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ERIN SELLERS: On the morning after inauguration, I dragged myself out of bed and down to New Love Coffee in Kendall Yards, where a group of teens were preparing to head down to Olympia, Washington.
Every year, the state legislature convenes in Olympia, for a 1 to 2 month legislative session. It’s a flurry of activity as bills get drafted, debated, moved through committees, killed or passed. Five local teenagers, all of them current or past attendees of The Community School here in Spokane, were ready to jump into the fray, meeting with state legislators to advocate for a slate of bills currently moving through the process.
NICOLAI “SADGE” JAGGAR: My name is Nikolai Jaggar, aka Sadge, I am 18 years old, I use he/him [pronouns], and I forgot what else you asked me to say.
SELLERS: Are you still in high school?
JAGGAR: I am not still in high school, I graduated: whoop, whoop!
SELLERS: During the legislative session, there are scheduled “Lobby Days,” where organizations will plan a slate of meetings with legislators for a single day, advocating for potential policies that align with their organization’s mission, or against bills that might go against their goals.
The teens I met the morning of January 21 were getting caffeinated and ready to make the long drive to the other side of the state to participate in Pro-Choice Washington’s annual Lobby Day, held on Wednesday, January 22. They were being driven down to Olympia by Sarah Dixit, the organizing director for Pro-Choice Washington.
SELLERS: How are you feeling?
DIXIT: Feeling good, feeling a little frazzled, but mostly just because we gotta Tetris all these bags in this car because we don’t have a passenger van, but uh, this will do great!
SELLERS: What are your hopes for this lobby day in this group of teens?
DIXIT: Honestly, just really trying to give hope and perspective from the inauguration on Monday, and really just showing up for these teens, which I think predominantly are trans kids, you know? And in his inaugural address [President Donald Trump] said there’s two genders, right? So it’s a direct attack on who these kids are.
SELLERS: Talking to politicians can be an incredibly intimidating thing — take it from someone with too much experience bumbling through phone calls with state legislators — but the teens I talked to weren’t nervous. Instead, most of them were looking forward to the opportunity to share their stories, their experiences and their thoughts with the people who occupy the halls of power.
JAGGAR: So this is my third time lobbying. I’m really excited. I believe that we’re speaking to some people that we haven’t spoken to before. And I’m really excited to hear some different perspectives on the bills that we’re bringing forth. I’m really excited because we’re talking about keeping clinics open that offer gender-affirming care, and I’m somebody who’s going through hormone therapy, so I really want to keep that open.
SELLERS: Jaggar wasn’t the only transgender student attending Lobby Day. All of the students I talked to fell somewhere under the transgender umbrella. All of them described to me how their identities informed the policies they felt passionately about, like Albert Johnson, a senior at The Community School, who planned to ask lawmakers to pass three Senate bills that would make amendments to a bill that passed last year called the Parent’s Bill of Rights that included language that could be interpreted as requiring educators to out transgender students to their parents.
JOHNSON: I’m excited to advocate for the law that would require parents to be alerted when their kids come out as trans to like, facilitators or teachers, and they’d be alerted if they changed pronouns or names. I think I’m very interested in that, just because as a trans student, my teachers knew before my parents knew, and I think that that was really beneficial to me to have that time to kind of explore before my parents knew about it. So I think that that would just impact a lot of trans people.
SELLERS: These students are also looking to the future, not just for themselves but for their family members. Elliot, a student who asked to be referred to by first name only, told me:
ELLIOT: A lot of what we’re going to be talking about with reproductive health care and access to gender-affirming care hits really strong for me because I am trans and [assigned female at birth] and with that, I just feel very directly impacted by some of the things going on in the world, and I’m very scared for myself, my friends. My sister had a baby, and I just look at them like I don’t want my little niece growing up in such a scary world and having such few choices.
SELLERS: One of the other bills Elliot prepped to talk about is Senate Bill 5093, sponsored by Sen. Mankra Dingra, which would ensure every Washingtonian who experiences a pregnancy loss — whether that’s miscarriage, stillbirth, or neonatal death — can make their own decisions about how they will handle that loss without having to be worried about criminalization. Currently, it is a crime to “conceal a birth,” in Washington, which means medical examiners and county coroners can investigate people who lose a pregnancy as if they are criminals if those people don’t report correctly.
