Rahim Mohamed: I watched the North Carolina 'bathroom bill' debacle

Pierre Poilievre is serving no one by re-hashing last decade's culture wars.

By: Rahim Mohamed

When asked recently if he favoured banning transgender women from women’s shelters and prisons, Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre took things one step further, opining, without prompting, that “female changerooms (and) female bathrooms should be for females, not for biological males.”

Poilievre, one of Canada’s most disciplined political communicators, isn’t the type to shoot from the lip at a press conference. He undoubtedly understood the reaction his words would provoke in the national media. The odds that his use of the term “biological males” to refer to trans women was accidental are close to zero.

One has to question the political upside, for Poilievre, in pivoting away from the relatively safe terrain of erecting safeguards for women housed in high-risk spaces like jails and crisis centres and instead dredging up the tired 2010s culture war flashpoint of public restrooms and changing rooms.

As someone who had a front-row seat to the United States’ first “bathroom bill,” Poilievre’s remarks had me feeling a tinge of déjà vu — and not in a good way.

I was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when the state’s Republican-controlled legislature passed the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act, more commonly known as House Bill 2 or HB2, in the spring of 2016.

The first piece of legislation of its kind in the nation, HB2 required all residents of North Carolina to use the public restroom that matched the gender indicated on their birth certificates. The law applied broadly to public schools, state-funded universities, hospitals, government buildings and other public settings. HB2 offered a little more flexibility to private businesses and workplaces, many of which would subsequently convert their existing facilities to gender neutral.

It's hard to convey just how much of a disaster HB2 was on all fronts. In addition to being virtually unenforceable (my own birth certificate was safely in the possession of my parents in Canada at the time), the law single-handedly torpedoed North Carolina’s hard-won brand as an emerging and forward-looking hub for tech, commerce and entertainment.

At the time of HB2’s passing, the mid-sized city of Charlotte was the country’s second-largest financial centre behind only New York City, the Research Triangle linking the state’s three top universities boasted the highest concentration of PhDs anywhere in the country and the picturesque coastal city of Wilmington sat at the centre of a $500 million (USD) state film and television industry. (If you watched WB teen dramas in the late 1990s or early 2000s, chances are you caught at least a few frames of Wilmington’s weeping willows and fishing piers.)

One ill-conceived bill nearly flushed all of this down the toilet (if you’ll excuse my pun).

The backlash to HB2 was swift and costly. The NBA soon announced it would be moving its 2017 All-Star Game from Charlotte, costing the city around $100 million in lost economic activity. A handful of businesses soon followed suit by cancelling planned expansions in North Carolina. Multiple high-profile film and television projects were also casualties of the radioactive new law. The state’s brand became so toxic that Netflix nixed plans to film North Carolina-set coming-of-age drama “Outer Banks” on location, opting to move production to South Carolina — a state that removed the Confederate flag from its statehouse just months before HB2’s inception. 

The NCAA’s decision to move March Madness games out of the state in 2017 proved a bridge too far for even small-town North Carolina, where college basketball ranks just one-notch below official state religion. By HB2’s one-year mark, nearly two-thirds of North Carolinians said that the law’s negative economic impact outweighed its benefits.

Republican Governor Pat McCrory would pay a steep price for the fallout from HB2, getting unceremoniously booted from office in November 2016’s gubernatorial election. (Donald Trump comfortably carried the state on the same ballot). McCrory, an ex-business executive, would have difficulty finding a new job after his election loss, lamenting “People are reluctant to hire me, because, ‘oh my gosh, he’s a bigot.’”

The state still majority-Republican legislature would attempt to engineer a compromise by rewriting parts of the bill in 2017 before killing it altogether in 2020. The short-lived bathroom bill would leave a stain on the state’s reputation for years.

The total cost of North Carolina’s bathroom bill is hard to tabulate, but one credible estimate puts this figure well into the billions of dollars. The collateral damage to the state’s economy could plausibly have been justified if there was any evidence that HB2 improved public safety. A review of bathroom bills published in 2018 found unequivocally that “fears of increased safety and privacy violations as a result of nondiscrimination laws are not empirically grounded.”

There is, admittedly, little grounds for a direct comparison between the North Carolina legislature and Canada’s federal government. As Pierre Poilievre himself conceded shortly after his comments, he’d have little sway over policies relating to restrooms and other public facilities as prime minister. His public statements on the matter could nevertheless have a downstream effect, spurring local bathroom ordinances and other trans-exclusionary policies at lower levels of government. (It’s worth noting that the residents of Westlock, Alberta voted narrowly to remove pride flags from municipal property and paint over the town’s existing rainbow crosswalk just a day after Poilievre’s presser.)

Whether trans women should have access to sensitive women’s-only spaces is an entirely valid question for open political debate and Pierre Poilievre should, to some degree, be commended for having the temerity to reach for this putative third rail. However, he’s only moving the conservative movement backwards by aping the ill-fated American bathroom crusaders of yesteryear.

Canada doesn’t need to turn public restrooms into a political football. Take it from a former North Carolinian.

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