New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu on Friday signed a package of bills that restrict the rights of transgender youth, including banning transgender girls in grades 5-12 from participating on girls’ sports teams and prohibiting medical professionals from performing gender reassignment surgery on minors.
The decision, which LGBTQ+ advocates condemned Friday and said was an attack on the transgender community, was welcomed by Sununu’s fellow Republicans who have made sex and gender reassignment surgery in high school sports a major political battleground.
Governor Sununu also signed a bill allowing parents to opt their children out of public school classes that have LGBTQ themes and requiring teachers to notify parents at least two weeks before teaching such material.
But he vetoed a fourth bill, House Bill 396, which would have allowed businesses and government agencies to discriminate on the basis of biological sex in restrooms, locker rooms, sporting events, prisons, psychiatric hospitals and treatment facilities. The bill would have directly repealed parts of the Gender Identity Nondiscrimination Act that Sununu signed into law in 2018.
“The problem with HB 396 is that it seeks to solve a problem that does not exist in New Hampshire, and in doing so, creates unnecessary divisiveness,” Sununu said in a statement.
The governor announced the decision late Friday afternoon.
Democrats and LGBTQ+ advocates quickly condemned the decision, saying the law “amounts legal discrimination against transgender young people.”
“Governor Sununu cannot say our state rejects discrimination and then go to great lengths to block transgender girls from connecting with other girls in sports, censor curriculum that challenges stigma against LGBTQ lives, and deny doctors, parents and patients the opportunity to receive the best medical care they deem appropriate,” Lyns Jakobs, founder of the advocacy group 603 Equality, said in a statement.
Conservatives are ecstatic. “These bills are practical and reasonable, and I applaud the Governor for signing them into law,” Rep. Joe Sweeney, a Republican from Salem, said in a statement.
Women’s Sports
The first bill, House Bill 1205, would require all sports teams in grades 5 through 12 to be designated as “boys, men, or boys,” “girls, women, or girls,” or “mixed gender.” The new law would prohibit “male” students from participating on girls’ teams. Students would also be required to verify their gender by presenting a birth certificate verifying the student’s biological sex “at or near the time of the student’s birth.”
The new law states that children whose birth certificates do not indicate their sex at birth, or whose birth certificates are different from the original, “must present other evidence” to prove their sex at birth, with the costs of providing that evidence to be borne by the parents.
The law, which goes into effect Aug. 19, allows any other students who claim they have been disadvantaged by their school’s failure to comply with the new requirements to sue for injunctions and damages.
The law also bars the New Hampshire High School Athletic Association and other athletic associations from taking action against schools for excluding transgender girls from girls’ sports. The associations are also prohibited from “entertaining” complaints from transgender students who claim their rights have been violated.
Opponents of the bill argued that it would prevent transgender girls from participating in sports and athletics, many of whom would not feel comfortable playing on boys’ sports teams, and urged Governor Sununu to veto the bill.
But Sununu and others argued that some transgender girls have a physical advantage over girls born biologically female and that the ban protects fairness in sports.
“HB 1205 will ensure fairness and safety in women’s sports by maintaining a balance between athletic integrity and competition,” Sununu said.
Gender reassignment surgery
The second bill signed by Governor Sununu, House Bill 619, prohibits doctors from performing “genital sex reassignment procedures” on children under the age of 18. This includes vaginoplasty, the surgical creation of a vagina from another part of the body, phalloplasty, the surgical creation of a penis, and phalloplasty, which turns the clitoris into a penis.
The law would classify such procedures as “unprofessional conduct,” subject doctors to disciplinary action by medical licensing boards, and allow minors or their parents to sue doctors who perform such procedures within two years of the procedure.
Doctors would still be allowed to perform circumcisions on minors, surgery to remove malignant, deformed or damaged genitalia, and reconstructive surgery to address physical injuries, illnesses or developmental problems.
The law will come into effect on January 1, 2025.
