New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte, a Republican, vetoed a bill that would have prohibited males from entering female spaces and joining female sports teams.
“I vetoed a nearly identical bill to this one last year,” Ayotte said in a statement on the veto, as reported by NHPR. “I made it clear this issue needed to be addressed in a thoughtful, narrow way that protects the privacy, safety, and rights of all Granite Staters. Unfortunately, there is minimal difference between Senate Bill 268 and the bill I vetoed last year, which Governor Sununu vetoed the year prior.”
Senate Bill 268 aimed to create exceptions to the state’s anti-discrimination laws, specifically “permitting classification of individuals based on biological sex under certain limited circumstances.”
She vetoed a similar bill last year, writing at the time, “I believe 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.”
“At the same time, I see that House Bill 148 is overly broad and impractical to enforce, potentially creating an exclusionary environment for some of our citizens,” Ayotte said.
Former Republican Governor Chris Sununu also vetoed a bill on the subject in 2024.
This is not the first Republican-led effort vetoed by Ayotte. In July 2025, the governor turned down a bill that would have expanded parental power to remove books considered inappropriate from the state’s public schools. “We should not engage in the role of addressing questions of literary value and appropriateness at the state level,” she wrote in her veto message.
