LGBTQ advocates prep for a difficult campaign against ‘Protect Girls Sports in Arizona Act’

Arizona law already forbids trans girls from joining school sports teams that align with their gender identity, but Republican lawmakers want voters to ban them from school locker rooms and private sports leagues, too. 

In November, voters will decide the fate of the “Protect Girls Sports in Arizona Act”, also known as Proposition 318. The wide-ranging proposal lets disgruntled athletes sue their school or athletic association if a trans girl joins a team consistent with her gender identity or for letting someone use a locker room, bathroom or shower room that is “integral to athletic engagement” if it’s designated for the opposite biological sex. 

And while Arizona law already requires public and private schools to separate sports teams by biological sex, the new law would go further, forcing even privately funded sports organizations that operate outside of schools to exclude trans girls. The initiative defines an athletic association as broadly as any league, corporation, association or organization whose primary purpose is to sponsor or set up athletic competitions. 

Darrell Hill, the policy director for the Arizona chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, criticized the ballot initiative as discriminatory, saying it unfairly singles out trans girls and violates the First Amendment because it restricts private organizations. He added that it likely prevents parents from creating intentionally inclusive teams, making it impossible for trans girls to participate in any organized competitive sports in a way that reflects who they are.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s bowling, badminton, or chess, if the league designates a team for girls, then trans girls can’t participate on that team,” Hill said. 

State law and the new proposal both require athletic teams to be designated as one of three categories based on the members’ biological sex: male, female or mixed. Acceptance onto a team hinges on the participant’s sex as recorded on their birth certificate and female teams are prohibited from being opened up to athletes whose biological sex is male. The same isn’t true for male teams, however, leaving schools and athletic associations free to accept trans boys if they choose. But trans girls seeking to get involved in competitive sports would have to join either co-ed or male teams. 

The ballot measure also restricts who can use what public facilities. It expressly forbids schools and athletic organizations from knowingly allowing a person to use a locker room, shower room, bathroom or other “private space” intended for a person of the opposite biological sex if it is “integral to athletic engagement.” That likely loops in locker rooms and other public facilities used by sports teams during practice sessions and even competitive events open to the public. 

And the vague wording may also be used to bar trans and nonbinary students from using any bathrooms in the school aligned with their gender identity, not just those used by a school sports team or during sporting events. In a July ruling rejecting a lawsuit that sought to keep the proposal off the ballot, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Greg Como acknowledged that possibility. 

“The latter provision arguably applies to all restrooms in a school, not just those that are used for sports, such as locker rooms,” Como wrote. 

Hill noted that the requirement for schools to clamp down on who uses which bathrooms doesn’t just apply to students, but also to family members and spectators who visit the school to watch a sports game. And that opens the door to intrusive questions because the ballot initiative doesn’t include any criteria for how schools should go about ensuring people use school facilities that match their biological sex.

“It forces schools into an uncomfortable position of becoming bathroom police in a manner in which they are ill equipped and the law gives no direction on how to do so,” Hill said. 

But letting people make their own choices isn’t an option; the provision that empowers athletes to sue schools and athletic organizations if they believe they’ve suffered “direct or indirect harm” also applies to the mandates around the use of school facilities. 

Unlike a ballot measure in Washington that requires girls to undergo genetic tests or physical inspections from a doctor before joining a girls school athletic team, the Arizona ballot measure doesn’t expressly include invasive criteria. But critics fear the lack of clarity on how schools should handle bathroom and locker room use could potentially lead to similar outcomes. Hill said that the confusion over how to stay on the right side of the law would force school officials to come up with their own procedures, and enforcement could vary across the state. 

LGBTQ advocacy organizations are gearing up to campaign against the proposal, hoping to educate voters on how it hurts trans girls and their cisgender peers. Bridget Sharpe, the director of the Arizona branch of the Human Rights Campaign, warned that targeting trans girls opens the door to enforcing a narrow view of femininity and will invariably lead to cisgender girls who don’t fit that view being questioned and humiliated. 

