New Hampshire House votes to table anti-LGBTQ+ bills
New Hampshire's House of Representatives on Wednesday tabled a bill that would have reversed the state's ban on LGBTQ+ conversion therapy for minors and shelved another piece of legislation that sought to affirm "state recognition of biological sex" in athletic competition and incarceration.
New Hampshire in 2018 banned conversion therapy for children, but a bill introduced earlier this year would have repealed the law. The amended version of the bill tabled by the legislature on Wednesday would have technically left the state's ban in place, but would have altered the definition of conversion therapy to only encompass treatments aiming to change a person's sexual orientation or gender identity "against their will."
Conversion therapy has been widely denounced by the nation's leading medical associations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association, which claims that such practices are rooted in an "unfounded misconception of sexual orientation and gender identity."
Currently, 20 states have laws in place banning conversion therapy for minors, and five states have partial bans. In three states - Alabama, Georgia and Florida - bans on conversion therapy are unable to be legally enforced.
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Nearly 700,000 LGBTQ+ adults in the U.S. have undergone some kind of conversion therapy, according to the Williams Institute, including 350,000 as adolescents. Those who have received conversion therapy are more likely to report mental health problems like anxiety and depression.
A recent study by researchers at the LGBTQ+ youth suicide prevention and crisis intervention group The Trevor Project found that LGBTQ+ young people who had undergone conversion therapy were more than twice as likely to report having attempted suicide in the past year.
New Hampshire representatives on Wednesday also tabled a bill that would have allowed public entities to differentiate between people assigned male or female at birth in sports, incarceration or "places of intimate privacy" like restrooms.
The bill's sponsors before the legislation was shelved proposed an amendment to limit its scope solely to athletic competition, arguing that the intent was to protect female athletes from competing on an unlevel playing field created by transgender girls who had gone through male puberty.
That amendment was ultimately rejected and the bill was tabled as it was originally written.
"If you think a high school boy would suddenly put on a skirt and try out for a girls' team, it just doesn't happen," Democratic Rep. Linda Tanner said Wednesday on the House floor.
Eleven states have laws in place which ban trans girls from competing on school sports teams that match their gender identity. Dozens more have been introduced in state legislatures across the country.
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