My name is Sara Tirrell. I’m a lifelong resident of New Hampshire, and for the last 10 years my family has been lucky enough to call Plymouth home. My son is a junior at UNH; my daughter, Parker, is a senior at Plymouth Regional High School.
On paper, we’re a pretty ordinary family. We get up, go to work and school, come home for dinner and homework, watch some TV, and do it again the next day. You’d find a version of that routine in most households across America.
Except in one detail: my daughter is transgender. My husband and I have spent years advocating and fighting for her rights, publicly enough that our story isn’t hard to find. Here in Plymouth, we feel supported. Neighbors and friends ask how she’s doing with real, genuine interest. But zoom out to the state, and further out to the country, and that support thins out fast.
Most families don’t have to talk at the dinner table about when it might be time to leave their state, or their country. Most parents touring college campuses aren’t quietly afraid that dropping their daughter off could be the last time they see her, because someone decided she shouldn’t get to be alive simply for being who she is. Most people don’t build their work schedule around legislative hearing calendars so they can testify against bills written to hurt their own kid. I don’t think most families in America do those things. Mine does.
I love this community, and I mean that. But my husband and I have started calling the kindness we get “thoughts and prayers” support. It’s the kind that shows up as a warm word or a shared post, and stops there. Ask the same people to hold a sign at a rally, or talk to a reporter, and it suddenly becomes too much. They worry about the backlash, about what it might mean for their job, or for their kids at school.
I understand that fear. But right now, I need more than thoughts and prayers. I need your vote.
Republicans have controlled our statehouse for five years, and Washington for two. I don’t know what your household budget looks like, but mine keeps getting tighter. My property taxes keep climbing as the state pushes more of its costs like education and retirement onto towns like mine. My heating bill has doubled this year.
We’ve tried it this way. Costs keep rising. I have less control over my own body than I did four years ago. We live in a country where lawmakers are actively working to legislate my daughter out of existence. Journalist Erin Reed’s tracking survey estimates several hundred thousand transgender people have already relocated within the U.S. since the 2024 election, in what researchers have called one of the largest domestic migrations in recent memory. Trans people make up roughly 1% of the U.S. population, and still, they are not safe in their own country.
So on November 3rd, I need your vote, not your sympathy. I need people in office who will undo the last five years of damage: who will restore state funding for schools and retirement systems, who will give women back control over their own bodies and their own medical care, and who will protect Parker’s right to the medical care that keeps her alive, to safety at her own school, and to walking back through our front door every single day.
I need real, lasting change. Please vote.