Conservatives must admit to loss in bathroom law

As the battle over legislating gender identity in bathrooms plays out on the national stage via a highly publicized photo by conservative UCLA students, the issue of transgender exclusion in bathrooms is a heated one.

In North Carolina, public schools face looming threats in the wake of the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, a bathroom bill signed in late March that mandates that those in government buildings use the bathroom that matches their assigned sex at birth rather than their preferred gender identity. When administrators at the University of North Carolina  met to discuss the infamous bathroom law earlier this month, they weren’t focused on their stance on the issue so much as what was at stake — namely, $1.4 billion in federal funds and $800 million in federally-backed student loans.

As UNC President Margaret Spellings conveyed in the meeting, compliance with the state law means putting a significant number of students at risk if the state loses the Department of Justice lawsuit that alleges that  it violates a number of federal civil rights laws.

But Spellings also said that the White House does not hold “any greater interest in poor and minority students losing financial aid than we do,” according to the Associated Press.

And thus stands the Obama administration’s dilemma between taking a stand on the issue by cutting federal funding to the state and protecting the aid of thousands of poor and minority students in the state. For the administration, it means that now is the time for clever political maneuvering — the White House needs some strong negotiators on its side in order to have its cake and eat it too.

For North Carolina, the looming threat of federal funding cuts should be more than enough for Republican legislators to save the legal battle for another day. It doesn’t help that the bathroom predator myth from which the law derives is largely baseless — as ABC News reported, a coalition of sexual assault and domestic violence organizations found that none of the 200-plus municipalities and 18 states with transgender bathroom access nondiscrimination laws have experienced increases in public safety issues. Moreover, the harm for transgender people remain high. As a study cited in The Atlantic by assistant professor Kristie Seelman at Georgia State University found, failing to provide gender-inclusive bathroom access is associated with higher suicide rates among transgender people.

But perhaps, just as cutting funding for North Carolina schools would make an example out of the state in the Obama administration’s eyes, standing by a fear-driven law in order to placate right-wing discomfort about the changing face of America would show that bathroom access is a conservative priority. But if the civil rights and women’s rights movements have shown America anything, it’s that states don’t win federalist battles regarding discrimination. So regardless of the highly-anticipated outcome of the federal lawsuit, North Carolina lawmakers standing by their bathroom law should change their tune. In the short term, losing means facing major financial consequences. And in the long term, it means standing in the way of inevitable identity inclusion.