The Secret History of HB-2: Bathroom Safety in the Eighteenth Century and Beyond

Abstract

In April of 2016, the political imagination turned toward what happens in women’s bathrooms. In the wake of what the North Carolina House Bill 2 banally called “the regulation of employment and public accommodations,” Republican politicians incited a highly politicized discussion of bathrooms as private and segregated spaces (“An Act to Provide”). A Politico headline read, “Transgender Bathroom Battle Rocks Republican Race,” as Ted Cruz challenged his opponent Donald Trump for his indifference to the pressing issue of men entering women’s bathrooms without consequence (Gass). Telling Glenn Beck that “we have gone off the deep end,” Cruz worried in the waning days of his candidacy about “the idea that grown men would be allowed alone in a bathroom with little girls—you don’t need to be a behavioral psychologist to realize that bad things can happen, and any prudent person wouldn’t allow that” (qtd. in Byrnes). North Carolina Senate Leader Phil Berger claimed that the “bathroom safety bill has nothing to do with discrimination and everything to do with protecting women’s privacy and keeping men out of girls’ bathrooms” (qtd. in “NC Weighs Impact”). Jerry Boykin, a prominent former member of George W. Bush’s defense team, was fired from his teaching position at Hampden-Sydney for telling a conservative group, “the first man that walks in my daughter’s bathroom, he ain’t going to have to worry about surgery” (qtd. in Beaujon). The specter of the grotesque, predatory “transgender” is pitted against the pure, virginal daughter whose sanctuary he invades. The transphobic anxiety recalls Bruno Bettelheim’s description of the grandmother-devouring wolf (a “cross dresser”) in Little Red Riding Hood: “not just the male seducer, he also represents all the asocial, animalistic tendencies within ourselves” (172). And in response to this seducer, we are told, we need politicians not only to protect us but also to legislate and regulate sexual identity. The rhetorical wildfire was sparked by HB-2, the “Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act,” which swiftly passed in both the North Carolina State House and Senate. Responding to a nondiscrimination ordinance enacted by the Charlotte City Council and inclusive protections that extended to bathrooms,