North Carolina made headline news last month when it became the first state in the nation to legally enforce that restroom use correspond to a person’s biological sex.
In a special session meeting that occurred within less than 24 hours at a cost of $42,000, House Bill 2 passed through the House, then the Senate before being signed by Gov. Pat McCrory on March 23. The bill is one of nearly 200 bills this year targeting queer and transgender communities across the nation, according to data tracked by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC).
HB 2 is not simply a state’s law; it is another form of violence enacted on gender-variant bodies. The same day McCrory and North Carolina’s general assembly signed the law into effect, a transgender woman, Kourtney Yochum, was shot and killed in the Skid Row area of downtown Los Angeles.
Restroom use is an essential human function, but the bill denies transgender people the right to comfortably and safely access bathrooms.
The bill got its start after the group Keep North Carolina Safe issued an emergency petition to repeal an ordinance passed by the city of Charlotte, which would have protected transgender people in using restrooms that correspond to their gender identity. Among other reasons, the petition stated a fear of potential risk for women and children in stopping Charlotte’s ordinance.
The fear of sexual assault and violence is valid, with 1 out of 6 women in the United States having experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime, and 44 percent of rape survivors being under 18, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network.
But transgender and gender nonconforming people are not the cause of this violence. There is no available information documenting occurrences where transgender people have assaulted other people in restrooms, according to Sebastian Ochoa-Kaup, director of the Queer and Trans Resource Center at San Francisco State University. McCrory and Keep North Carolina Safe could not provide information either on incidents such as these on which they are basing their policy.
“There are no recorded instances of transgender people assaulting others in restrooms,” Ochoa-Kaup said. “There’s plenty of data about trans-people having been assaulted physically and verbally, which is exacerbated by these laws.”
Arguments advocating for a law that targets gender variant people are based on unfounded fear, and an alarming amount of transgender and gender nonconforming people die worldwide as a result of this fear, which is why we should condemn legislation such as HB 2.
The Trans Murder Monitoring project, which has documented the murder of gender-variant people worldwide since 2008, recorded 1,374 deaths from January 2008 through October 2013.
The HRC report on transgender health and human rights documents incidents such as the one where a transgender woman in El Salvador was detained in a male prison and raped more than 100 times, at times with the complicity of officers.
The report further describes discriminatory effects on the access to education and employment for transgender people. A survey found nearly half of transgender students missed a class due to bullying and 1 in 6 left school because of continuing harassment. A January 2014 study by the Williams institute found 41 percent of transgender and gender nonconforming people attempt suicide.
Transgender people, of course, are acutely aware of such violence and discrimination, but I find it important to illustrate it for those not aware of the material consequences of transphobia. The hate and ignorance driving laws such as HB 2 do not simply hurt feelings, it also encourage unnatural violence toward human beings who express gender differently than how we’ve been raised to do.
As a person defining a gender identity outside the confines of biological sex, I believe transgender and gender nonconforming people are brave and assertive in defining themselves against a culture that seeks to force them into gender boxes. Voicing your disapproval of these laws can take the form of protesting them or simply encouraging gender variant people’s choice of gender expression.
Using the bathroom isn’t a privilege, it’s a natural function of being human, and defining one’s gender is no different.