Transgender-boosting groups are furiously protesting North Carolina’s political deal that will protect the sexual privacy of adults and children in public bathrooms and shower rooms while likely ending the university sports boycott of the state.
The compromise deal, titled HB142, ends near-term economic threats to the state’s business groups by sunsetting the state’s sole authority to decide who is male and who is female in December 2020, just after the next gubernatorial election. After that date, cities and counties will regain the power to write new legal rights for gays and for “transgender” people who want to live as members of the opposite sex, ensuring renewed political fights over the role of the “gender,” and over distinctions between the male and female sexes.
But the state will keep sole control of privacy rules for men’s and women’s use of public restrooms and shower rooms unless judges decide to create new rights for people who want to live as members of the opposite sex. Also, the state preserves its sole authority over the process by which people can formally change their legal sex.
That is a political defeat for the gay groups and the progressives in Charlotte who ignited the “transgender bathroom” fight in February 2016 by erasing any legal distinction between men and women in public bathrooms. They erased the distinctions by declaring that men who merely say they are “transgender women” could use women’s public bathrooms and shower rooms, and effectively eliminated women-only bathrooms in the city.
In March 2016, conservatives defeated the Charlotteville challenge by passing HB2, titled the “Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act.” The popular law limited cities’ ability to impose social legislation on citizens, conserved the normal legal and civic recognition of the male and female sexes, protected sexual privacy in shared public bathrooms, and reaffirmed rules for how people can legally switch between the two sexes.
Gay and progressive groups, aided by the established media, then organized a national campaign against the HB2 law. For example, they persuaded their allies in companies and universities to withdraw investment and sports tournaments from the state. The economic threat, although only partly effective, helped the 2016 defeat of the GOP’s effective governor, Pat McCrory. The business pressure also pushed GOP leaders to approval the compromise deal with the new Democratic governor, Roy Cooper.
On Thursday, the deal was approved 32 to 16 in the state Senate’s vote and by 70 to 48 in the state House’s vote, as many GOP and Democratic legislators voted no.
The deal was approved just before a deadline set by the university-run NCAA, which threatened to withhold valuable sports events from the state from 2018 to 2022.
Many polls also show the transgender agenda is supported by only one-in-four voters, partly because there are so few transgender people. Since the 2016 election, former President Barack Obama has twice blamed the transgender fight for Hillary Clinton’s loss. In mid-December, for example, Obama told NPR that voters “may know less about the work that my administration did on trying to promote collective bargaining or overtime rules. But they know a lot about the controversy around transgender bathrooms.”
The extension is also only a temporary win for conservatives, who will have to build assertive public support for the long-standing civic distinctions between men and women if they want to ensure that the legislature and the courts preserve the many single-sex facilities in the state.
The state’s conservative Lt. Gen. Dan Forest opposed the business-backed deal, citing the state’s need to resist economic blackmail from business groups:
If HB2 was right to begin with, which I believe it was, then why are we repealing it? If it is wrong, then why wait four years to fix it? Such ambiguity undercuts the legitimacy of a law that we have fought so hard to defend. We are yielding the moral high ground and giving in to a new form of corporate extortion from an unaccountable, out of state, non-elected, tax-exempt organization (NCAA) and for what?… a ballgame? Why are we allowing them to dictate to us, laws that govern the protection of our people? We should have the backbone to tell them to take a hike.
Tami Fitzgerald, the director of the NC Values Coalition, denounced the pressure from economic interests and predicted a renewed political battle in 2022:
These chambers were filled today with men and women who have been under a full-court press by the NCAA and the business community for months, and today, the leaders of our State have let the people of North Carolina down. The truth remains, no basketball game, corporation, or entertainment event is worth even one little girl losing her privacy and dignity to a boy in the locker room, or being harmed or frightened in a bathroom. Today each member cast a vote based on what they believed was in the best interest of their constituents and North Carolina.
HB2 was a compassionate, reasonable law that guaranteed that [loss of privacy] wouldn’t happen, and provided sensitive solutions for transgender individuals as well so that everyone’s privacy was protected. NC Values Coalition remains committed to advocating for a state-wide standard on privacy protections in bathrooms, locker rooms and shower facilities in our schools and public buildings. Our municipalities should never erode our State’s business-friendly climate by empowering cities to create a patchwork of regulations across the state to force business owners to violate their beliefs or be subject to fines and frivolous lawsuits.
I am grateful for the lawmakers who remained steadfast to these principals and the thousands of coalition members that today urged them to vote against the repeal. Today’s repeal vote maintains separate facilities for men and women and leaves regulation of multi-occupancy facilities to the state; however, it leaves the state without a statewide public policy on privacy and safety in bathrooms, locker rooms and showers and simply kicks this debate three years down the road.
I hope that our state will learn from this and stand stronger in the future against the bullying and intimidation tactics of groups like the NCAA, the NBA, and billion dollar corporations who care more about their political, hypocritical agendas than the well-being and dignity of the people in our great state.
The almost-four-year period until 2020 is also only a temporary defeat for advocates of the transgender ideology. Those groups are demanding that the state forcefully require Americans to validate the sex-switching claims of “transgender” people, regardless of the cost to the roughly 99.7 percent of normal Americans who do not wish to live as members of the opposite sex.
In practice, that unpopular ideological demand requires large-scale changes in society to remove any legal or civic recognition of the two equal-and-complementary sexes. For example, in the “genderless society” sought by the transgender groups, women would be forced to accept biological males in their shower rooms, biological males in K-12 girls’ sports leagues, and pro-transgender curricula in their kindergartens. People, including high-status scientists and doctors, would also be legally pressured to use incorrect female pronouns — “she” — when referring to men and teenage boys who merely say they are women, even in science classrooms or in hospitals. These requirements also would allow easy lawsuits against any single-sex practice or organization in the state, including civic groups that cater to kids.
The transgender-ideology groups denounced the compromise deal in a morning press conference and demanded full submission to their demands.
“Let me express my heartfelt disdain and disappoint for what we are seeing,” said Chris Sgro, the director of Equality N.C. The deal is “ill-considered, hasty, bad legislation … [which] will continue to actively discriminate against the transgender community,” he complained, adding that people in the state are “obsessed with where transgender people use the restroom.”
The deal “sold out” the lesbian, gay and transgender groups in the state, said Cathryn Oakley, the senior legislative counsel for state and municipal advocacy at the Human Rights Campaign.
The activists declined to tolerate any compromise. Full repeal of HB2 “is the compromise …. anything else is a terrible deal” said an ACLU staffer, Sarah Preston.
“If you are a vote for this bill, you are not a friend of the LGBT community, you are not standing on the right side of the moral arc of history,” claimed Sgro.
The text of the pending bill is short:
Preemption of Regulation of Access to Multiple Occupancy Restrooms.
§ 143-760. Preemption of regulation of access to multiple occupancy restrooms, showers, or changing facilities. State agencies, boards, offices, departments, institutions, branches of government, including The University of North Carolina and the North Carolina Community College System, and political subdivisions of the State, including local boards of education, are preempted from regulation of access to multiple occupancy restrooms, showers, or changing facilities, except in accordance with an act of the General Assembly.
SECTION 3. No local government in this State may enact or amend an ordinance regulating private employment practices or regulating public accommodations.
SECTION 4. This act is effective when it becomes law. Section 3 expires on 19 December 1, 2020.
To read more Breitbart coverage about the “gender identity” ideology, click here.
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