We Contain Multitudes

I had a seminary professor who often quoted Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself, “I contain multitudes.” We are more than meets the eye. We are more than we even we know about ourselves sometimes. But it also means we can contain a multitude of emotions, experiences, and feelings. We are complex beings after all.

I can be ecstatic for the blue tsunami that swept across the country (Texas?! Kansas?! Ohio?!) and I can be hurt and confused over the results of WA Initiative 638. Effectively banning trans girls from participating in public school sports, 638 would require “biological gender confirmation” and genital inspections for any girl wanting to participate in a school sport.

Washington has always been more conservative than we give it credit for and certainly more than we appear from the outside. While the rest of the country has been fighting for a blue wave, Washington has been assumed to be an easy win, a forgone conclusion. I know several local political activists who spent time in red states canvassing in hopes of giving the democratic candidate there a boost. I can celebrate that many of those places indeed turned blue last night. But, in the shadow of the country’s blue wave it’s easy forget that Washington isn’t the liberal bastion we think it is.

Washington politics has long been dominated by the more progressive urban areas, primarily Seattle, but just outside those population centers the demographics shift dramatically. Thurston county for example, where I live in the state capitol Olympia, is also home to one of the largest networks of Nazi White Nationalist.

Looking at the map of Initiate 638 election results, you can see the beacons of blue amid the seas of not-blue, (or beige and teal in this case). Even as we maintained the Millionaire Tax, about 25,000 of those who voted for income equality voted against trans kids. Some of the same kids who moved to Washington to escape deep-red states are now impacted by this millionaire-backed, anti-trans initiative.

As of 3 pm on Wednesday, with 60% of the ballots counted, we’re still waiting for the official results, but either way this ballot measure is too close. At least 1,119,192 of our neighbors and fellow Washingtonians do not believe that trans girls are girls.

We contain multitudes and we have work to do.