Sims: New Hampshire Kept Ignoring The Warning Signs Of Nashua Democrat, Others

By Bronwyn Sims, NH Journal

New Hampshire women and girls should never have been put in the position of warning the public about a man who would later be sentenced to 33 years in federal prison for child exploitation.

Yet that is exactly what happened.

Former Democratic state Rep. Stacie Laughton (D-Nashua), once celebrated as a political symbol, now stands exposed as a man whose public record should have raised far more alarm than it did.

The question is not just how Laughton got elected. It is how so many warning signs were ignored, minimized, or explained away. Laughton’s record already included a felony fraud conviction, a bomb-threat-related misdemeanor, a stalking arrest, and eventually a federal child exploitation case that ended in a 33-year sentence.

In any serious political culture, that record would have disqualified him from public trust. Instead, he was elevated, defended, and treated as beyond criticism.

That is not just a political failure. It is a civic one.

At a recent State House press conference, Rep. Katherine Prudhomme O’Brien (R-Derry) testified that she often saw Laughton in the women’s bathrooms at the Capitol and knew something was wrong, but stayed silent because the law was not on her side. That testimony matters because it shows what many women have been saying for years: When the law allows men into women’s private spaces under the banner of ideology, ordinary women are expected to swallow their discomfort and stay quiet.

That silence has consequences. It tells women their instincts are suspect, their boundaries are negotiable, and their safety is secondary to someone else’s identity claim.

The same lesson was visible outside the State House as well.

Judy Walcott, a Concord woman, said she encountered a man in the women’s locker room at Planet Fitness and did what any reasonable woman would do: She complained. But instead of being protected, she said her membership was canceled after she raised the alarm.

Her experience became a symbol of what happens when ordinary women are expected to accept the presence of biological males in female spaces and then punished for objecting. The Planet Fitness debacle was not a misunderstanding. It was a message: Women’s discomfort will be treated as the problem, not the policy that caused it.

And the pattern continues in our schools.

At ConVal Regional High School in Peterborough, a parent of a ninth-grade girl said her 14-year-old daughter was forced to share the girls’ locker room with a 16- or 17-year-old biological male. According to the parent, the daughter felt uncomfortable and unsafe. But when female students objected, Principal Heather McKillop told them to stop using their own facilities.

The district’s response was even more alarming: Statements such as “boys do not belong in girls’ locker rooms” were treated as “harassment.” In effect, girls were told to move aside while boys were told they had every right to stay.

That is not inclusion. It is the erosion of female privacy in real time.

The U.S. Department of Education opened a formal Title IX investigation into ConVal on March 31, after complaints over the district’s locker room policy.

That is why the debate over biological sex in law is not abstract. It is not a matter of semantics. It is about whether women can still count on female-only spaces being female-only, and whether girls can still expect fair competition in sports.

New Hampshire’s legal shift in 2018, when Gov. Chris Sununu signed HB 1319 and added gender identity protections to the state’s nondiscrimination law, reflected a broader cultural move away from clear biological categories. Supporters hailed it as progress. Critics warned that once the law stops naming sex plainly, women and girls will eventually be asked to surrender the categories and spaces that exist for their protection.

That warning is now impossible to dismiss.

I signed the ICONS amicus brief in United States v. Skrmetti because the stakes are real. Biological sex is not a political insult. It is a material reality with direct consequences for athletics, privacy, and safety.

The brief argued that post-puberty male advantages in strength, muscle mass, bone density, and skeletal structure persist even with testosterone suppression. That is why sex-separated categories exist. They are not a cruelty. They are a safeguard for fairness and opportunity.

The U.S. Supreme Court sided decisively with fairness and biological reality. In the consolidated cases of Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., the court ruled 9-0 that Title IX allows schools to maintain women’s and girls’ sports teams defined by biological sex, and 6-3 that such protections do not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s opinion affirms what many women and girls have long known: Sex is a biological fact that shapes athletic performance, and states may protect female athletes accordingly. Female athletes in the 27 states with these safeguards now have strong constitutional backing.

That is why HB 1442 matters now.

The bill is a narrow, common-sense effort to clarify that biological sex can still be used in limited circumstances where privacy, safety and fairness are at stake — including bathrooms, locker rooms, sports and secure facilities. It does not force anyone to do anything. It simply preserves the right to separate by sex where the stakes are highest.

Gov. Kelly Ayotte has another chance to get this right.

Her veto of SB 552 was a missed opportunity. After Laughton’s sentencing, after the State House restroom testimony, after the Planet Fitness incident, after ConVal, and after years of women asking for boundaries that should never have been controversial in the first place, the governor should understand that delay is not neutral. It always falls hardest on women and girls.

The public deserves better than that. New Hampshire women deserve better than that. And girls deserve laws that recognize the difference between political symbolism and real safety.

The lesson here is simple: When warning signs are ignored, predators benefit, and women pay the cost.

That is why vetting matters. That is why boundaries matter. And that is why biological sex cannot be erased from the spaces where privacy, fairness, and safety are at stake.

New Hampshire should have learned that lesson already.

Bronwyn Sims is a creator, performer, choreographer, and educator. She wrote this for NHJournal.com.

This story was originally published by the NH Journal, an online news publication dedicated to providing fair, unbiased reporting on, and analysis of, political news of interest to New Hampshire. For more stories from the NH Journal, visit NHJournal.com.