Tricia Cotham vowed to be a ‘champion’ of LGBTQ rights. Not anymore | Opinion

For the foreseeable future, all of us will be learning in real time who the real Tricia Cotham is — or, at least, who the latest Tricia Cotham is. It’s an unfortunate guessing game, given that she appears to be abandoning, one-by-one, things she previously told voters.

The latest such learning came on Wednesday when Cotham voted in favor of the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, which was debated in the House’s education committee and later heard on the House floor the same day. The bill ultimately passed the House with a vote of 73-39.

The bill is intended to prevent transgender female athletes from playing on women’s sports teams — a draconian “solution” to something that isn’t actually a problem. Currently, only about 15 transgender student athletes participate in high school sports in the entire state of North Carolina. Only two of them are transgender females, The Charlotte Observer previously reported, and they’re not hurting anybody. The House version of the bill would ban transgender athletes from participating in college sports, too.

The problem, of course, is that Cotham campaigned for the seat she now holds by explicitly vowing to protect the LGBTQ+ community. On Cotham’s campaign website, which has since been deleted, she described herself as a “champion” of LGBTQ+ rights, and promised to “stand strong against discriminatory legislation.”

In a tweet Wednesday morning, Cotham also praised the testimony of Riley Gaines, a former NCAA swimmer turned vocal anti-trans activist, who spoke in favor of the Republican-sponsored bill. Gaines told the House panel about her experience competing against a transgender swimmer last year, claiming that she was “traumatized” from having to share a locker room with her competitor.

If the bill becomes law, it would be a cruel move that stigmatizes trans kids, deprives them of opportunity and treats them as a threat to their peers. It would put North Carolina in the company of about 20 other states, including Tennessee and Florida, that already ban transgender athletes from playing high school sports in accordance with their gender identity.

To North Carolinians, it also feels like a bait-and-switch. This is about more than just Cotham — it’s about the veto-proof supermajority that Cotham handed Republicans when she decided to switch parties. Her defection will inevitably have consequences, not just for the LGBTQ+ community, but for all North Carolinians.

Cotham has said that she left the Democratic Party because people expected her to simply fall in line and were angry with her when she didn’t. She complained that people just wanted her to vote with Democrats instead of her conscience. But most voters did want Cotham to vote like herself — or, at least, who they believed her to be. They wanted her to vote like the person she presented to voters, to keep the promises she made to them when they elected her.

Unfortunately, we’re quickly learning — again — that Tricia Cotham’s word may not be worth a whole lot after all.

This story was originally published April 19, 2023 at 11:12 AM.