The News
New Hampshire will ban gender-transition surgeries for minors after Gov. Chris Sununu signed a bill on Friday that bars health professionals from performing the procedures. The new law also threatens disciplinary action for doctors who refer minors to other providers for such services.
The governor, a Republican, also signed a bill that bars transgender athletes from competing on school sports teams that align with their gender identities, and another that lets parents choose to have their children opt out of any public school instruction in “sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or gender expression.”
Mr. Sununu vetoed a fourth bill that would have allowed businesses and public entities to separate bathrooms, locker rooms and athletic teams based on biological sex.
Background
The moves are in line with what other leaders in the Republican Party have done. About two dozen other states have passed laws that bar transgender minors from receiving gender-transition care.
“This bill focuses on protecting the health and safety of New Hampshire’s children and has earned bipartisan support,” Mr. Sununu said in a statement about the measure banning gender-transition surgeries.
Before Friday, Mr. Sununu had taken a relatively mixed stance on gender-identity issues and L.G.B.T.Q. rights.
In 2018, he signed bills that banned discrimination based on gender identity in housing, employment and public accommodations and prohibited therapies that sought to change the sexual orientation of minors.
“We must ensure that New Hampshire is a place where every person, regardless of their background, has an equal and full opportunity to pursue their dreams and to make a better life for themselves and their families,” Mr. Sununu said at the time.
At a State House hearing last year, Courtney Tanner, senior director of government relations for Dartmouth Health, testified against the measure banning surgeries, saying: “We don’t like to legislate medicine. These are complex subject matters that are really between a patient and a provider.”
The measure signed into law was significantly pared down from its initial version, which included prohibitions on a wider range of medical treatments for transgender minors, such as puberty blockers, hormone therapy and top surgeries.
After the bill was amended, 12 Democrats joined nearly every Republican in the 400-member House, and it passed 199 to 175.
In New Hampshire, there are about 700 people between 13 and 17 who identify as transgender, according to a database by the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. Law School, based on its report from 2022. In comparison, there are about 300,000 transgender youth across the country.
The Transgender Legislation Landscape
This is the first ban on gender-transition care in the Northeast, illustrating how far the conservative movement to ban transgender care for minors has come. The first of such bills was introduced in 2020, and none were passed that year.
For the past few years, statehouses around the country have been consumed by fights over laws governing transgender people. Most of the states that have bans on what doctors call gender-affirming care for children enacted them within the last year.
New Hampshire now joins at least two dozen other states in restricting or ban gender-transition medical care for minors. Lawsuits have been filed in many of those states, and courts have issued mixed rulings.
Advocates for transgender youth condemned the New Hampshire governor’s actions.
“Our laws should work to eliminate the inequities and negative outcomes created and perpetuated by discrimination, rather than reinforcing them,” Chris Erchull, a senior staff lawyer for GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders.
What’s Next
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a challenge to Tennessee’s ban on the treatment for minors, and a ruling from the court could have a wide-ranging effect on all laws on gender-transition care.
The post New Hampshire Bans Gender-Transition Surgery for Minors appeared first on New York Times.
