Nearly three years ago, the governor signed a law in New Mexico that most voters don’t even know about.
House Bill 7 – known as the “Reproductive and Gender-Affirming Health Care Act” – requires every public school, university, and state agency to let males who say they’re women use women’s locker rooms, showers and bathrooms. Refuse to comply? You get hit with a $5,000 fine.
You’d think, with all the resources poured into it, something this major would dominate kitchen-table talk, and that the overwhelming majority of New Mexicans would be in favor.
It doesn’t, and we aren’t.
Recent polling from Independent Women shows 54% of New Mexicans have never heard of the bill, and a full 71% of us – including 70% of Democratic women – say we oppose letting males into female-only spaces in public schools and government buildings. That’s not a fringe position. That’s moms, daughters, and everyday working women saying the same thing: our privacy and safety matter more than the feelings of a tiny minority.
We’re two of those women. We’re Hispanic, we vote, we pay taxes, and we have daughters who should be able to use the restroom, change clothes for gym, or take a shower after sports without wondering whether a boy will walk in because the state told him he belongs there. Women and girls already face enough risk in public restrooms – ask any survivor of assault how “welcoming” a mixed-sex facility feels. Yet our Legislature decided hush-hush that radical gender ideology is more urgent than the basic dignity most female New Mexicans expect when they close that stall door.
While rural clinics shut their doors, OB-GYNs flee the state, and families wait months for a pediatrician, our elected officials have spent precious time and taxpayer money mandating that biological reality take a back seat to compelled speech and open doors. They call it “inclusion.” Most New Mexican women call it insanity.
This isn’t about hate, as our opponents claim. It’s about fairness.
Women fought for decades to get sex-separated spaces because we know the difference between equality and erasure. Separate isn’t inherently unequal when the separation protects the group that gets pregnant, bleeds every month, and has historically been targeted in vulnerable moments. Rolling that back under the banner of “kindness” is, at the end of the day, the same old story of women being told to move over, stay quiet, and accommodate everyone else first.
Well, we won’t go back to that.
Especially since the polls are as clear as they are: New Mexican women – Republican, Democrat, independent, Hispanic, Black, white, young, old – overwhelmingly want to keep female-only spaces female-only. We’re not extremists for wanting our daughters to feel safe when they have to pee at school. Those denying us our right to privacy are.
If Santa Fe politicians keep ignoring us, they shouldn’t be surprised when we remind them who actually runs this state: the women who will protect our daughters and ourselves, whether the law helps us or not. Because at the end of the day, no woman should have to choose between her comfort and someone else’s ideology – especially not in the bathroom.
