New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu signed a series of bills that will limit the rights of transgender youth Friday, banning transgender girls in grades 5 to 12 from participating in girls’ sports teams and prohibiting medical professionals from carrying out gender-affirming surgeries for minors.
The decisions – which LGBTQ+ advocates denounced Friday and called an attack on the transgender community – were cheered on by Sununu’s fellow Republicans, who have made gender in high school sports and gender-affirming surgeries a key political battleground.
Sununu also signed a bill that would allow parents to opt their children out of any public school instruction that features LGBTQ topics – and would require teachers to give parents at least two weeks notice before teaching such material.
But he vetoed a fourth bill, House Bill 396, that would have allowed businesses and government entities to discriminate on the basis of biological sex in bathrooms, locker rooms, sporting events, jails and prisons, mental health hospitals and treatment facilities. That bill would have directly rolled back some of the gender identity anti-discrimination protections Sununu signed into law in 2018.
“The challenge with HB 396 is that in some cases it seeks to solve problems that have not presented themselves in New Hampshire, and in doing so invites unnecessary discord,” Sununu wrote in a statement.
The governor released the decisions late in the afternoon Friday.
Democrats and LGBTQ+ advocates quickly condemned the decisions, the legislation “makes legal discrimination against transgender young people.”
“Governor Sununu cannot say our state rejects discrimination and then use the full force of his power to block transgender girls from finding belonging with other girls in sports, censor curriculum that breaks down stigma against LGBTQ lives, and block access to best-practice medical care that doctors, parents, and patients agree is right for them,” said Linds Jakows, a founder of the advocacy group 603 Equality, in a statement.
Conservatives were elated. “These bills are pragmatic and reasonable and I applaud the governor for signing them into law,” said Rep. Joe Sweeney, a Salem Republican, in a statement.
Girls sports
The first bill, House Bill 1205, will require all sports teams for grades 5 to 12 to be designated for “males, men, or boys,” “females, women, or girls,” or “coed or mixed.” The new law prohibits students of “the male sex” from participating on female teams. And it requires students to verify their sex by producing a birth certificate that demonstrates their biological sex “at or near the time of the student’s birth.”
Children whose birth certificate does not indicate their sex at birth, or which is not their original birth certificate “must provide other evidence” that demonstrates their sex at birth, the new law states. The cost of producing that evidence must be borne by the parents.
The law, which takes effect Aug. 19, allows any other student who claims they have been aggrieved by the failure of a school to follow the new requirements to sue for injunctive relief or damages.
And the law prohibits the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association and any other athletic association from taking action against a school for barring transgender girls from girls’ sports. The association is disallowed from “entertaining” complaints from transgender students who say their rights are violated.
Opponents pleaded with Sununu to veto the bill, contending that the bill would deny access to sports and competition for transgender girls, many of whom would not feel comfortable playing on a boys’ sports team.
But Sununu and others said the ban would protect fairness in sports, arguing that some transgender girls could have a physical advantage over those born biologically female.
“HB 1205 ensures fairness and safety in women’s sports by maintaining integrity and competitive balance in athletic competitions,” Sununu said.
Gender affirming surgery
House Bill 619, the second bill Sununu signed, bars any physician from performing any “genital gender reassignment surgery” on children under 18. That includes vaginoplasties, defined as the surgical creation of a vagina form other parts of the body; phalloplasty, the surgical creation of a penis; and metoidioplasty, the transformation of a clitoris to a penis.
The law will make the practice of those surgeries “unprofessional conduct” and make doctors subject to disciplinary action before their licensing board. It would also allow the minor or their parent to sue a doctor that carried out such a surgery up to two years after the procedure.
Doctors will still be allowed to perform for minors circumcisions; surgeries to remove malignant, malformed or damaged genitalia; and reconstructive surgeries to address physical injuries, disease, and developmental issues.
The law takes effect Jan 1, 2025.
“HB 619 ensures that life-altering, irreversible surgeries will not be performed on children,” Sununu said in his statement. “This bill focuses on protecting the health and safety of New Hampshire’s children and has earned bipartisan support.”
LGBTQ+ rights supporters strongly disagreed.
The bill “will ban access to some healthcare 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,” read a joint statement from the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire and the GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD).
LGBTQ bans in the classroom
Meanwhile, House Bill 1312 expands the existing law requiring teachers to give advanced notice to parents about sex ed curricula and teaching materials, and applies it to all instruction of “sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or gender expression.” Parents would then have the option to opt their child out of that instruction, provided they find alternative instruction agreed to by the school district.
The new law does not define what constitutes instruction. In an interview in May, Sen. Tim Lang, a Sanbornton Republican senator who supported the law, said it would not require a teacher to inform parents if they are planning to talk about LGBTQ+ civil rights history, such as the Stonewall Riots. Instead, he contended, notice would only need to be given if the lessons were directly about the concepts of gender identity and sexual orientation. But the text of the law does not differentiate that.
“It’s just informative to parents,” Lang said at the time. “Nothing stops the school from doing those classes. The class is allowed. That just says that if you do it though, because this is a sensitive topic, you need to notify parents.”
Responding to Sununu’s signature of the bill, the National Education Association of New Hampshire, the state’s largest teacher’s union, said the bill presents difficult challenges for teachers, and raised the possibility of legal action. In May, the U.S. District Court of New Hampshire struck down an earlier law that regulated what teachers could teach in 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 in a statement.