Trial Challenging North Carolina’s HB2 Delayed

Photo: Shutterstock

A trial challenging North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” which requires transgender people to use the restroom correlating to the gender they were assigned at birth and not the gender they actually are, has been pushed back until May 2017, so that the Supreme Court can have time to hear a case along similar lines which stems from Virginia.

The two cases are unrelated, and the North Carolina case will be heard within that state, but the decision by the judge to delay the lower court trial is a logical one.

The result of the Supreme Court trial could establish precedent on how to deal with the North Carolina case, which was due to begin in November, but would likely end up running at least in part concurrently with the SCOTUS trial. Pushing this case back, then, is common sense because it will likely reduce the amount of time the trial is actually being heard, and could render it effectively moot anyway, depending on how SCOTUS finds.

The North Carolina law, HB2, as well as similar laws in other parts of the country, are being challenged because while they purport to protect the safety of women in restrooms, there are already laws that do this, and critics argue that these laws are simply created to discriminate against transgender people. They claim that requiring transgender people to use restrooms of their assigned gender, and not their actual, lived gender, puts them at risk of violence, which seems to be a credible argument.

Since the passage of HB2 in March of 2016, there have been numerous attempts by other states to pass such laws, which have met with significant backlash.

Some companies, such as Target, have vowed that they will not enforce such laws, or have moved to make all their restrooms unisex, and other such stances. Shortly after Target announced that they would not police restroom, a woman set off a bomb in one of their restrooms as an act of “free speech.”

Ultimately, the Supreme Court’s decision will have a strong effect on any of these other bills, and how SCOTUS decides will have a lot to do with the number of justices on the bench—presuming the current vacancy is filled—and their political leanings.

What do you think of “bathroom bills?” Do you believe SCOTUS will set a precedent one way or another, or do you think the court will be deadlocked on the issue because it is currently one justice short? Please share your thoughts in the comments.