CONCORD, New Hampshire (LifeSiteNews) — New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a socially liberal Republican, signed into law on Friday three bills to prohibit “gender reassignment” genital surgery for minors, restrict female-specific school athletic programs to actual females, and guarantee parents’ right to know about LGBT materials used in schools, while vetoing a fourth measure that would have kept men out of opposite-sex restrooms, lockers, and prisons.
House Bill 619 prohibits health care providers from subjecting minors to genital surgeries and restricts health care providers from sending them out of state for those same surgeries. An earlier version would have banned other transgender surgeries, like mastectomies, as well as pharmaceutical transgender interventions, like cross-sex hormones and puberty-blocking drugs, but was watered down to only cover surgical genital transformation.
House Bill 1205 states that grade 9-12 sports teams designated for a specific sex must only be open to actual members of that sex, as determined by a birth certificate at or near the student’s time of birth. House Bill 1312, meanwhile, requires schools to notify parents about the use of any classroom materials pertaining to “sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or gender expression.”
The Center Square reports that Sununu signed all three into law, explaining that the sports bill was “widely supported” and would maintain “integrity and competitive balance in athletic competitions” and that the genital surgery ban “ensures that life-altering, irreversible surgeries will not be performed on children,” citing countries “from Sweden to Norway, France, and the United Kingdom” hitting the brakes on “transitioning” minors.
However, he also vetoed House Bill 396, which would have allowed for “classification of persons based on biological sex” for the purposes of restroom, locker, and prison access, on the grounds that “classification serves the compelling state interests of protecting the privacy rights and physical safety of such persons and others.”
The governor responded that he felt the bill “seeks to solve problems that have not presented themselves in New Hampshire, and in doing so invites unnecessary discord.”
READ: Transgender mania has resulted in women’s prisons being overrun with male sex offenders
A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “transitioning” procedures, including full “reassignment” surgery, fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Mandatory inclusion of gender-confused individuals in opposite-sex sports is promoted by the left as a matter of “inclusivity,” but critics note that indulging “transgender” athletes undermines the original rational basis for having sex-specific athletics in the first place, thereby depriving female athletes of recognition and professional or academic opportunities, as well as undermining female players’ basic welfare by forcing them to share intimate facilities with members of the opposite sex.
There have been numerous high-profile examples in recent years of men winning women’s competitions, and research affirms that physiology gives males distinct athletic advantages that cannot be negated by hormone suppression. Critics also warn that forcing girls to share bathrooms, showers, or changing areas with members of the opposite sex violates their privacy, subjects them to needless emotional stress, and gives male predators a viable pretext to enter female bathrooms or lockers by simply claiming transgender status.
Meanwhile, there has been growing concern around the world over placing men who claim to be women in female prison populations, which has proven to be a means of both securing lighter treatment during incarceration and gaining easy access to women to prey upon. Transgender status also has the potential to be exploited to avoid incarceration entirely in some cases, as seen in Wales when a man who identified as a woman received a suspended sentence keeping him out of prison despite physically assaulting two partners within days of each other, on the grounds that he would be “vulnerable” behind bars.
As for Sununu, his record has long disappointed social conservatives. In 2022, he expressed public opposition to a Parental Bill of Rights that would have barred schools from hiding children’s alleged gender confusion from their parents. The bill stalled and later died in the House. That year, he also vetoed legislation to repeal a law empowering abortion centers to establish 25-foot “buffer zones” on public property to prevent pro-life advocacy, despite having previously pledged to repeal it.