Disaster Relief Funds Are Being Used to Keep Transgender People Out of Bathrooms

In May the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce issued a report outlining how the legal battle for HB2 has economically devastated the Charlotte area, resulting in the loss of $285 million in revenue and 1,300 jobs in Mecklenburg County. On Thursday, June 30, the state senate decided to reallocate half a million dollars from North Carolina's disaster relief fund in order to pay for the legal defense of HB2 and crush the civil liberties of trans Americans.

Chase Strangio is a staff attorney with the ACLU's LGBT & HIV Project who is deep in the battle against HB2 and other bathroom bills like it across the country. "We have seen time and time again that discrimination is costly," Strangio said in an interview with Broadly. "Money is going out of North Carolina, and yet the political leaders continue to dig in in defense of HB2." The actions of North Carolina leaders are irrational; they're upholding discrimination "to the detriment of their state," Strangio said.

This should weigh heavily on voters, who are being toyed with by fear-mongering politicos. "Unfortunately, until we build out a robust public education campaign that centers on the lives and leadership of transgender people—particularly transgender women of color—we are going to continue to face a public that is willing to risk money and jobs just to harm and stigmatize transgender people," Strangio said.

When governments require citizens to use public restrooms in accordance with the sex marked on their birth certificates, transgender people become criminalized for accessing a fundamental public accommodation.

In May, the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce, which measured the economic loss in the wake of HB2, decided not to request that HB2 be rescinded and suggested a compromise, noting that municipalities have "diverse needs" and should decide individually if they want to protect transgender people or not. Subsequently, the Human Rights Campaign lambasted the organization, writing that "partial solutions to the tremendous damage inflicted on the state's reputation and economy by Governor McCrory and state lawmakers in passing HB2" are unacceptable.

Strangio told Broadly that the ACLU is in the process of "litigating a challenge to HB2 in federal court in North Carolina and the United States is as well." Their legal argument is that HB2 "violates federal civil rights laws" and is unconstitutional. But this recent spate of anti-trans bills are just the beginning, Strangio says—he anticipates more to be proposed across the country. "These cases are going to be costly, the legislative fights are going to be costly, and most of all there is a huge emotional cost to the transgender people who have to listen to their government officials spew hateful things about them and escalate an already hostile and dangerous climate," Strangio said.