Because it Can

            There’s an off-color riddle I once heard in my high school’s locker room.  It involved a dog and it’s ability to lick a certain part of its anatomy.  The punch line was “because it can.”

            It’s hard not to think about that riddle in light of what conservative state legislatures and governors have been doing to the progressive legislation trickling out of some of their towns, counties and cities.  Case in point: North Carolina’s House Bill 2, which, among other things, neutralized the City of Charlotte’s attempt to accommodate transgendered people and their use of restroom and changing facilities located in the city.  The law also voids and pre-empts any other  municipal anti-discrimination laws affecting employment and public accommodations as well as any l local laws that seek to raise wages, regulate working hours or improve working conditions beyond what has been done by the State.

            I’ve previously argued that the attack on the provisions of the Charlotte law that allow people to use the restrooms and changing facilities that match their current gender identities are symbolic and unnecessary.  There is no evidence that a male sexual predator has ever taken advantage of a law like Charlotte’s to harass women or children in a public restroom or changing facility.  Nor is there likely to be.

            When the Charlotte City Council adopted the law, the North Carolina state legislature was not in session and it wasn’t supposed to begin its 2016 session until April 25. It could have waited until then and taken the matter up in the general course of its business.  Since the democratically adopted Charlotte law doesn’t affect anyone but the residents of Charlotte, the State Legislature could have turned a blind eye to the controversy.   

            That’s apparently what Governor Pat McCrory, who is facing a tough reelection bid this year, wanted when he declined to call the state legislature back into session.

            But that’s not what state legislative leaders wanted.  They arranged for their colleagues to return to Raleigh over a month early to address the Charlotte law.  The move gave the matter nationwide prominence. 

            After almost no discussion, the State Legislature passed HB 2 with the support of mostly Republican legislators.  11 Democrats, who represent primarily rural House districts, went along with their Republican colleagues.  In the State Senate, all of the Democrats walked out in protest.

            The backlash has been entirely predictable.  PayPal has cancelled its plans to build a major hub in the state.  Braeburn Pharmaceuticals now says it’s reconsidering its plans to build a $50 million facility in Durham County, and the NBA is reconsidering holding its 2017 all-star game in Charlotte.  According to ABC News, “more than 100 corporate leaders have decried the law, saying it is unfair and makes it more difficult to attract talent.”  And Bruce Springsteen cancelled a concert in Greensboro because “some things are more important than a rock show,” the Boss explained, “and this fight against prejudice and bigotry, . . is one of them.” 

            You always have to take local political needs into account when you look at something like this.  But, it doesn’t appear as if the rest of the state’s residents were clamoring for the state legislature to block Charlotte’s law.  And I have to believe that the governor and some of the state legislature’s leaders must have been sophisticated enough to anticipate the backlash.  So why did the state legislature act?

            This is the part where the licking dog comes in.  Table 1, compares the demographics of Charlotte with those of the rest of the state.

Table 1

	Charlotte	North Carolina	Charlotte Share
Whites	51.88%	69.59%	5.92%
Blacks	34.96%	21.47%	12.94%
Hispanics	13.43%	8.7%	12.96%
Asians	5.56%	2.38%	18.57%
Growth	43.26%	21.13%	13.76%
College Degree	40.66%	27.79%	11.37%
Foreign Born	15.26%	7.6%	15.95%

Source American Community Survey and author’s calculations.

            Nothing about Charlotte resembles the rest of the state.  Its percentages of Blacks and Hispanics, are much higher, as are its percentages of people with at least a college degree and people born in another country.  Charlotte accounts for a large proportion of the state’s diversity.

            Table 2 gives another view of this difference in terms of population density.

Table 2

	Charlotte	Outside Charlotte	Multiplier
Density	2585.53	167.71	15.48
Whites	1341.32	119.26	11.25
Blacks	903.97	34.05	26.55
Hispanics	347.14	13.91	24.95
Asians	143.67	3.53	40.73
Growth	780.75	27.41	28.48
College Degree	684.84	29.90	22.91
Foreign Born	394.43	11.64	33.88

Source American Community Survey and author’s calculations.

Charlotte’s population density is over 15 times greater than it is in the rest of the state and on a people per square mile basis, it is growing more than 28 times faster.  People living in Charlotte are far more likely to be living in proximity to people who have college degrees, were born outside the U.S. or who are not white than people living elsewhere in North Carolina.

            These charts understate the differences between Charlotte and other North Carolina communities because they lump people living in North Carolina cities like Raleigh and Greensboro in with the rest of the state.

            Charlotte’s diversity probably contributes to its status as a politically blue island in a predominantly red state red sea.  Charlotte’s mayor is a Democrat as are 9 of its 11 city council members.  And it is represented in the state legislature by a delegation that consists of 8 House members, 7 of whom are Democrats  and 4 State Senators, 3 of whom are Democrats.

            According to the Winston-Salem Journal, North Carolina’s state legislative districts are seriously gerrymandered, and according to Common Cause “90 percent of the lawmakers who voted for HB 2 either have no opponent this fall or won their last race by more than 10 percentage points.”

            All of this led the state legislature to the kind of collective action problem we know so well here in the Tragic Commons.  Given the backlash, it would have been in the State’s best interests to ignore the Charlotte law.

            Unfortunately, once a bill dealing with a largely symbolic matter makes its way to the floor, it’s hard for anyone to vote against it, particularly if you can’t justify your vote by pointing to direct economic benefits your constituents are likely to receive.  If a legislator is being forced to vote on a symbolic matter, who wants to be the only legislator from a morally traditional district who didn’t take action to prevent men from using the ladies room? Let somebody else protect the State at large.

            Normally, that would be a job for the governor.  But Governor McCrory needs the evangelicals to turn out for him if he has any hope of keeping his seat in the Fall. He had no choice, as a political matter, but to sign the bill.

