Sims: Protecting Women Requires More Than Photo Ops

By Bronwyn Sims, NH Journal

Gov. Kelly Ayotte and state Rep. Jennifer Rhodes recently stood at the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence and signed three important bills strengthening protections for survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence and human trafficking. These measures expand protective orders for sexual assault survivors, improve restitution enforcement and victim notification, and license massage businesses to help shut down trafficking operations.

I support these bills. Survivors of sexual and domestic violence deserve every tool the state can give them. They deserve to be seen, heard and believed. Closing gaps in the system that leave victims without recourse is necessary and long overdue. I will always stand with women and girls who have been harmed by male violence.

But there is a glaring and indefensible disconnect — and on Veto Day, Aug. 19, 2026, that disconnect was locked in once again.

The same governor who stages these photo ops and declares that New Hampshire stands with survivors has repeatedly vetoed legislation that would restore women’s and girls’ rights to single-sex bathrooms, locker rooms, changing areas and prisons. Senate Bill 552 and House Bill 1442 were narrow and measured. They did not force anyone to do anything. They simply clarified that classifying those spaces by biological sex is not unlawful discrimination under the 2018 gender identity statute.

Ayotte vetoed them. On Veto Day, the Legislature tried to override those vetoes. The Senate mustered the two-thirds vote needed to override the veto of SB 552, 16-8. The House, however, failed to reach the required threshold on both bills: The veto of HB 1442 was sustained, 165-149, and the effort to override the veto of SB 552 failed in the House as well. The vetoes stood. The bills are dead for this session. Women and girls still have no statutory protection for their private spaces.

As I wrote earlier this summer, her veto of SB 552 was a missed opportunity for true leadership — choosing repetition over courage while leaving privacy, fairness and safety unprotected. The day before that veto, former Democratic state Rep. Stacie-Marie Laughton — a biological male once celebrated as New Hampshire’s first transgender legislator — was sentenced to 33 years in federal prison for the sexual exploitation of children, including the abuse of toddlers at a day care.

At a State House news conference, state Rep. Katherine Prudhomme O’Brien testified that she repeatedly saw Laughton in the women’s bathrooms at the Capitol. She knew something was wrong. She stayed silent because the law was not on her side. “He was affirmed as a woman at every turn.”

That is the system Ayotte continues to defend — and that the Legislature just failed to change.

The same system punished Judy Walcott at Planet Fitness in Concord for reporting a biological male — identified in multiple reports as a registered sex offender — in the women’s locker room shower area. Staff called her transphobic, canceled her membership and had her trespassed.

These are not abstract policy debates. They are lived experiences of New Hampshire women being displaced, demeaned and disbelieved in spaces meant to be safe. When warning signs are ignored, predators benefit and women pay the price. Veto Day simply confirmed that the political will to close this gap still does not exist.

Ayotte has celebrated Supreme Court rulings affirming biological sex distinctions in sports and has noted her own daughter’s athletic experience. Yet she refuses to apply the identical principle when the clothes come off. Signing victim-protection bills while repeatedly vetoing bills that would actually keep men out of women’s private spaces — and then watching attempts to override those vetoes fail — is not protection. It is hypocrisy.

I support real protections for victims of sexual and domestic violence. I will always fight for them. But those protections are incomplete — and the rhetoric rings hollow — when the same administration leaves the door open for biological males, including men with predatory histories, to enter women’s most intimate spaces. You cannot claim to stand with survivors of male violence while defending a legal regime that forced women legislators to stay silent in their own State House restrooms and that punishes women for objecting to males in their locker rooms.

New Hampshire’s motto is “Live Free or Die.” Women and girls cannot live free when their most private spaces are treated as negotiable. Ayotte had the chance to lead by affirming biological reality where privacy and safety matter most. Instead, she chose the path of least resistance — and on Veto Day, the Legislature let that choice stand.

The photo ops are nice. The press releases are polished. But until the governor signs the bills that restore sex-based boundaries — or the Legislature overrides her vetoes of them — every speech about standing with survivors is incomplete, and every sustained veto is a betrayal.

Women and girls in New Hampshire are watching. They deserve better than performative protection. They deserve leaders with the courage to draw the line.

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.