Backers of legal protections for transgender people mounted an all-out campaign for widening New Hampshire's anti-discrimination laws yesterday, holding a press conference to present personal cases, turning out en masse for a Senate hearing on the bill and excoriating opponents who weeks ago dubbed the measure the "bathroom bill."

But their late push appeared to fall short: The Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously, 5-0, to recommend killing the bill, which would forbid landlords, employers and others from discriminating against transgender individuals. The whole Senate will vote on the bill as early as Wednesday, along with a raft of other social issues.

The vote followed hours of emotional testimony, including from several transgender people - people born into one biological sex but who identify with the other - who said they live in fear of losing their jobs or worse when they go public with their struggles over gender.

Toni Maviki of Danbury choked up as she described being "harassed verbally and physically assaulted" by fellow Carroll County corrections officers who found out she was a man becoming a woman.

"I carried a badge, and I protected all you people, and there was no law to protect me from harm," said Maviki, who said she now works in law enforcement in Vermont.

Sarah Blanchette of Somersworth read aloud the letter she received from her company shortly after she told her bosses that she's transgender. "Upon consideration, you are immediately relieved of your duties," she read.

Opponents of the bill said they feared the bill would give carte blanche to predators or mischievous men to enter women's bathrooms or locker rooms. Several weeks ago, House Bill 415 burst on the public stage, with opponents, mostly Republicans, blasting it as the "bathroom bill."

"I am here in 2009 as a woman fighting for my rights," said Ann Marie Banfield of Bedford at the hearing yesterday. "Where are my rights? Where are my daughter's rights? I'm angry."

Others said the concept of gender identity as separate from biological sex violates their core beliefs.

"This bill actually discriminates against those who believe gender neutrality is morally wrong," said Rachel Robinson, a pigtailed ninth-grader from New Boston.

Supporters of the bill fought back hard against the "bathroom" label. Co-sponsor Sen. Martha Fuller Clark, a Portsmouth Democrat, said opponents had brought "the debate literally to the toilet by frivolously nicknaming this bill the bathroom bill."

"These objections are outright lies," Fuller Clark said. Of all the 13 states and dozens of municipalities that passed similar laws over the past three decades, she said, there's been "not one reported instance of bathroom miscontact."

Fuller Clark cited the fact that the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence had come out for the bill, and she read from a letter co-signed by that group and the New Hampshire Women's Lobby.

The letter read in part: "We are saddened by those individuals and groups that are deliberately misleading legislators and the public by creating an unfounded fear about women's safety in connection with this legislation. Not only does this scare tactic detract from the very real issues of violence facing women in New Hampshire, it also ignores the serious threat to personal safety that many transgender and gender non-conforming people in New Hampshire experience on a daily basis."

Betsy Janeway of Webster told senators that one of her five children may be transgender. "I have enormous fears for her and pray for her," said Janeway, whose husband, Harold Janeway, is a state senator. "It is dangerous that there are no laws protecting her."

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