The Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, better known as House Bill Two, was passed by North Carolina legislature on March 23. This bill claims to be "an act to provide for single-sex multiple occupancy bathrooms and changing facilities in schools and public agencies and to create statewide consistency in regulations of employment and public accommodations." In reality, it is just a government-sanctioned form of discrimination.
What HB2 states, in essence, is that people must use bathrooms that correspond with their biological sex, defined as the sex written on one's birth certificate. This seems all fine and dandy in a black and white world where men and women identify with their biological sex 100 percent of the time. But the truth is, 21st Century Earth is not a black and white world. And men and women do not always identify with the sex written on their birth certificates.
Whether transgender, gender-bending, non-binary or any other label that could be ascribed to a person in regards to his or her sex, as human beings, we have a responsibility to treat each other with kindness, with sympathy, and most importantly, with respect. We need to look at people who are different from us with a sense of understanding, even if we do not personally agree with their lifestyle decisions. They did not ask to be different; they did not ask to face unfair treatment and discrimination; they did not ask to struggle daily with other people's judgement. We all need to be sensitive of that.
And HB2 is not sensitive to that.
It forces transgender women and men to use bathrooms corresponding with the sex on their birth certificates, not the sex with which they identify. It forces them to temporarily identify with a gender that they do not feel is truly theirs. It opens them up to discrimination, awkward encounters and perhaps even dangerous situations depending on the way in which people react when they see a transgender person in a bathroom that corresponds with biological sex and not the sex the person is truly conveying.
This bill is unnecessarily controlling and limiting. It attempts to regulate human identity, a place where the government should have no role at all. The North Carolina legislature has overstepped its bounds with HB2, and it has disrespected a lot of people by refusing to offer them the understanding and respect that all human beings deserve. These actions are not in line with the toleration that has developed over the past century, and they inhibit the growth of toleration in the future by forcing people who are shades of gray into distinctly black and white boxes.
