LGBT discrimination and the Battle of the Bathroom

There wasn’t a time when transgender people weren’t discriminated on, but the recent turn of events with North Carolina’s HB2 bill have taken things to a new low with regard to LGBT discrimination.

This state law dictates individuals should use bathrooms in all public buildings according to the gender of their birth certificate, regardless of their actual day-to-day lived gender.

Because of this, the law has claimed national– even international– spotlight as a ‘Battle of the Bathroom.’

HB2, LGBT discrimination, and… bathrooms?

As featured in Time magazine’s May 30 issue, the battle for transgender equality centers largely around trans access to bathrooms and this has made people term it the ‘Battle of the Bathroom.’

Even as a number of media outlets have uncritically parroted the widely debunked myth that non-discrimination protections for transgender people will allow male sexual predators to sneak into women’s bathrooms by pretending to be transgender, Time has shot down this particular anti-LGBT attack in this issue.

“In a divided country, the social battle lines have been drawn once again in our most private of public places,” Time Washington Bureau Chief Michael Scherer said.

“State legislatures have been besieged, and school committees have split. Pastors have become politicized in the pulpit, and the gay-rights lobby has abandoned its past hesitancy to embrace the transgender cause,” Scherer pointed out.

“Transgender students are under attack in this country. They need their federal government to stand up for them,” said Chad Griffin, president of the Washington-based advocacy group. Human Rights Campaign.

Culture clash over LGBT discrimination

This clash over bathrooms, an issue atop the upcoming national polls, has become the next frontier in America’s fast-moving culture wars.

This time it involves an array of players, some with law degrees while others still in high school. It has even reached the White House, ultimately landing on the desk of the president.

As such, the Obama administration is suing North Carolina over the anti-LGBT bathroom bill, alleging that a bill that blocks protections for transgender people violates federal law.

After urging for the repeal of the bill, the US Justice Department said in the lawsuit that the so called ‘bathroom bill’: “stigmatizes and singles out transgender employees, results in their isolation and exclusion, and perpetuates a sense that they are not worthy of equal treatment and respect.”

Commenting on the issue, Sherer said: “The 2016 battle over the bathroom is, after all, about far more than public facilities.”

“(This battle is) about gender roles, social change, federalism, physical danger, political polarization and, most strikingly, a breakdown in the ability of anyone in this country to speak across our divides, or appeal to common humanity,” he added on the issue of LGBT discrimination.