ELLIOT: I think it’s really sad to think that somebody could experience such a loss in such a capacity and still not be able to get what they need for their body to be healthy. And that there are people out there who worry about going to jail to help somebody who’s in such a vulnerable place. Ugh, I’m getting kind of sad and emotional talking about it. It just makes me really sad. And I mentioned I have a niece. My sister was pregnant recently and just like thinking about all of the possibilities that could have gone there, and people being afraid to help her because of what could have happened, that scares me so bad. And like I said, I’m big on fairness. I don’t think it’s fair to put somebody in that position. I don’t think that that’s fair.
SELLERS: The students prepped for Lobby Day by writing and rehearsing talking points, figuring out which personal stories they wanted to share, and deciding who would be talking about which bills, Dixit told RANGE.
Twenty four hours after they squished into Dixit’s rented sedan like a can of sardines, they found themselves at the state capital, racing through their packed Lobby Day schedule. Laura Isaza, one of the Murrow fellows covering state legislature, met the students in Olympia and followed them as they raced from meeting to meeting, and attended a rally on the capital steps. Isaza caught this passionate moment during the speech Sami Alloy, executive director of Pro Choice Washington, gave to the students and other Lobby Day attendees.
ALLOY: I want to say that I am with you in your sadness, your grief, your rage, your anxiety about the Trump administration coming into power again. Thank you for your time. Monday was a difficult day for all of us. We are seeing the limits of presidential power and the test to our democracy like something that, you know, we’ve never seen before, that I certainly have not seen in my 20 year career of organizing around these issues, and it’s scary, right? It’s scary, and it’s demoralizing, but we’re not going back. And we are here today to affirm that we have the fundamental rights to access abortion care and gender-affirming care in Washington state, and we are not going to let them take that away from us.
After the rally, students steeled their nerves to go talk to legislators who represent the Eastern Washington districts. Some of those legislators are Democrats and likely to be receptive to the students’ stories, but other lawmakers on the schedule were conservatives, and those meetings could end up being a lot more tense. For Jaggar, a three-time Lobby Day veteran, those reactions can shape the experience of lobbying.
JAGGAR: The way that people respond to you and your very deeply personal stories, it can shock you. It can be very warming and welcoming or a little disappointing.
SELLERS: Isaza also got to play fly on the wall, and listen to the students’ lobbying session with Senate Majority leader Marcus Riccelli, who represents Spokane and the rest of Legislative District 3.
ONE OF THE STUDENTS: So we’re here to talk to you about the, um, Dignity in Pregnancy Loss Bill, which is Senate Bill 5093, the Parents Bill of Rights, which is Initiative 2081 and Medicaid Funding for Clinics, which is 1296.
SELLERS: After all their practice, the students were ready to share their thoughts about the bills.
ONE OF THE STUDENTS: With the Dignity in Pregnancy Loss Bill, why we think that you should care is because It’s such a natural experience and such an awful thing to be criminalized for. One in five women will experience pregnancy loss. 200 folks have already been prosecuted for the outcome of their pregnancy, which is, again, just awful.
SELLERS: Howl Hall, who lobbied Riccelli last year, spoke about bills that could protect the privacy of transgender students in schools.
HALL: I also want to talk about Initiative 2081. It was passed last year in the legislature, and it has a lot of very vague language about what parents have the right to with their students and children in school.
And a lot of this is just restating [rights] that parents already had, but it adds the vague language of “any mental health issue,” or “any health services that are offered within the school needs to be disclosed to a parent, or is able to be disclosed to a parent,” so this can end in forced outings of students if they go to their teacher or their school counselor saying, “Hey, I think I might be trans,” or “I think I might be literally anything,” or “I’m having a lot of anxiety around this.”
That would be information that a parent could then request and the school would then be required to disclose that information to their parent, which violates a lot of privacy laws so there are three Senate bills that are going in to kind of change this language and make it more specific: Senate Bill 5179, 5180, and 5181.
If I need to repeat those numbers for you, I can, but these three bills together, they are all just going in and making sure that students are safe to express to their educators anything, really, without the worry of if their parents may not be supportive, or may not be their main support system, and their main support system is someone within the schools, that students can really feel comfortable with that.
