House Bill Two and the Bathroom War

In February of twenty-sixteen, the Charlotte City Council passed an ordinance expanding the city's non-discrimination protections to include sexual orientation and gender identity, specifically allowing transgender people to use public restrooms matching their gender identity. The ordinance was the kind of local civil rights measure that dozens of American cities had adopted in preceding years.

The North Carolina state legislature convened a special session on March twenty-third, twenty-sixteen, and passed House Bill Two within a single day. The bill overrode Charlotte's ordinance and prohibited all local governments in the state from passing non-discrimination protections beyond state law. Most controversially, it required transgender people to use bathrooms corresponding to the sex listed on their birth certificate in government buildings and public schools.

The economic consequences were severe. The National Basketball Association moved the twenty-seventeen All-Star Game from Charlotte to New Orleans. The National Collegiate Athletic Association relocated championship events from the state. PayPal canceled plans for a four hundred-job expansion in Charlotte. Estimates of the total economic damage ranged from several hundred million to well over three billion dollars, though the exact figure remained disputed.

Governor Pat McCrory, who signed the bill, lost his reelection campaign in November twenty-sixteen, the only Republican gubernatorial incumbent in the country to lose that year. A partial repeal passed in twenty-seventeen replaced House Bill Two with House Bill One Forty-Two, which lifted some provisions but retained others.

The fight that started in a Charlotte city council meeting became one of the defining national confrontations over LGBTQ civil rights of the twenty-tens.