Will North Carolina be Potty Police Waterloo?
Will North Carolina be Potty Police Waterloo?
I’m being nice by referring to the radical religious fascists (or the Republicans who pander to them) as potty police!
On Monday, March 2, 2015 the Charlotte City Council “voted down the most controversial ordinance it has considered in years, a nondiscrimination proposal that would have added sexual orientation and gender identity to protected categories.” The measure failed 6-5, after a marathon meeting that featured hours of emotional debate and comments from supporters and opponents. Council members had removed the section of the ordinance that would have allowed transgender people to use the bathroom of the gender they identify with. The measure failed because a couple of Democratic Council members, Mayfield and Autry, would not leave their transgender brothers and sisters behind!
Transgender Equality and LGBT Equality took a beating late last year when Houston’s HERO ordinance fell to an ignominious defeat despite having more than adequate financial resources at hand.
Had the Potty Police won? A temporary victory, and a huge wake up call that in America’s 4th largest City with a popular openly lesbian mayor, a simple nondiscrimination law could be repealed if we were cavalier in our defense and did not allow transgender people to be empowered in our own defense. (And yes, a good offense is sometimes the best defense)
The Houston success emboldened the Potty Police , by early Spring 19 States had over 40 pieces of anti-transgender and anti LGBT legislation awaiting action in their current legislatures. Perhaps the most insidious are the so called “bathroom bills,” proponents of which, the “potty police,” have introduced in state legislatures across the country, peddling them by spuriously portraying transgender women as potential rapists.
But an inclusive LGBT community came together with more and more allies and together we started winning in Tennessee, Virginia and a huge win in South Dakota where trans people were front and center in the fight.
Meanwhile in Charlotte, political activists fought back from their 2015 defeat, voted out anti equality council members David Howard and Michael Barnes, replaced them with pro equality people and on February 22, 2016 by a 7-4 vote passed a law so preventing businesses in Charlotte from discriminating against gay, lesbian and transgender customers, in addition to long-standing protections based on race, age, religion and gender. The ordinance applies to places of public accommodation, such as bars, restaurants and stores. It also applies to taxis.
So the people in Charlotte, N.C., having spent more than a year carefully considering and debating an anti-discrimination ordinance and having voted into office legislators who passed that ordinance in February intended to promote the city’s culture of inclusiveness. State lawmakers quashed it on barely a month later by passing an appalling, unconstitutional bill that bars transgender people from using public restrooms that match their gender identity and prohibits cities from passing anti-discrimination ordinances that protect gay and transgender people.
Gov. Pat McCrory, who signed the bill into law late Wednesday, March 23rd, had 30 days to review the bill, but signed it within hours of passage. He said it was necessary to undo Charlotte’s ordinance, which included protections for gay and transgender people, because it allowed “men to use women’s bathroom/locker room.”
The threat of transgender women as predators exists only in the imagination of bigots. Supporters of the measures have been unable to point to a single case that justifies the need to legislate where people should be allowed to use the toilet. North Carolina is the first state to pass such a provision.
What caught activists by surprise was the high-profile veto by the Republican governor of South Dakota on a very similar bill. It is reasonable to think that North Carolina lawmakers recognized that careful scrutiny of the bill would have doomed it. They convened a special session on Wednesday, March 23, 2016 — which cost taxpayers $42,000 — to ram the bill through. The House allowed for 30 minutes of public debate, limiting speakers to two minutes. The Democrats walked out of the Senate in protest.
Inexplicably, lawmakers slipped a provision in the deceptively titled “Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act” that prohibits cities from setting a minimum wage higher than the state’s, which is $7.25 per hour. That appears to be largely symbolic because local jurisdictions in North Carolina generally don’t have the type of broad authority required to pass minimum wage requirements. It was an extra “shot” at the poor by the “compassionate” Republicans.
