New Hampshire Legislature Passes Bill Reversing Its Historic Trans Rights Protections
New Hampshire made history in 2018 for passing legislation to protect trans people despite Republican control of the house, senate and governorship. Now, the state is backpedaling.
On the morning of June 10, Republican Governor Kelly Ayotte signed a forced outing bill into New Hampshire law—a dangerous anti-trans policy that the GOP has been trying to curry through the state legislature for years. It marks the turning of the tides of progress for a state that once led the way for bipartisan support of transgender rights.
The bill, HB 10, puts trans kids in dire straits—giving schools the green light to out trans kids to their parents. It is cloaked in the language of “parental rights,” but human rights organizations have dismissed this framing as a red herring.
“Of course parents should have rights, and they have many already existing in law,” Linds Jakows said, founder of the state’s LGBT advocacy organization 603 Equality, in an interview with Erin in the Morning. “But that doesn’t mean that teachers should be forced to ‘out’ a gay or trans student to an abusive family.”
The signing of HB 10 comes after multiple anti-trans bills advanced through the state legislature over the last few weeks. House Bills 377 and 712 would prohibit trans youth—and only trans youth—from accessing puberty blockers and what it calls “gender surgery.” This can include anything from surgeries to modify genitalia to a nose job. In either scenario, however, the bills carve out extensive protections providing this kind of care for people who identify with their sex assigned at birth, or people who are deemed by doctors to be intersex. People who are intersex often undergo a litany of irreversible, unnecessary, and sterilizing procedures as children.
“If Governor Ayotte sincerely believes that parents should have rights to direct medical care, she will veto HB 377 and HB 712, which allows politicians to ban decisions doctors, patients, and families have made when it comes to medical care for a gender transition,” Jakows said.
Another bill awaiting Ayotte’s signature is HB 148. The policy would gut many of the protections that trans New Hampshirites had fought for, and won, in 2018. It marked the first time in history that a state with Republican control of the house, senate and governorship amended its anti-discrimination statutes to include trans people. Now, New Hampshire is reversing course.
“The legislature’s relentless wave of attacks on the rights of LGBTQ+ Granite Staters—particularly transgender residents and their families—is unprecedented and unwarranted government overreach,” said Chris Erchull, Senior Staff Attorney of the LGBT rights group GLAD Law, in a recent press release. “These officials elected to serve the people of New Hampshire are sledgehammering the State’s constitutional promises of liberty, independence, and the right to live free from governmental intrusion.”
Constituents flooded avenues for public input, denouncing these anti-trans bills—for the healthcare restrictions alone, thousands of people took to the state website to voice opposition, while only a few hundred registered in support.
But the state’s party leadership has gone to great lengths to snuff out Republicans who might be willing to recognize trans rights or otherwise compromise with Democrats, by ousting them through competitive primary races. As a result, New Hampshire has seen a hard right turn—even from some Democrats, over a dozen of whom strayed from their own party line to vote in favor of legislation that dismantled trans rights last year.
Jakows knows the fallout of this intimately. They were an instrumental figure in the passage of the 2018 trans protections under Republican Governor Chris Sununu.
“I think at that time, learning about what it meant to be transgender was new to a lot of people, including elected officials, and because of that, there was more good faith and open-mindedness,” Jakows said. “But, since then, we've of course seen a large and well-funded national movement to sow misinformation about us [trans people] and that has gained more steam.”
In April, Jamie Reed—a Missouri anti-trans activist—came to New Hampshire and testified using bogus data about the prevalence of gender-affirming chest surgeries at Dartmouth Health, which is based in the state. A spokesperson for the health system, comprised of hospitals and health clinics across New England, clarified the actual number of these procedures performed in the timeframe at hand was zero. Reed’s data, obtained via Do No Harm (a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group), was “falsified,” the spokesperson said.
Trans New Hampshire residents, their providers, and allies are rallying to put pressure on Governor Ayotte to block the remaining bills. They told Erin in the Morning that they are calling her office daily to voice their opposition, and the bills could become law any day now. However, Ayotte could choose to veto at least some of them, as Sununu did.
Jakows encourages constituents to call as much as they can to express their dissent and move Ayotte to block the bills. It may be an unlikely turn of events, activists admit, but so were the trans rights victories of 2018. At the very least, they’re not going down without a fight.
“People who are pushing the legislation brought in a lot of out-of-state people who are traveling around, trying to push this,” said Rosie Emerich, a New Hampshire parent of a trans child. Under these laws, her nine-year-old could face violence in public restrooms, discrimination at school, and be stripped of life-saving medical care.
Alongside similarly-situated parents, she is demanding that Ayotte meet with the families of trans youth. She has called the Governor’s office daily, and when that failed to get her on Ayotte’s schedule, parents showed up to a state breakfast to ask her in person. Finally, this week, they received a callback.
 | A guest post by
|
Oh New Hampshire. The Texas of New England.
New Hampshire is such a stain on New England.