            The upshot is that Charlotte was an easy target for the largely Republican state legislature.  Few if any of the legislators who voted for HB 2 will face any retribution from the voters.  It would be surprising if any of their constituents care very much about what goes on in the state’s largest city, a place that must seem like a foreign country to many of them.  A vote in favor of HB 2 must have seemed like an easy way for state legislators to strike a blow against the demographic forces that, for many people, are changing America into a place that more closely resembles Charlotte than the neighborhoods and towns they used to live in.

            And that’s why the situation reminds me of the licking dog.  It’s always nice to have the capacity to give oneself some temporary meaningless pleasure, particularly when no one else has the power to stop you.

            But all that licking ultimately gets you nowhere, and, instead, ends up being just a colossal waste of time and energy.   

Potty Politics

Michael C. Hughes, transgendered man

           I’m taking a break today from potty-mouthed presidential candidates to focus instead on the politics of restrooms.

            We men really don’t give much thought to the public facilities we use to answer nature’s call.  These are not places in which anyone wants to spend much time.  We generally have stalls with doors for activities that require toilet paper. For activities that don’t require toilet paper, sometimes there are small dividers that make it difficult to see what your neighbor is doing, and sometimes there aren’t.

            I confess to a certain curiosity about the companion facilities devoted to ladies.  There must be something special about them since women tend to visit them in larger groupings and stay there somewhat longer than men would.  I presume that they largely consist of multiple stalls since all female restroom operations require toilet paper.  But, I’ve never been inside—I think I would feel uncomfortable and unwanted there with my bald head and graying mustache—so I really don’t know.

            I’ve taken to thinking about this because of the brouhaha that has just bubbled up from North Carolina in the last few days.  At the end of February, the Charlotte City Council passed an ordinance that protects people against discrimination based on marital status, sexual orientation and gender identity.  Among other things, it enables transgendered people to use the restrooms and locker rooms that correspond to their gender identity.

            The State of North Carolina would have none of that. 

            In response, the State Legislature passed, and the Governor signed into law, House Bill 2, otherwise known as the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act.  Among other things, the law strips cities and counties of their ability to provide greater levels of antidiscrimination protection than the State provides.  Not only does it mandate that people use the facilities designated for their “biological sex,” but it also prevents municipalities from requiring their contractors from extending that greater protection to their employees and customers or passing laws that make it illegal for places of public accommodation to discriminate against people for their gender identities if they happen to vary from their biological sex.

            To avoid all doubt, House Bill 2 specifically provides that there shall be no girls in the men’s room nor boys in the ladies' room.  The law does not provide for monitors to crosscheck anatomy with birth certificates.

            I don’t get this.

            I grew up in an era when, as Archie Bunker used to sing, “goyls were goyls and men were men.”  We all knew which room to use because we knew which gender we were.  Even if a person understood deep down that he or she was a she or a he, nobody had the means to swap out the equipment to conform to his or her internal reality.  Instead, the idea was to avoid stigma, humiliation and mistreatment by hiding the truth.  You just didn’t go around saying you were a girl when your equipment was male.  The ethic was to suffer in silence rather than accept the bruises and broken bones you’d get from other men who didn’t understand.

            But those days are over.  Modern medicine understands that nature doesn’t get it right all the time.  We acknowledge that on relatively rare occasions, nature issues you a jock strap when you really wanted a bra.  We accept that the greater harm is to require a person to betray his or her own nature by conforming to nature’s mistake. And we now have the technology to transform a Bruce into a Caitlin.

            The ostensible concern of the North Carolina State legislature seemed to be that a male sexual predator might decide to claim that his gender identity was female for the day and to haun the ladies' room somewhere in Charlotte, looking for someone female to rape or abuse.  Why there’s no similar concern about male sexual predators haunting the men’s room looking for weaker men and children to abuse is, BTW, remarkable.

            In places that allow people to use the restroom or locker facility consistent with their gender identities elsewhere in the country, there’s no evidence that what the North Carolina State Legislature apparently feared has ever happened.

            Nor is it likely to.  Transgender people have made a commitment to their true gender identities.  Men with female gender identities go out of their way to dress and look like women.  Men who have not made that commitment simply can’t walk into the ladies room and not be noticed, feared and ejected.   

            I can only think of two reasons for this law.  The first is an understandable discomfort on the part of the cigenered arising out of ignorance or prudishness.  These concerns should dissipate as people gain more experience with transgendered people.  In another context, whites, for example, learned to accept and even welcome blacks into what were once strictly segregated facilities (though it initially took the force of law to break the ice).

            But the other reason is troubling.  Even if Charlotte’s ordinance had not been voided by the state government, the vast number of restroom interactions (aside from interactions with porcelain) are going to continue to be between people whose external plumbing matches the room’s fixtures (at least as far as anyone knows).  With so few interactions between cigendered people and transgendered people in restrooms, the only problem the North Carolina law addresses is largely hypothetical or extremely rare.  And laws addressed to hypothetical or extremely rare problems are largely symbolic.

            We are living through an era in which we use symbols to divide and segregate ourselves from our neighbors.  It’s no longer acceptable, in real life, to discriminate overtly against anyone (unless, of course, you’re a Trump follower).  Thus, we use symbolic discrimination.  When our governmental authorities adopt laws that will have very little impact on real life situations, they do so as a way of demonstrating the dominance of one group over another.

            House Bill 2 may, to some extent, flows out of this.  It is the product of what is likely to be the  last gasp of a population that grew up in a whiter, straighter world.  Their numbers are declining, their political influence is waning, and everybody knows it. 

            It’s a shame that they can still make others suffer.  It’s a shame that they can’t pass gently and graciously into the night.