Numerous reporters at prestigious media outlets have wrongly described, many times, the most basic fact about North Carolina’s new transgender “bathroom law.”
The articles claim that the new law bars transgender people from using the single-sex bathrooms they prefer. In fact, the law sets up a formal procedure to let transgender people legally use bathrooms reserved for the other sex.
So the North Carolina law does the opposite of what is claimed by hundreds of articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Hill and Politico. But this deception also hides the progressives’ stealth ideological goal in the North Carolina dispute — to promote the sexually revolutionary idea of fluid “gender identity” in the nation’s schools, workplaces and communities.
“A lot of folks have not gone in depth about what the law actually does,” said Ricky Diaz, press aide for Governor Pat McCrory. “A lot of the opposition here … has been generated by advocacy groups, CEOs from San Francisco, the whole Human Rights Campaign [gay advocacy group, who] have been organizing a campaign of misinformation,” he said.
The established media outlets will claim some of their reports are technically correct. Some, perhaps, but only to the same limited extent as a news anchor who hysterically announces that soldiers are jumping out of high-altitude aircraft — without also mentioning the parachutes on the paratroopers’ backs.
The media’s almost-universal distortion of the compromise law is being encouraged by left-wing political activists, including Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the gay-advocacy group, the Human Rights Campaign. In this election year, they’re portraying the dispute as a noble progressive crusade to protect a few victimized transgenders from southern racist bullies — and are eager to hide North Carolina’s simple procedure for letting qualified transgenders use bathrooms reserved for people of the opposite sex.
This likely will be a little-used procedure. Only only about 1 in every 2,400 Americans have changed their name from one sex to another, according to a recent study of the 2010 census. Even pro-transgender advocates say that only 1 in 300 Americans are transgender.
Amusingly, the media’s almost universal misunderstanding of North Carolina’s HB-2 law replicates the media’s almost universal misunderstanding of the scale and purpose of the H-1B guest-labor system, which was unveiled by Breitbart in January.
What’s The real Dispute?
The North Carolina misdirection by activists and by Attorney General Loretta Lynch, however, shows the progressive opposition to the North Carolina HB2 “privacy and security” law is not driven by concern for a few transgender people.
The misdirection suggests progressives are using the nation’s very few transgender people as TV-ready victims to help them achieve a more ambitious ideological goal — to legally destroy and stigmatize the civic support for two equal, distinct and different sexes, which is decried as “the gender binary.”
Many progressives argue that men and women, young boys and girls, should discard the “gender binary” and adopt, create and discard multiple varieties of temporary “gender identities” as they please, without or without the support of their parents and communities. That gender-fluid society, they insist, would be better than the civic rules which Americans have gradually developed to maximize benefits from the two distinct sexes’ different average capabilities and preferences.
This gender theory is the revolutionary idea behind a 2014 speech from Lynch’s predecessor, Eric Holder, who told an audience in Sweden that:
Our Civil Rights Division is fighting to … safeguard those who are targeted just because of their sexual orientation or gender identity [because] every human being is, and must be, free and equal in both dignity and rights. Neither tradition nor fear of change can absolve us of the obligation we share: to identify and eradicate discrimination in all its forms … As we continue to move forward, we will undoubtedly encounter resistance and opposition both at home and around the world.
The no-more-sexes plan was pushed in a May 9 press conference about the HB2 law by Vanita Gupta, the acting assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division. She declared that people who try to live like members of the other sex do actually become members of the other sex, regardless of their X or Y chromosomes, or their ability to give birth or their desire to watch football for 12 straight hours, or their preference for cats or for dogs.
“Transgender men are men — they live, work and study as men. Transgender women are women — they live, work and study as women,” said Gupta.
The Compromise In The Law
North Carolina’s new privacy and security law validates the reality of the two sexes, as it makes a decent accommodation for people who wish to switch from one sex to the other.
The law does declare that people must use the bathrooms that match their “biological sex.” That’s the part of the law that the media usually gets correct.
But here’s the part of HB2 that is left out; The law carefully defines “biological sex” as “the physical condition of being male or female, which is stated on a person’s birth certificate.”
So “biological sex” is — legally — merely what’s printed on a government certificate, not what’s biological, according to the HB2 law.
Moreover, a 2005 state law allows people to change the sex on their birth certificates once they’ve undergone medical procedures, saying,
(b) A new certificate of birth shall be made by the State Registrar when …
(4) A written request from an individual is received by the State Registrar to change the sex on that individual’s birth record because of sex reassignment surgery, if the request is accompanied by a notarized statement from the physician who performed the sex reassignment surgery or from a physician licensed to practice medicine who has examined the individual and can certify that the person has undergone sex reassignment surgery.
So, the law sets up a process that allows transgenders to us their preferred bathrooms.
“They would be able to change [sex via] the birth certificate, and be able to use the restroom,” said Traci Griggs, spokeswoman for the North Carolina Family Policy Council. “That’s the process set up within HB2.”
“Many transgender individuals do change their birth certificate to their [preferred] sex, to their gender identity,” said Aaron Sarver, communications director at the Campaign for Southern Equality. “You can do that in North Carolina.”
So the supposedly anti-transgender law is actually a compromise law that allows the few transgenders in the state to use bathrooms reserved for people of the other sex — once they’ve gone through the medical procedures to become transgender. And it also protects sexual privacy for everyone else by excluding normal men who merely claim they are transgender from intruding on the sexual privacy of women in a single-sex bathrooms.
North Carolina’s law does’t discriminate on this sex-change issue — any adult can change their legal sex by going through the medical procedures.
