North Carolina Finally Flushes Its Hated Bathroom Bill
Turns out, losing $3 billion in tourism revenue is bad for digestion.
(Photo by Sara D. Davis/Getty Images)
On Tuesday, the governor of North Carolina signed a consent decree that put an end to a long-running saga over the state’s bathroom bill. Now everyone can go back to peeing in peace and quit worrying about what kind of bits the person in the next stall is packing. Who says the news is all bad these days!
Back in 2016, when the dissipating fumes of the marriage wars were still strong strong enough to convince conservatives that they might be able to win a couple more rounds by ginning up animus against LGBT people, the Republican-controlled legislature passed HB2, aka the North Carolina Bathroom Bill. The City of Charlotte was about to enact a local ordinance protecting the right of trans people to use the appropriate restroom, so state legislators raced to convene an emergency session to protect the public from “possible danger from deviant actions by individuals taking improper advantage of a bad policy.”
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Ignoring data showing heightened risk of sexual assault and harassment for trans kids forced to use the wrong restroom, lawmakers conjured up a plague of dangerous predators donning skirts as a pretext to enter the ladies’ room. Because apparently that’s what Mike Huckabee would do, given half the chance.
“I wish that someone told me that when I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in PE,” Huckabee told the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in 2015, “I’m pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said, ‘Coach, I think I’d rather shower with the girls today.'”
Haw-haw.
The North Carolina law required people to use the public bathroom corresponding to the gender listed on their birth certificate, forcing trans people to risk arrest in the “illegal” bathroom, or assault in the “legal” one. It further banned the passage of local anti-discrimination ordinances protecting LGBT people.
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Then-Governor Pat McRory signed the bill, and the local politicians figured they’d won another round in the culture war. They never saw the backlash coming. The NBA pulled the All-Star game out of Charlotte, PayPal canceled a planned facility that would have brought 400 new jobs, dozens of municipalities banned employee travel to North Carolina, and the tourism industry projected a multibillion-dollar hit from boycotts. Even the porn site XHamster blocked users from the state, saying, “Judging by the stats of what you North Carolinians watch, we feel this punishment is a severe one.”
And it worked … sort of. After Pat McRory lost the gubernatorial race to Democrat Roy Cooper in 2016, North Carolina politicians put their heads together to come up with a compromise to save tourism without making them look like they caved to Big Gay. Would those trans people just go away if the legislators added a 2020 sunset to the moratorium on local anti-discrimination ordinances?
Turns out, they would not. Because transgender state employees like Joaquín Carcaño still had no place to pee at their government jobs. Carcaño, a Project Coordinator at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Institute for Global Health and Infectious Disease, was the lead plaintiff in the case challenging HB142, the bandaid North Carolina tried to slap on HB2 in 2017. And this week, Carcaño finally won his case.
Over the objection of the Republican legislative intervenors, Governor Roy Cooper and Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein agreed to an interpretation of the law that allows trans people to use the bathroom corresponding to their gender identity in all public buildings.
Because elections really matter.
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The odds are not good that one of Justices Roberts, Gorsuch, or Kavanaugh will break ranks and find that discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation are illegal under Title VII. But for now at least, it looks like the economic backlash has protected trans kids from becoming the next national wedge issue in the nation’s culture war. Eventually, this will be okay, because Gen Z kids and Millennials do not care about pronouns, or bathrooms, or dividing the world up into Team Girl and Team Boy.
So let’s take this good news and be grateful. Everybody pee, flush, wash your hands, and go about your day. Because other people’s junk is none of your business.
Carcaño, et al. v. Cooper, et al., All Filings [ACLU]
Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.
