This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Live Free or… uh… wait, actually, don’t live free. Sorry, we made a mistake, just don’t live free actually. Thank you for understanding.
The odious concept of “parental rights” has been used to justify the passage of a law that would force educators to out transgender students to their parents against their will in New Hampshire. Last week, Governor Kelly Ayotte signed into law Senate Bill 430, known as the Honesty and Transparency in Education Act, which “requires all school employees to respond honestly and completely to written requests by parents and legal guardians regarding information relating to their children, except where such responses are prohibited by state or federal law.”
Interestingly, though it represents a significant risk of harm to trans youth, the bill is not as virulent as perhaps it could have been. Specifically, New Hampshire credentialed educators must respond to written requests from parents regarding their children within 10 business days of receipt, and if the educator believes answering honestly could place that child at risk of imminent abuse or neglect, they are allowed to file a report with their superintendent and deny the request. How will that play out, exactly? Who knows! The law is still, beyond a shadow of a doubt, completely unnecessary and likely to result in harm done to trans kids in New Hampshire. It is currently set to take effect in January of next year, and the New Hampshire state board of education must adopt new rules to reflect the law’s change to their code of ethics on or before June 30.
The threat laws like these pose to trans kids are, frankly, very obvious. New Hampshire Senator Tim Lang, the bill’s Republican sponsor, defends the law as a necessary move to bolster “parental rights.”
“If you don’t tell the parent, the parent can’t watch for the signs of self-harm,” Lang said buffoonishly. “Why is it not reasonable to have a parent go and ask a question like that: I recognize something’s going on with my child. Are you aware of anything that’s happening?”
But scenarios in which a parent asks an educator, in good faith, what’s going on with their child—as opposed to having a one-on-one conversation with that child—and intends to use that information for good purposes are, in my mind, vanishingly few. Rather, it seems far more likely that bigoted parents will abuse these “parental rights” to expose their LGBTQ+ child’s aberrance and punish them for it. It’s not new information that LGBTQ+ kids suffer much higher rates of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse than their cisgender, heterosexual counterparts.
Furthermore, protections for LGBTQ+ kids that shield them from forced outing in no way infringe upon the rights of parents to raise their children how they see fit. Or, that’s what the New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled in 2024 when they upheld the lawfulness of a school district policy preventing forced outing. The court stated, in their ruling: “The Policy does not prevent parents from observing their children’s behavior, moods, and activities; talking to their children; providing religious or other education to their children; choosing where their children live and go to school; obtaining medical care and counseling for their children; monitoring their children’s communications on social media; choosing with whom their children may socialize; and deciding what their children may do in their free time.”
As unpleasant as this law’s passage is, it isn’t exactly surprising, either. Governor Ayotte campaigned on overturning the New Hampshire Supreme Court’s ruling on forced outing back in 2024, stating that she believed the state should have a parental bill of rights, because “parents deserve to know what’s happening with their children, because parents are the ones that love their children, and can support and guide their children under any circumstance.” A rather lofty view of parenthood, and one that most LGBTQ+ kids and adults could disabuse her ignorant ass of, given half a chance to describe their own horror stories.
Last year, Governor Ayotte vetoed two harsh anti-LGBTQ bills, one that would have made it far easier for parents to ban books with LGBTQ+ themes from school libraries, and one that would have let businesses and correctional facilities segregate people by sex assigned at birth. Ayotte has twice vetoed a bathroom ban bill, and seems likely to veto at least one more… but I wouldn’t consider her an ally on the matter, since she has agreed with the spirit of the bills, saying, “[There] are important and legitimate privacy and safety concerns raised by biological males using places such as female locker rooms and being placed in female correctional facilities.”
The new law is bad whichever way you slice it, and it seems likely that the Republican majority in New Hampshire—even if it is not veto-proof—is poised to make life for trans New Hampshirites.
