Panel Splits On Bill For Transgender Rights

A House panel split yesterday on whether to recommend a bill that supporters said would prevent discrimination against transgender people but that opponents, who dubbed the measure the "bathroom bill," said would tear down proper barriers between the sexes.

The House Judiciary Committee voted 10-10 on whether to support the bill. That deadlock means that the committee will offer no recommendation to the whole House on whether it should become law or not. The House is expected to take up the bill next week.

House members say they've received hundreds of e-mails and calls from people opposed to the bill. House Bill 1415 would add "gender identity and expression" to a host of factors that cannot be discriminated against by employers, landlords and others, including age, sex, race, color, marital status, religion, physical or mental disability or national origin.

Proponents said it was a straightforward anti-discrimination measure to protect a vulnerable group in society: those who identify as the gender opposite the one of their birth, some of whom undergo sex-change procedures.

"We had testimony about people who had had stellar job reviews and job performance for years and years and years, and who, when they finally made the choice to act on their gender issues, had been fired," said Rep. Lucy Weber, a Walpole Democrat who spoke for the bill. The outcry against the bill, she said, had "given me a deep sympathy for the people who sought protection."

But opponents painted the bill as opening the door to women's bathrooms and locker rooms to men, including predators and stalkers.

"I ask you: Who's more vulnerable than women and children?" asked Rep. Nancy Elliott, a Merrimack Republican. "And we are putting them at risk."

Elliott described the women's room as a refuge where women go to cry or breast-feed their babies. The bill, she said, would open those doors to men. "We're making it very easy. We've got women in there with their pants down, and there's men in there."

Amherst Republican Rep. Robert Rowe agreed, saying the bill's use of the term "gender identity" is too loose a definition. "Any man could walk into any female changing room, any bathroom," he said.

The vote split largely down party lines, with every Republican on the committee voting against it and all but one Democrat voting for it.

The Democratic dissenter, Manchester Rep. David Nixon, said he believed that transgender people should already be protected under a proper reading of anti-discrimination laws against sex. He decried the tactics of some of the bill's opponents and said he would "reluctantly join with those who, in my opinion, have carried on very unfair, very misleading, very disparaging and destructive tactics."

Hopkinton Democratic Rep. Gary Richardson noted that while most people are born with either two X chromosomes - women - or an X and a Y chromosome - men - there are people who are born with different combinations, such as XXY.

"The question is are we going to allow discrimination against those people" Richardson said. And he scoffed at the idea that the bill would drastically change life in New Hampshire's bathrooms.

"Where do you think these people are going to the bathroom now?" he asked. "They're going to the restroom like the rest of us."

Thirteen states have laws banning discrimination based on transgender status, according to the Transgender Law Policy Institute.