On Friday, Chris Sununu, the Republican governor of New Hampshire, signed legislation to ban the transgender butchery of children in the state. He also signed a law barring males who claim to be female from participating in girls’ athletic competition in grades 5-12 in the Granite State.
Sununu also signed a bill that will give parents two weeks’ notice of LGBT topics being taught in school and allow parents to opt out of those lessons for their children. The governor vetoed House Bill 396, which would have allowed businesses to insist that only females use restroom facilities designated for women, because “it seeks to solve problems that have not presented themselves in New Hampshire, and in doing so invites unnecessary discord.”
Banning Sex Changes for Minors
House Bill 619 bars the grisly and barbaric practice of “genital gender reassignment surgery” — or sex changes — for minors. The law officially takes effect on January 1, 2025. The governor explained in a statement:
HB 619 ensures that life altering, irreversible surgeries will not be performed on children. This bill focuses on protecting the health and safety of New Hampshire’s children and has earned bipartisan support. There is a reason that countries across the world — from Sweden to Norway, France, and the United Kingdom — have taken steps to pause these procedures and policies. Even the Biden Administration opposes these youth surgeries, citing the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Transgender advocates from the American Civil Liberties Union and GLAD (GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders) strongly disagreed. Claiming such surgeries are “life saving,” they say the bill
will ban access to some health care for transgender minors, interfering with the ability of parents, transgender people, and doctors to make individualized health care decisions and opening the door to further restrictions on established standard-of-care medicine that is recognized by every major U.S. medical association as the only evidence-based approach to addressing the physical, mental, and emotional needs of transgender youth.
Protecting Female Sports
House Bill 1205 “requires schools to designate athletics by sex and prohibits biological males from participating in female athletics.” This law will take effect August 19 of this year, in time for the new school year. Said the governor:
HB 1205 ensures fairness and safety in women’s sports by maintaining integrity and competitive balance in athletic competitions. With this widely supported step, New Hampshire joins nearly half of all U.S. States in taking this measure.
Transgender advocates claim the bill is discriminatory and denies access to sports competition for transgender individuals. Proponents of the bill argue that those students can still compete, but only in the category of their birth.
Teaching LGBT Topics in School
Meanwhile, House Bill 1312 amends an existing law requiring parental notification when topics of human sexual reproduction arise. The update requires a two-week parental notification of subjects pertaining to “sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or gender expression.” Further, parents are allowed to remove their children from such teaching if they wish.
Sununu made no public comment on House Bill 1312, but in the lead-up to the vote New Hampshire Republican Tim Lang said: “If schools are going to teach these sensitive subjects, parents ought to have the ability to review the material and make informed decisions about their child’s education.”
Opposition to the Bills
Some teachers unions believe that the bill is a form of censorship of the classroom.
“Let’s be clear. The adoption of HB 1312 is yet another attempt to chill classroom conversations, just like the similarly vague and unworkable ‘banned concepts’ law which was recently ruled unconstitutional,” said NEA-NH president Megan Tuttle.
Democrats in the state are incensed by the legislation. According to Democratic Senate Leader Donna Soucy, “The Senate Democrats know that our transgender community members are not a threat, they are the threatened, and we will not silently stand by while they are targeted with cruel legislation.”
But according to Sununu, the actions he took were “fair, balanced, and void of political considerations.”
