New Hampshire Joins States Protecting Children From Gender Ideology

New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu signed a total of three bills into law last week calling them “commonsense” measures reflecting the values of parents across the state. The three bills preserve female sports for just women and girls, prohibit children from undergoing harmful genital surgeries, and allow parents to opt their children out of gender-related instructional material in schools.

Each law passed largely along party lines in the state’s Republican-controlled Senate by a vote of 13-10. In the state’s Republican-controlled House, the largest in the nation with nearly 400 members, the female sports bill passed 189-182, the child gender surgery ban passed 199-175, and the classroom instruction bill narrowly passed 186-185.

The first bill, House Bill 1205, requires schools to separate sports teams based on a student’s “biological sex at birth” in fifth grade through 12^th grade. The law directs schools to designate sports teams for “males, men, or boys,” “females, women, or girls,” or “coed or mixed.” Under the law, students must produce their birth certificate when registering for teams to verify their sex at birth. With the passage of this law, the nation is exactly split with 25 states now protecting female sports from gender-confused males. 

Those other states include Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming. New Hampshire’s female sports protections go into effect August 19, 2024, ahead of the forthcoming school year.

The second bill, HB 619, bans doctors from performing mutilating genital surgeries on anyone under the age of 18. The law also allows children or their parents to sue doctors who administered the surgeries for up to two years afterward. A previous version of the law included banning puberty blockers and hormones for the purpose of treating gender confusion, but the law was amended and passed banning only genital surgeries.

HB 619 states adolescent genital surgeries usually involve parents having both a “lack of adequate information for informed consent” and a “high risk of coercion” from the medical community giving them a choice between their child committing suicide or consenting to their child’s genital surgery. The law further noted that doctors have an “ethical and legal duty” to inform parents, but with the absence of long-term outcomes regarding gender surgeries, children in the state should not receive them. The law will take effect January 1, 2025.

New Hampshire’s HB 619 now creates a majority of 26 states that protect children from medical mutilation. The other states include Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

A third bill in New Hampshire, HB 1312, requires schools to inform parents at least two weeks in advance of any upcoming course material involving human sexuality or sex education. The parental disclosure law broadens the scope of topics for which teachers must notify parents, which now will include “sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or gender expression.” The law is set to take effect September 18, 2024.

Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “We commend Governor Sununu and New Hampshire legislators for protecting women and girls in sports, children from medical mutilation, as well as giving parents the option to decline inappropriate gender classes. Half of all states now recognize gender ideology as an extreme and destructive political agenda. All 50 states need to push back against this agenda to keep people safe from harm.”

For more information about state laws protecting against gender ideology, visit Liberty Counsel’s website here.