Progressives’ Opposition to Compromise
That compromise reality is ignored by the media, perhaps because many progressives oppose any custom, distinction, regulation or law that reinforces the hated cultural supremacy of the two sexes over the utopian idea of “gender.” Recognizing the obvious differences between the two sexes is decried as “gender policing.”
In fact, the North Carolina controversy began when the city of Charlotte passed an ordinance that simply allowed any person to use a facility for women or men by simply declaring they have a new male or female “gender identity.” No test, no process, no verification, no barriers — just fluid “gender identity,” as progressives prefer.
Similarly, AG Lynch has announced her progressive opposition to the North Carolina law. So she is not offering any alternative rule to balance the needs of a few transgenders against the right of men and women to sexual privacy in their single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms, for example, girls’ privacy from men who justify their appearance in a girls’ locker with the claim that they have a newly discovered female “gender identity.”
Sarver said people should be free to use facilities that match their “gender identity,” without any oversight by federal or local authorities, or even people in the local community, and regardless of long-standing and popular civic recognition of the two sexes. “We don’t want people policing the bathrooms,” he told Breitbart.
When asked if Charlotte’s no-test procedure is his group’s preferred policy, he said “correct,” adding that “the vast majority of people, certainly in the legal context, don’t understand distinctions between sex and gender identity or [the] non-distinctions.”
The Media’s Error
Breitbart used Google on May 10 to conduct a study of the HB2 coverage by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Hill and Politico.
The Hill has published 122 articles or pages containing the terms “North Carolina,” “biological,” “sex,” and “bathroom.” Only 31 of those items contain the phrase “birth certificate” none of which mention the legal ability to change the birth-certificate. For example, reporter Julian Hattem wrongly wrote: “The North Carolina law would … require that people use the bathroom that corresponds to their biological sex assigned at birth.”
A similar search at Politico showed 44 hits, including two that mention the birth certificate, but the not legal ability to change the birth certificate. “By enforcing the state law — which requires individuals to use bathrooms corresponding to the gender listed on their birth certificate — the state violates Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments,” said a May 9 article by Elena Schneider that did not mention the sex-change procedure.
A search at The Washington Post showed 270 hits, including 44 mentions of “birth certificate.” Breitbart could not find any that mention the sex-change procedure. For example, the Post’s major article on the law’s passage was written by Sandhya Somashekhar, who describes herself as the “culture war” correspondent. She described the law incorrectly — “to use the bathroom that corresponded with their biological sex at birth” — and missed the sex-change process, but made sure to include progressive vitriol;
LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) rights groups said the legislation …. is blatantly discriminatory and condemned it as the most extreme bill of its kind in the nation.
The New York Times had an amazing 414 hits, but only eight with “birth certificate.” Those eight hits included a May 4 Associated Press article that got the legislation wrong by saying “the law suffered a blow Tuesday when a federal appeals court that oversees North Carolina issued an opinion that threatens part of the law requiring students to use bathrooms in line with their gender at birth in … universities.”
CBS got the facts wrong too. An April 22 article declared that “several celebrities and corporations, including PayPal, have pulled their business out of North Carolina over HB2, which stops local governments from passing anti-discrimination rules and requires transgender students to use bathrooms assigned to their biological sex at birth.”
“The mainstream media has abandoned journalism and become the propaganda office for the furthest fringe of today’s social landscape,” said Kami Mueller, spokeswoman for the North Carolina Values Coalition. They’re “spreading the lie that there are no differences between a man and a woman,” she said, adding that “if the [distinction] is not drawn before a girl is forced to shower in the presence of a man, there is no line.”
Progressive Distortions
In her May 9 press conference, AG Lynch also distorted her description of the law to hide the compromise sex-change process.
The North Carolina General Assembly passed House Bill 2 in special session on March 23 of this year. The bill sought to strike down an anti-discrimination provision in a recently-passed Charlotte, North Carolina, ordinance, as well as to require transgender people in public agencies to use the bathrooms consistent with their sex as noted at birth, rather than the bathrooms that fit their gender identity.
The leading gay advocacy group also hides the sex-change procedures from visitors to their webpages. The Human Rights Campaign’s main description of the law ignores the 2005 sex-change process and says the law demands “access to facilities in all government agencies must be based on biological sex as well. That includes public universities.”
Calls by Breitbart to the group, and also to Equality NC, were not returned.
The HRC also shifts the focus from adults towards young people who say they are transgender, and who are thus too young to undergo the sex-change operations. This youth focus allows the HRC to say, correctly but misleadingly, that “the law forces transgender students in public schools to use restrooms and other facilities inconsistent with their gender identity.”
Elsewhere on its site, however, the HRC lauds states like North Carolina — including Maryland and New York — that allow adults to change the sex on their birth certificates.
But the group fiercely opposes any efforts to validate a person’s claim of “gender identity.” For example, when the National Student Activities Association agreed to let athletes switch between male and female leagues, it set up a process to verify the person’s commitment to their new “gender identity.” The HRC then called the process “tedious and unnecessary… dangerous and discriminatory,”
Transgender students must provide “credible documentation” from family, friends and teachers, as well as accompanying input from a physician, psychologist, a member of NSAA and member from a non-competing school.
The approval process requires a committee of physicians and psychologists to determine if the athlete “truly” identifies with a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth. Trans women athletes are additionally required to undergo hormone therapy for at least one year.
Even after this tedious and unnecessary process, transgender student athletes are still barred from using facilities appropriate for their gender, forced into either using a private facility or one associated with the gender they were assigned at birth.
This dangerous and discriminatory policy further isolates transgender students, who, according to HRC survey, already struggle for acceptance.
HRC’s site, nonetheless, does add a banner about North Carolina — “Help fight hate and discrimination in North Carolina and nationwide! Make an urgent donation today” — to help fundraising in the run-up to the 2016 election.