This is a truly draconian law! According to Zack Ford, “HB2 made it illegal for any North Carolina municipality to extend nondiscrimination protections beyond what’s provided at the state level, thus banning and voiding all LGBT protections. Charlotte was not the only city that had passed them. The law also rolls back sexual orientation and gender identity protections in the counties of Buncombe, Mecklenburg, and Orange, as well as in Ashville, Boone, Carrboro, Chapel Hill, Greensboro, and Raleigh”. Additionally, Durham and Guilford counties, along with the cities of Bessemer City, Durham, High Point, and Winston-Salem, all had nondiscrimination protections based on just sexual orientation.
Furthermore, the “University of North Carolina system, which consists of 17 campuses, also has an LGBT nondiscrimination policy it can no longer enforce. HB2 specifically bans these campuses from accommodating transgender individuals, who are now prohibited from using restrooms that don’t match their birth certificates. This impacts the system’s 13,000+ faculty, 30,000+ staff, and 250,000+ students.”
The good news is that LGBT Organizations and Allies reacted quickly and sharply against this law.
The North Carolina NAACP was particularly on point and articulate:
The NC NAACP Stands Against Hypocrisy and Immorality of the NCGA Made Clear by the Passage of HB2
Numerous organizations pointed out that the Governor was unable to name a single leading business that supports this new law, while there has been an articulation of opposition from leading corporations, including from IBM, Dow, Biogen, PayPal, RedHat, the NCAA, American Airlines, Salesforce, Apple, the NBA, Google, Microsoft, Marriott, Bayer, and even the NHL Carolina Hurricanes. Some statement have been stronger than others and we would really like to see action by these businesses to match the words. We’d like to see real action from giants like Bank of America and Wells Fargo that have active LGBT Affinity groups. The message must be clear: discrimination is bad for business.
North Carolina Furniture manufacturer Mitchell Gold has been a strong leader in fighting LGBT Discrimination and expressed grave concern about a boycott to the High Point Market which is the largest economic event in the State of North Carolina each year. The Market has an annual economic impact of $5.38 billion and generates over 600,000 visitor days to the state each year. The Market and the home furnishings industry are responsible for over 37,000 jobs in North Carolina.
“Given the overwhelming response we have received from businesses who are against HB 2, we are not tremendously shocked that Governor McCrory can’t name a single business backing this dangerous and radical new law,” said JoDee Winterhof, HRC Senior Vice President for Policy and Political Affairs. “This is just one more indication that Governor McCrory and legislative leadership rammed this through on their own without considering the impact on business or North Carolina residents.”
This new law eliminates existing municipal non-discrimination protections for LGBT people and some veterans; prevents such provisions from being passed by cities in the future; and forces transgender students in public schools to use restrooms and other facilities inconsistent with their gender identity.
North Carolina is now the first state in the country to enact such a law attacking transgender students. It has been asserted by LGBT activists that school districts that comply with the law will now be in direct violation of Title IX, subjecting the school districts to liability and putting an estimated $4.5 billion of federal funding at risk. Apparently school districts must choose between complying with federal law and protecting their students or complying with a state law that violates students’ civil rights.
Reactions and Actions taken:
There is now a movement in North Carolina! #WeAreNotThis
North Carolina Universities and colleges were quick to issue statements deploring HB2 and affirming their commitment to diversity and inclusive LGBT non discrimination policies and to articulate that Private colleges were unaffected. All very fine, but go off campus and you are affected if local business and government institutions can discriminate.
Lambda Legal and the ACLU are partnering to represent Equality North Carolina and the ACLU of North Carolina in litigation against the new law. They are “representing two men who are transgender, Joaquín Carcaño and Payton Grey McGarry, and a lesbian named Angela Gilmore. This outrageous new law targets them for no reason other than prejudice and puts them at risk every day for simply living their lives — for going to work and school.”
The mayors of 3 major cities, New York, San Francisco and Seattle have temporarily suspended employees travel to the Tar Heel State. Boston is considering a similar ban.
ww.advocate.com/politics/2016/3/28/3-big-cities-ban-travel-north-carolina
New York Governor Cuomo issued an Executive Order banning non essential travel to North Carolina.
