TRANS DEFECTION: Black NH House Rep Accused of Backing ‘Jim Crow’ Takes Stand Against Gender Ideology

A New Hampshire House Democrat is standing by his opposition to transgender ideology after drawing fierce criticism for supporting legislation on sex-segregated spaces.

Rep. Jonah Wheeler, who represents Hillsborough, emphatically condemned transgender ideology in a Sunday video, reposted online by “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling.

“Gender ideology, as defined as the belief system that we are all assigned a sex at birth and need to go through a journey of our own to find a gender identity that is separate from that sex, … is reinforcing the stereotypes its most fervent ideologues claim to be dissolving,” Wheeler said in the video.

While Wheeler is running unopposed in his Sept. 8 primary, he has attracted national attention due to his willingness to buck his own party on transgender issues. A fellow Democrat said that legislation Wheeler supported to protect women-only spaces was comparable to segregation under Jim Crow.

Wheeler’s Gender Ideology Video

The state representative made two substantive arguments against gender ideology. First, he warned that transgender activism dissolves women’s rights to sex-segregated spaces.

“The protections from horrific discrimination … are dissolved, because the law is only as good as its definitions,” Wheeler says. “If definitions mean no more than what we feel, then they don’t mean anything.”

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He also condemned the idea that “we are all born in the wrong body and need to medicalize ourselves in order to achieve who we really are.”

The Democrat mentioned the stories of detransitioners such as Jon Skinner and Prisha Moseley, saying that these young people “have had their bodies destroyed, their endocrine systems damaged, their sexual function left destroyed.”

“Anybody who tells you you are born in the wrong body and you need to medicalize yourself with drugs and surgery that are going to put you on a life of being a patient is a charlatan who is lying to you,” he says. “You are born in the right body.”

“I yearn for a world where that is the liberal movement,” he added.

Rowling, an outspoken critic of transgender orthodoxy, posted the video to her 13 million followers.

Black Supporter of Jim Crow?

His video came a month after Gov. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican, vetoed House Bill 1442, which would have allowed sex-segregated spaces in businesses, sports, and prisons.

Wheeler, who voted for the bill in May, had previously faced criticism from other members of his party for supporting a similar bill, HB 148.

House Bill 1442 created exceptions to the state’s 2018 Law Against Discrimination, permitting business owners to separate restrooms and locker rooms by sex; allowing sports teams to exclude men who claim to identify as women; and letting jails and prisons to keep men who identify as female out of women’s facilities.

Rep. Heath Howard, D-Strafford, compared legislation to keep women’s spaces female to “Whites Only” restrooms in the Jim Crow era, the New Hampshire Journal reported.

“With white-passing African Americans being free from discrimination during Jim Crow-era laws, do you think that it is fair that we can compare this situation directly to the bathroom bans that African Americans were given, and told that they were dangerous to white people?” Howard reportedly asked in March 2025.

“Representative, race and what happened in the Jim Crow era is, yes, significantly different than sex and talking about women in their private spaces,” Wheeler reportedly replied.