Trying to change State via API

Hi all!

I'm working with an integration acct that is creating/updating Incident tickets in ServiceNOW and am struggling with the ability to update State specifically. My implementation has some customizations including renaming of some fields, so we call State = 1 "Opened" (not new), and it is the state that a ticket is in prior to being assigned to a technician.

I'm having an issue that when I try and transfer a ticket via REST to another team and set the assigned_to value to null, the State value stays "2" (i.e. in progress).

Is State meant to be an editable / overridable field via API? Even when I explicitly define state = "1" in my call, it will not override to Open.