“HB 619 will ensure that children are not subjected to life-altering, irreversible surgeries,” Sununu said in a statement. “This bill is focused on protecting the health and safety of New Hampshire’s children and has bipartisan support.”
LGBTQ+ rights advocates strongly opposed the move.
The bill “would deny transgender minors access to some health care, impede the ability of parents, transgender people and physicians to make individualized health care decisions, and open the door to further restrictions on established standard-of-care medical care that is recognized by every major medical association in the United States as the only evidence-based approach to addressing the physical, mental and emotional needs of transgender youth,” according to a joint statement from the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire and GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders (GLAD).
LGBTQ Ban in the Classroom
Meanwhile, House Bill 1312 expands existing laws requiring teachers to notify parents in advance about sex education curriculum and materials to apply to all instruction about “sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, or gender expression.” Parents would have the option to opt their children out of that instruction if they find alternative instruction that the school district agrees to.
The new law doesn’t define what constitutes a lesson. In an interview in May, Sen. Tim Lang, a Sanbornton Republican who supports the bill, said teachers don’t have to notify parents if they plan to teach a lesson about LGBTQ+ civil rights history, such as the Stonewall riots. Instead, he argued, notice would only be required if the lesson directly relates to concepts of gender identity or sexual orientation. But the law’s text doesn’t make that distinction.
“This is just information for parents,” Lang said at the time. “There’s nothing to stop schools from doing these classes. They’re allowed to do them. It just says that because it’s a sensitive topic, parents need to be notified if they’re going to do a class.”
After Governor Sununu signed the bill, the National Education Association, New Hampshire’s largest teachers union, said the bill would create difficult challenges for teachers and could lead to litigation. In May, a federal district court in New Hampshire struck down a previous law that restricted what teachers could teach in the classroom.
“Let’s be clear: the adoption of HB 1312 is another attempt to stifle classroom conversation, similar to the similarly vague and unenforceable ‘prohibited concepts’ laws that were recently found unconstitutional,” NEA-NH President Megan Tuttle said in a statement.
Passionate Advocacy
Calls and emails from LGBTQ advocates flooded in as soon as the bill reached Gov. Sununu’s desk on Monday. He has five days to sign, veto or pass the bill without his signature. Progressive advocates said they’ve called his office so frequently that his voicemail box is full.
Conservative groups have also attempted a pressure campaign. After Governor Sununu expressed concerns about HB 396 in an interview last week, the conservative religious liberty advocacy group Cornerstone Action ran a call-to-action ad on the social media website X.
“We have 24 hours before #HB396 is vetoed or becomes law!,” one of the ads posted Thursday said. “This is your last chance to stand up for New Hampshire’s women and girls. We need everyone’s help! Call or email Governor Sununu tonight.”
News of the veto upset conservatives. “By vetoing HB 396, Governor Sununu has authorized the Department of Justice to act, giving it the authority to ban gender segregation in restrooms, locker rooms, sports and prisons,” Cornerstone Executive Director Shannon McGinley said in a statement.
“The governor is siding with the most far-left 10 percent of New Hampshire, people who would never have voted for him in a million years,” McGinley said.
Efforts to regulate transgender youth received national attention this week when several speakers at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee raised the issue, and former Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump directly addressed the issue in his speech Thursday night.
“There will be no more boys participating in girls’ sports,” Trump said. “And that will end immediately.”
Republicans in New Hampshire had previously tried to pass a similar bill to ban transgender girls from girls’ sports but it died in the GOP-led House, but this year Sununu voiced his support.
“By enforcing these measures, we continue to uphold the principles of safety, fairness and common sense for all our citizens,” he said Friday.
But civil rights groups argued that Governor Sununu’s decision to sign the bill was a capitulation to a broader movement against transgender people.
“Our politicians continue to fail transgender youth. These laws are not actually about fair sports, healthy classrooms, or overall well-being, but rather they enforce discriminatory views and exclude transgender people from public life,” said Devon Chaffee, executive director of the ACLU of New Hampshire.
