HB2 sparked an NC uproar, but Trump’s transgender targeting? Crickets | Opinion

This coming week will mark nine years since the Charlotte City Council approved a nondiscrimination ordinance that drove Republican state lawmakers to respond with the notorious House Bill 2, also known as the “bathroom bill.”

The Charlotte ordinance allowed transgender people to use public bathrooms that conformed with their gender identity. House Bill 2, passed a month later, required that transgender people use bathrooms in schools and state and local government facilities that match the sex listed on their birth certificate.

HB2’s opponents condemned the law as codifying discrimination against transgender people. The bill, signed into law by Gov. Pat McCrory, sparked wide protests, national news coverage and boycotts that led to an estimated $3.7 billion in lost business. It also contributed to McCrory’s narrow loss when he stood for reelection that fall.

HB2 was a spectacular social issue misstep by state Republicans, who supported a repeal of the law one year later.

But, oh, what a difference nine years make. Included in President Trump’s fusillade of executive orders have been several targeting transgender people. They restrict transgender people from serving in the military, block gender-affirming medical care for minors and ban transgender athletes from women’s and girls’ sports.

Trump’s orders have triggered lawsuits, but generally the response from Democrats has been silence and even the LGBTQ community seems uncertain about how to protest. Certainly the corporations and athletic organizations that boycotted over HB2 are staying miles away this time.

What happened?

For one, Democrats saw their presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, get hammered by an ad in which she supported taxpayer-funded gender-affirming care for federal prisoners as required by law. State Sen. Dan Blue, who led a walkout by Senate Democrats when HB2 came up for a vote in 2016, said the ad has “created an environment so toxic that nobody is entering into it.”

Another reason for the muted response is that Republicans switched their attacks on transgender people from being about the supposed danger of “men in women’s bathrooms” to being about fairness in women’s sports and protecting children from medical treatments they might regret as adults.

Matt Mercer, a spokesman for the North Carolina Republican Party, said the lack of HB2-style protests to Trump’s orders shows that the Republicans were right all along.

“It’s a vindication that North Carolina legislators were right to confront this issue, and it’s unfortunate that it took seeing women athletes injured or defeated to raise the alarms that biological males do not belong in women’s spaces or sports,” Mercer said. “This is a 70/30 (polling) issue right now because it’s rooted in what most people believe to be right versus wrong.”

Republicans effectively recast the transgender issue, said Chris Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina University. “They transitioned to a popular position. It’s Politics 101.” But he said a broad restriction of transgender rights is still an unpopular move. “I still think HB2 would go down today, or wouldn’t be introduced in the first place,” he said.

Trump’s executive orders come after state Republican lawmakers passed similar restrictions in recent years. Eliazar Posada, executive director of the LGBTQ advocacy group Equality North Carolina, said the drumbeat against transgender people has left some would-be protesters exhausted and numb. But as the significance of Trump’s orders sink in, he said, resistance is stirring.

“It has become so common to see trans folks and LGBTQ folks attacked in many different ways that for some it’s just become run of the mill,” he said. But lately, he added, “There’s quite a bit of uproar. We may not see it in policymakers and the media, but we’re seeing it in the community.”

State Rep. Marcia Morey, a Durham Democrat, said post-election worries that Democrats went too far in support of transgender rights has left a vulnerable group of people on their own. “There are a lot of frightened people in need of medical and psychiatric help who are transitioning who are being forgotten now,” she said.

Given the muted response to Trump’s targeting transgender people, I asked Morey if state Senate leader Phil Berger might consider bringing HB2 back.

“Don’t give him any ideas,” she said.

This story was originally published February 16, 2025 at 4:30 AM with the headline "HB2 sparked an NC uproar, but Trump’s transgender targeting? Crickets | Opinion."