 60-day legislative session begins Monday.
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