Alexandra Carter

This proposal is not about protecting young people. It is about stigmatizing transgender youth, intimidating medical providers, and politicizing health care through the legal system. Extending the statute of limitations to ten years after a person reaches adulthood is an extreme and targeted measure designed to chill access to evidence-based, medically supervised care that is supported by every major medical association in the United States. Gender-affirming care for minors is already rare, carefully regulated, and provided through rigorous clinical standards involving parents, medical specialists, and mental health professionals. This bill singles out one category of care for extraordinary legal exposure, treating it differently from all other forms of pediatric medicine. That is discrimination, plain and simple. By dramatically expanding liability, the bill invites politically motivated lawsuits long after records, providers, and families have moved on, creating fear, uncertainty, and instability for clinicians who are acting in good faith and in accordance with medical best practices. The predictable result will be fewer providers willing to offer care, forcing families to leave the state or forgo treatment altogether. That harm falls squarely on transgender youth, who already face disproportionate rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide due to stigma and rejection. This legislation also undermines the autonomy of families. Parents, patients, and doctors (not politicians) are best positioned to make deeply personal medical decisions. The state should not insert itself into exam rooms by retroactively second-guessing care through the courts a decade later. If the legislature is genuinely concerned about patient safety, the appropriate tools already exist: medical licensing boards, professional oversight, malpractice law, and existing statutes of limitation that apply uniformly across health care. Creating a special, punitive timeline for one politically targeted form of care is not oversight, it is ideological interference. At a time when New Hampshire should be striving to be a state where all young people can thrive, this bill instead sends a message that transgender youth are suspect, their doctors are untrustworthy, and their health care is a political weapon. For these reasons, this bill should be voted Inexpedient to Legislate. New Hampshire must reject fear-based policymaking and stand for medical integrity, family autonomy, and the dignity of all children.