RICCELLI: Thanks for sharing. I would say, look, we’re in a time with unprecedented mental health crises, particularly amongst our youth. Unfortunately, death by suicide is in record numbers. I think we need to be making sure that there’s just broad access for people to get the kind of counseling and support service they need, and I particularly think schools now, it’s more important for them to be a place where people can feel safe to seek and potentially get on a path of treatment.
SELLERS: Riccelli spoke with the teens for about 15 minutes, asking them questions and giving them indications about where he stood on the bills they were bringing to him. Generally, he was an easy audience; he was actually a co-sponsor on a few of the pieces of legislation the teens highlighted. At the end of the meeting, he asked them to stay involved in advocacy.
RICCELLI: I appreciate the advocacy and the effort to come over here. Obviously there’s things going at the national level. Just rest assured, I’m committed — and I believe a lot of my colleagues are committed — to defending fundamental rights for folks in Washington. We will continue to work to make sure that Washington is a welcoming and safe place, and I appreciate the advocacy and the effort …. And just remember democracy is a participatory sport and, you know, it’s multiple actions throughout the process, particularly in tough budget years, so I hope you’ll remain active and engaged as we move forward.
SELLERS: While students said that Lobby Day was an incredible opportunity for them to practice skills like oration, developing arguments, and speaking up for themselves, it has also empowered them to be civically engaged and active in their future as well. Johnson told RANGE:
JOHNSON: I think that being politically involved has definitely given me a way to channel some of my anger at the political system, and it’s given me opportunities to actually feel like I’m changing things rather than just sitting around being worried and scared about stuff.
SELLERS: And for Elliot, continuing to do this kind of action feels like an inevitability.
ELLIOT: I can’t be a person who just sits and watches other people do all the work and complains about what’s going on in the world. I know I’m not going to change the whole world by myself, but I want to do as much as I possibly can to start getting everything going.
SELLERS: For Jaggar, no matter what happens in those lawmakers offices, he’s grateful for the opportunity just to share his story.
JAGGAR: Lobbying is a really unique opportunity, especially for young people who day to day don’t feel like their community acknowledges them or knows they’re there. And I’m grateful that I’m somebody who’s chosen to tell my story, because everybody’s story deserves to be heard.
SELLERS: According to reporting from Oregon Public Broadcasting, youth voter participation decreased 8.5% points from 2020 to 2024, a pretty drastic drop-off. Only 64% of registered voters aged 18 to 24 cast their ballots in the 2024 election. But the teens we interviewed are bucking that trend through increased civic participation and advocacy.
Jaggar, a recent graduate, works for the local advocacy organization Peace, Justice and Action League Spokane. Hall spent time interning with Washington BUS, a “statewide movement building organization that increases political access and participation for young people across Washington State.” All of the students we talked to said they were ready to keep fighting, and keep advocating for positive change, like Johnson, who said:
JOHNSON: We want basic good living conditions. We want to be able to buy houses. We want food. We want water. We want to just be able to be ourselves. And I feel like a lot of people think that we want a lot more than we do. And I also feel like there’s a lot of older people that won’t even listen to us because they think that what we say doesn’t have any value, because they think that our living experiences are so short and small.
And I think that if older people listen to younger people, and if younger people listen to older people, we could solve a lot of problems because we all have different living experiences.
Katherine Fromherz, the fifth student on the trip, hopes that by doing this kind of advocacy work, they’ll inspire other youth, and help older Washingtonians see them as serious contributors to making a better world, not as kids who didn’t vote.
FROMHERZ: We’re gonna be them someday. We’re gonna have to live with the choices that everybody made for us someday.
And, I don’t know, we’re just like all people, even if we’re all different ages, I think a lot of the time when people see me and I’m more involved in activism, I think people see that, or think that I maybe don’t have enough life experience to be involved in that kind of stuff, and I don’t necessarily understand like the issues just because I’m young.
But, there’s a lot of things that we can start doing at this age in order to try and see a difference in the future for ourselves and for our kids.
SELLERS: If you’re looking for a bit of hope in what otherwise might be a dark day, you don’t have to look any further than this group of teens.
Murrow Fellow Laura Isaza contributed reporting to this story.
