After North Carolina held a special session that passed the controversial bill regarding LGBT accommodations, the Twittersphere broke out into a frenzy and the hashtag #WeAreNotThis began trending.
On March 23, North Carolina’s legislator convened for a special meeting regarding the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act. Once the bill was passed, Republican Gov. Pat McCory immediately signed it into action. The bill makes it so that cities can no longer allow transgender individuals to use the public restroom for the gender they identify as. It also bars cities from passing non-discrimination laws.
The law has led to outrage from the LGBT community and residents of the state as well as support from corporations and other states. Recently, Twitter users took to the social media site to state their opinions about the law.
Using the hashtag #WeAreNotThis, people have condemned North Carolina’s government for passing what they believe is a shameful and discriminatory law. One Twitter user said that the law shows “obvious bigotry.”
Other states are standing by the LGBT community by banning unnecessary travel to the state. Along with the unnecessary travel bans to the state, Gov. Pat McCory and the University of North Carolina system have been named as defendants in a lawsuit. The lawsuit challenges not only the state bill, but the school’s rule regarding individuals to use the bathroom of the gender they were assigned at birth.
This bill in many ways angers me. Firstly, the bill, in my perspective, is very discriminatory and brings a bad light upon both the governor of North Carolina and the state itself. I believe that the controversy over the bill will in fact reach the Supreme Court and that hopefully after the struggle with protecting LGBT individual’s rights, they will do the right thing and shoot down this bills. In many instances, this bill makes it look as if transgender people are the problem, when in fact it is those that discriminate that are.
In your house a bathroom is probably shared by males and females, so why is it that someone who was born one sex but identifies as another isn’t allowed to use the bathroom of their preferred sex? Gov. McCory has defended the bill by saying it makes “common sense” and allows for safety, guaranteeing that a man will not identify as a woman just to get into a women’s bathroom to look at women. However, if that is the case then the governor could make it so that public areas have a separate bathroom for those who are transgender. Instead he has decided to pass a bill that excludes them from their own right of choice and targets the LGBT community.
Another reason this bill upsets me is that like many residents of North Carolina I don’t like that they held a special session just to push the bill through faster. This suggests that they were trying to target the LGBT community. They wasted money on holding this special session over this bill when it could’ve been used for something else. As one Twitter user mentioned, they decided to use the special session to pass this bill rather than thinking about using it to discuss teachers wages. In general, this bill is outrageous to me and others. It is obvious that this bill is meant to discriminate against transgender people.