“When rules are built around who is ‘woman enough’, it doesn’t protect women, it only puts them under scrutiny,” she said. 

“There’s been a lot of that sort of fear mongering that there may be some kind of threat to our kids but really the threat is from the folks who want to bully and divide our children and to impose their version of what a girl is supposed to be,” added Joel Edman, the strategic initiatives director for Progress Arizona, which is also planning to advocate against the initiative ahead of the November election. 

While Republicans have defended the proposal and others like it in the past as a safeguard for women, advancing evidence-free claims that allowing transgender people into women’s spaces increases the risk of assault, Sharpe argued that authentic concern over women’s sports would address longstanding issues, like the funding disparity between men and women’s athletic programs. 

“Folks who are pushing these funding policies raise absolutely no flags about the huge funding gaps between men’s and women’s sports teams. They make absolutely no effort to address the increased risk of sexual violence women and girl athletes face,” Sharpe said. “They completely ignore the lack of options female athletes have to participate in the full variety of sports programs that male athletes have access to.”  

Studies have consistently shown that there is no link between trans-inclusive policies and the harassment of cisgender women. By contrast, policies that bar transgender people from using facilities consistent with their gender identity does increase the risk of them suffering violence or sexual assault. 

Sharpe criticized the ballot measure as nothing more than a flashy political stunt to draw voters away from issues Republicans are underwater on. She pointed out that the state’s transgender population is small, and athletic participation among trans girls is rare, undermining Republican calls to legislate transgender people out of public facilities and off of sports teams. 

“Its a way for Republicans to distract voters from the real issues: affordability of housing in Arizona, gas prices — a whole slew of issues that actually need to be addressed,” Sharpe said.  

A 2022 population study by the Williams Institute found that just 3% of Arizona youth between the ages of 13 and 17 identified as transgender. And the same year that Republicans passed Arizona’s trans athletic ban, officials with the Arizona Interscholastic Association told lawmakers in public hearings that only 16 transgender students were allowed to join sports teams consistent with their gender identity between 2017 and 2022. About half of them were transgender girls. The AIA oversees 170,000 student athletes across the state.

Sam Parkes, the president of PFLAG Phoenix, a parent and LGBTQ support group which is also looking ahead to voter outreach efforts, added that Arizonans need to be made aware of the detrimental impacts the ballot measure could have on transgender kids in the state. 

A 2025 national survey from The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ suicide prevention advocacy group, found that 90% of LGBTQ youth reported higher rates of anxiety and depression as a direct result of discriminatory laws, policies and political debates. But being a part of an accepting community drastically reduces the rate of suicidality among LGBTQ youth, who are at a higher risk of attempting suicide compared to their peers. The survey estimated that LGBTQ young people who lived in supportive communities attempted suicide at less than a third of the rate that LGBTQ youth in unaccepting communities did. 

“The more we marginalize these people and do not allow them to live up to their own experience and their own body, we are jeopardizing their mental health and their social well-being,” Parkes warned. “We are hurting kids and families.”

Progressive groups likely face an uphill climb in convincing voters to reject the ballot measure, however. A 2023 joint poll conducted in partnership between Arizona State University, Stanford University and the University of Houston found that the majority of voters in the Grand Canyon State oppose trans inclusive policies. About 54% of Arizonans at the time said they were against trans people using bathrooms that best aligned with their gender identity and 63% disagreed with transgender participation in women’s sports. 

But LGBTQ advocates say they remain undeterred by that potential pitfall, saying it’s too soon to say where voters might fall on the issue. Parkes pointed out that Arizona is increasingly purple and Edman said voters have bucked Republican priorities in the past. 

“The government doesn’t belong in certain places, whether that’s in our decisions over reproductive health care or over where we want to send our kid to school,” Edman said. “It certainly doesn’t belong in telling our kids what teams they can and can’t play on. These are things that should be left to schools, school districts, sports associations that have been figuring this out for decades.”