North Carolina’s HB2: “restoring common sense restroom and shower management in public buildings (bill co-sponsor Dan Peters)”

Should an alleged trans-man exercise common sense and carry his birth certificate into the Capitol men’s room

“That’s a very interesting question. We don’t have police officers sitting at public bathrooms all day long,” a spokesman at the Raleigh Police Department told me with a laugh. Over in Greensboro, the state’s third-most-populous city, I received a similar answer. “We would respond if we received a complaint. It’s not like we would be standing guard at bathrooms,” said Susan Danielsen, a spokeswoman for the local police department, also suppressing a laugh. At the Wilmington Police Department, spokeswoman Linda Rawley said the law struck her as strange. “So that means people have to go to the bathroom with birth certificates? Yeah, that was curious to me.” At the Asheville Police Department, spokeswoman Christina Hallingse noted, “We’re not checking birth certificates. We just don’t have the police power to be able to do that in bathrooms.”…

But even before police officers are called to the scene, there may be room for mishap. Without law enforcement on guard, it will likely be up to bathroom goers to report a problem if they see someone enter the room who doesn’t appear to belong there—and appearances can be deceiving. As the Chapel Hill and Carrboro news site Chapelboro points out, hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery allow many transgender women to look like biological women, even if they don’t have female birth certificates. “There are blurry lines,” writes Chapelboro‘s Aaron Keck. www.motherjones.com/…