Living up to the state’s purple status in the otherwise blue region of New England, New Hampshire lawmakers on Thursday passed a bill that would ban biological males from competing in female school sports.
After voting 13–10 in favor of the legislation, the Republican Senate then passed a parental notification bill with the same party-line vote, under which schools will be required to provide parents with two weeks’ notice of any planned sex education curriculum that includes material on gender identity.
Both bills were already passed by the New Hampshire House and will next be sent to Gov. Chris Sununu to be signed into law. The Epoch Times contacted the governor’s office for comment.
Democrats fiercely opposed both bills, with Democrat state Sen. Donovan Fenton saying the ban on transgender females (biological boys) will essentially amount to “teachers and coaches pulling down the pants” of players to verify if they’re girls or boys.
Republican state Sen. Ruth Ward, the main sponsor of the sports bill, said during the debate that gender verification can easily be made by submitting the student’s original birth certificate, but Democrats countered that some states are allowing birth certificates to be altered to reflect a person’s preferred gender identity rather than biological sex.
The bill does provide for the use of what is called “alternative evidence” to a birth certificate, but does not say what the acceptable alternative evidence would be.
Democrat state Sen. David Watters said during the floor debate Thursday that he was concerned that the “alternative evidence” is going to be a “genital inspection” of all players, including biological girls, to make sure they are not biological boys.
Physical Differences
Democrats argued that the bill is discriminatory.“Transgender girls are real girls,” Democrat state Sen. Debra Altschiller repeated several times during the floor debate ahead of the bill’s passage.
She argued that transgender females with physical male traits are no different than a tall student having an advantage in basketball or a short student having a competitive edge as a batter in baseball.
Republican Senate President Jeb Bradley and Republican state Sen. Bill Gannon spoke about their experience coaching boys sports and also having athletic daughters. Both said there is no way to rationally overlook the drastic physical difference between boys and girls when boys hit puberty.
“There is just a physical difference that one side here is ignoring,” said Mr. Gannon. “You’re putting girls in danger.”
Republican state Sen. Dan Innis said that even Caitlyn Jenner—the transgender reality television star formerly known as Bruce Jenner, who was an Olympic gold medalist decathlete in the 1970s—has expressed serious concern about the safety of girls participating in contact sports with biological boys.
Mr. Innis recalled meeting with the former Olympian and said Caitlyn Jenner told him that “eventually someone is going to get killed or be seriously injured.”
Democrats also called the bill discriminatory because it only pertains to transgender females and did not ban biological girls from participating in boys sports.
If signed into law, New Hampshire will be the 26th state to require schools to organize boys and girls sports based on biological sex, not gender identity.
Like similar legislation adopted by other states, the New Hampshire bill pertains to middle school and high school sports but not elementary school sports. It also does not pertain to college sports at the University of New Hampshire (UNH).
UNH is part of the NCAA, which changed its policy on transgender athletes in 2022. Instead of monitoring testosterone levels and requiring biological males to undergo one year of testosterone suppression before competing on a women’s team, the college sports association now follows a sport-by-sport policy in line with the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee and the International Olympic Committee.
Parental Notification
Along another topic related to gender identity in schools, the New Hampshire Senate voted to expand the state’s existing parental notification laws on sex education to include any planned instruction on sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or gender expression.At least 14 other states have adopted similar parental notification laws.
The bill’s main sponsor, Republican state Sen. Tim Lang, emphasized that the bill does not restrict or ban the teaching of gender identity, but instead allows parents to know that a conversation about “sensitive topics is coming up.”
He said public education is drifting “away from math, and science and English” and that school teachers are now being called “social workers.”
Mr. Fenton, objecting to the bill, said it would subject an endless litany of topics to parental scrutiny and create a potential impossibility for teachers to keep up with demands to know what they are doing day-to-day in the classroom.
“If a teacher wanted to speak about the instance of oppression of women in foreign countries, under this legislation, they may have to provide two weeks’ notice,” he said.
Following the Senate’s debate and passage of the two bills, the group GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) posted a compilation of comments from teachers unions, LGBT groups, and the American Civil Liberties Union urging the governor to veto the legislation.
“Governor Sununu should see through the tired old myths they’re flinging at vulnerable students and veto these discriminatory bills,” said Sarah Robinson, education justice director with Granite State Progress, in a statement posted by GLAD.