Trans blogger Lexie Cannes has put together a partial list of major companies that should be contacted and pushed to keep the heat on Governor McCrory.
I hope that our LGBT organizations continue to work together and fight for our rights and respect. Individuals have opportunities to step up and help.
Already a similar piece of discriminatory legislation that was recently passed in Georgia, was just vetoed by Republican Governor Deal after an outcry from businesses there and the threat of a major lawsuit. We should recall the successful Lambda Legal lawsuit against the State of Georgia on behalf of Vandy Beth Glenn!
North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper announced that he will not
defend the law in court. A Democrat, Cooper is challenging McCrory for the governorship in November.
We can help ourselves win this by fighting back, taking positive action, be it bold or passive as long as it is smart and we continue working together in unison and complementing each others actions. We must take action at the ballot box, by voting for and supporting candidates who will fight for us and by voting out of office the haters and their apologists. This is war!
Revised 3/31/16
Category: Transgender Community News, Transgender Opinion, Transgender Politics
About the Author (Author Profile)
Babs at 76 passed away in 2019. She was a member of the Executive Committee of the Democratic National Committee, Deputy Vice Chair of the NJ Democratic State Committee and Political Director of the Gender Rights Advocacy Association of NJ. She served on the Executive Committee of Trans United 4 Obama. She has served as Vice Chair of the DNC Eastern Caucus, was President of NJ Stonewall Democrats, Co-Chair of National Stonewall Democrats Federal PAC Board, Vice-Chair of Garden State Equality, Executive Board member of National Stonewall Democrats as Chair of the DNC Relations Committee and a member of the NJ Civil Unions Review Commission.Subscribe
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One wonders exactly how they plan to enforce such a law equally. Are they going to do genital inspections of everyone prior to their entering a bathroom? Do these yahoos honestly think they can identify every TG person solely by looking at the outward appearance? Are they going to post cameras in the stalls and over over urinals? I can hear it now, “OMG! That man doesn’t have a penis! Quick! Call the cops!” Of course, it will be somewhat more problematic to “catch” trans women as the camera would most likely have to be placed in the toilet bowl itself. In essence the legislature has just made it OK for those who can pass to use the restroom of their identified gender but those who cannot will be singled out for ridicule and arrest. One wonders what will happen when they mistake a butch woman for a guy?
These potty police are active all around the country trying to portray themselves as “protecting” women and children from “dangerous” people like us whom they consider “perverts”. They stoke fears by talking about predators using these laws as a means to enter women’s bathrooms and attack women and children. They willfully ignore the fact that any real predator that would hunt in such a way is not going to refrain from doing so simply because of a bathroom law. No, this has nothing to do with protecting anyone because let’s face it, it is far more likely that a TG person would be the victim than a perpetrator, especially if they are forced to use the wrong bathroom. But then that would be OK in their eyes since they would say we were asking for it by the way we were dressed (sound familiar?). These laws are nothing more than an attempt by a majority to marginalise, isolate, and ostracise a weaker minority. If history is an indicator such situations usually turn out badly for the minority, e.g., the Klan and blacks, the Nazis and Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and intellectually disabled. Hopefully, when this law is finally challenged in the courts it will be recognised for the hatred that it is and appropriately overturned.
I would say its time for several trans men, the manlyier the betterto go marching in to the womens room and a bunch of trans women to do the same in a mens room. Ideally this should be in a large public restroom perhaps a stadium or GOP political rally The look on the faces of other should be priceless.
I agree and that it was smart that of the 3 LGBT people in the Lambda Legal-ACLU lawsuit, 2 are trans men! That will get a lot of publicity.
RE: The great state of N. Caroline
Well, since N. Carolina is so discriminatory it’s off my vacation list. In the past I enjoyed sailing there, but no more. The thought of going there now makes me ill.
Richelle
It is sad that one group can disrupt a whole state to pass such a discriminating law. I think N. Carolina has “shot their selves in the foot” with it. I can only hope the good people of that state will rescind it and return to the great state it once was.