Headlines from the Granite State
Game changer
“Changing the Game,” a new documentary by Emmy-winning filmmaker Michael Barnett about transgender inclusion in school sports, features the Granite State’s own Sarah Rose Huckman.
“Being transgender is not a choice. From the very beginning, I knew I was a girl,” says Huckman, who attended Kingswood Regional High School in Wolfeboro. She was also a featured speaker at Boston-based GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) Spirit of Justice Award Dinner in 2018.
Says USA Today, “Huckman, a teen skier from New Hampshire, enjoys hanging out with her friends and posting makeup tutorials on YouTube. While the powerful and emotional documentary examines the more than 100 transgender state bills introduced in 2021 alone, all aimed to restrict the human rights of people like Huckman, the film goes beyond ideology when it shows the humanity of the athletes themselves.”
“Changing the Game” began streaming on Hulu at the start of Pride month.
Marriage equality and the GOP
Recently elected chair of the New Hampshire Log Cabin Republicans Dan Innis told WMUR TV-9 that he’ll continue to push his party to recognize marriage equality—or more precisely, to simply drop the language from both the Granite State’s and national Republican party platforms that recognize marriage only as between “one man and one woman.”
“All we’re asking is that the relationships and partnerships and marriages we develop and are engaged in should be treated equally,” said Innis, a former state senator and long-time LGBT activist.
The US Supreme Court legalized marriage equality in all 50 states back in 2015. Well before that, New Hampshire’s governor signed same-sex marriage into law in 2009, and of course neighboring Massachusetts was the first state in the country to legalize it in 2004.
But neither the national nor Granite State Republican party has yet to accept marriage equality and have continued to disavow it in their platforms, though New Hampshire’s LCR chapter has been working for some time now to change this.
Gender ID glossary
Kudos to New Hampshire Public Radio for sharing NPR’s “Glossary of Gender Identity Terms” at the beginning of Pride month.
“Proper use of gender identity terms, including pronouns, is a crucial way to signal courtesy and acceptance.” Alex Schmider, associate director of transgender representation at GLAAD, compares using someone’s correct pronouns to pronouncing their name correctly—“a way of respecting them and referring to them in a way that’s consistent and true to who they are.”
The glossary isn’t just packed with definitions but handy tips on how to use them. Listings include: sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, cisgender, transgender, nonbinary, agender, gender-expansive, gender transition, gender dysphoria, sexual orientation and intersex.
You can find the helpful guide—and direct friends and family to it—on nhpr.org.
Leadership in question
An alumni group at the Derryfield School in Manchester has gathered more than 600 signatures calling for the removal of a board member who also serves as executive director of a Christian advocacy group and in particular her advocacy against a statewide ban on conversion therapy, according to the New Hampshire Union Leader.
“She is a vocal advocate for these issues which are the antithesis of Derryfield’s Core Values,” states the petition. More than 600 fellow alums have signed the Derryfield Inclusion Alliance petition demanding that Shannon McGinley, a parent of Derryfield students and executive direcor of the conservative advocacy group Cornerstone New Hampshire, leave the board.
For her part, McGinley wrote in a letter to the board and head of the school, “I have never taken the view that a therapist can or should attempt to ‘convert’ someone’s sexual orientation.” Rather, she opposed the ban on conversion therapy, the Union Leader reported, “because, she said in testimony at the time, the state could not realistically determine the line between talk therapy and conversion therapy.”
The American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics would beg to differ with McGinley’s position.
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