Jonah Orion Wheeler is a member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives.

I gave a speech on March 20 to my colleagues in the New Hampshire House in favor a bill that classifies people based on biological sex in certain circumstances, including lavatories, sports competitions, and locker rooms. Leading up to the vote on the bill, I heard from transgender people who said they want to be accepted in society. I also listened to many women who felt as though their privacy and concerns had been overlooked.

Every American deserves the respect they are entitled to in the Constitution. That includes transgender people, and it includes women. Transgender people shouldn’t be isolated from society. And we should listen to women who say that they feel their spaces are no longer theirs. The current political climate puts these two ideas in opposition, but they don’t need to be.

As a man who has personal experience with discrimination based on race, I know how hard it is to be heard when expressing that you’ve been the victim of discrimination. I will always be sympathetic to those who make such claims. So when the Legislature heard this bill in the last session I voted against it for that reason.

It wasn’t until after the vote, when I corresponded with women in my district who disagreed with my vote, that I started to think that I hadn’t given the other side its fair due. These women were not extreme people; they did not express reactionary opinions about transgender people as I had seen others do online.

These women expressed a genuine worry about the loss of their privacy. They talked about the fairness of women’s sports competitions. They did so in a calm, and well-thought-out manner. As I said in the beginning of my speech on the floor, the consent of one cannot supersede the consent of another. There are women who say that they are uncomfortable sharing locker rooms, sports, and private spaces with trans women. I couldn’t write those women off as transphobic. After extensive research, and a lot of listening, I came to the conclusion that the bill was balanced.

But before I could finish the first paragraph of my speech in favor of the bill, most of my Democratic colleagues walked out of the chamber in protest of my views. They made faces and said unintelligible words to me as I continued speaking. I finished nonetheless and sat back down to vote.

After my speech, the internet was abuzz discussing it. I received thousands of calls, emails, and text messages from people offering their support. I have been overwhelmed by stories from women who’ve been begging to be heard, politically homeless Democrats who feel the party has left them, and so many others who just wanted to say thanks.

I had a town hall in my district five days after my speech. What was usually a small gathering of constituents was now set to be an explosive night. People were organizing others to come out and protest me. As I walked past the overflowing crowd of people, I hoped that decorum would prevail, but people were more interested in expressing their outrage through, well, outrage. They were uninterested in having a conversation about women’s concerns or the balance that the legislation included.

When Democrats make displays such as yelling political epithets at one another, or walking out because they disagree with others’ opinions, it continues the divide between parties that must be bridged if we are to find solutions to the hard problems facing our world today.

There was a time when a lawmaker could duke it out on the floor with another member on one bill and then the two could work together on another bill the next week. We as a society need to be able to have full-throated debate on contentious issues, but once that debate is over, we need to return to our common humanity. The vast majority of citizens yearn for a world in which we can disagree without being disagreeable.