North Carolina’s Sexual Segregation of Restroom Law

North Carolina’s Sexual Segregation of Restroom Law

Thomas Allen

[Editor’s note: This was submitted as a letter to the editor. The editor of this newspaper opposes North Carolina’s voter identification law and its restroom sexual segregation law, SB2, which requires people to use the restroom of the sex on their birth certificate. His reason for opposing these two laws is that they attempt to solve problems that do not exist.]

    I went to what is now called middle school with some boys who had an annual contest of getting expelled from school for the rest of the year. The first boy to be expelled for the rest of the year won.
    They would have loved today’s school policies void of common sense and guided by zero tolerance. When they entered the classroom on the first day of school, they would have shown the teacher a picture of a gun and demanded to be expelled. They would have repeated this process every time that they returned to school until they were expelled for the rest of the year.
    Sexually integrated restrooms, which the recent enactment of the General Assembly prohibits, may have been enough to keep these boys in school. On the first day of school, they would have informed the teacher that they felt like girls and demanded to use the girl’s restroom. Thus, some good could have come from sexually integrated restrooms: keeping these boys in school.
    We are witnessing big business bullying North Carolina with the extortion of threatened boycotts. The reason for this bullying has more to do with the bottom line than with equality. If restrooms were sexually integrated, the cost of new construction could be reduced by cutting restroom facilities in half. No longer would they have to build restrooms for women and for men. They need only build one for all.
    Some people condemn the General Assembly for being proactive with the voters’ identification law and the restroom segregation law to prevent problems before they occur. Yet many of these same people condemn the General Assembly for not being proactive when problems do occur, such as the coal ash spill.
    Most of these people denounce the General Assembly for selling out to big business on the coal ash issue. Now they denounce the General Assembly for not selling out to big business on the sexual integration of restroom issue.
    Go figure! I guess it depends on one’s agenda, whether the General Assembly should be proactive.

Copyright © 2016 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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