North Carolina Republicans file sweeping bill targeting transgender rights to bathrooms, documents

Kyle Ingram, The Charlotte Observer on Mar 25, 2025

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RALEIGH, N.C. — North Carolina Republicans on Tuesday filed a sweeping bill targeting transgender rights to bathroom access and updated legal documents.

The bill, Senate Bill 516, would require that bathrooms in public schools and other facilities “shall only be used by one designated biological sex at one time,” restricting transgender people from using the restroom corresponding to their gender identity.

It also would empower someone who “encounters a person of the opposite biological sex in a covered facility” to bring lawsuits.

The list of facilities encompassed by the bathroom restrictions include prisons, domestic violence centers, rape crisis centers and public schools, including public colleges and universities.

In addition to bathrooms, SB 516 also targets transgender people’s ability to get legal documents that align with their gender.

If enacted, the bill would strip transgender people of the right to change the gender on their birth certificate if they receive sex reassignment surgery. It would also require that all driver’s licenses reflect a person’s sex at birth — not their gender identity.

The bill reignites a contentious debate over bathroom access that roiled the state in 2016 following the passage of House Bill 2, a similar law restricting transgender people from using the bathroom aligned to their gender.

At a news conference Tuesday centered around a slate of pro-LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights bills filed by Democrats, a tearful Sen. Julie Mayfield said the state should not return to the days of HB2.

“We’re done with that,” she said. “We need to be done with that. We need to recognize who people are. We need to allow them to live their lives, and we need to be done with treating people as anything less than whole human beings deserving of respect and dignity.”

In the fallout from HB2, analysts estimated that North Carolina’s economy was expected to lose billions of dollars as businesses withdrew plans to invest in the state.

Now, however, 13 states across the country have enacted similar legislation to restrict bathroom access, and President Donald Trump’s administration has targeted transgender people through executive orders.

In 2023, North Carolina Republicans enacted a series of bills targeting transgender minors, after overriding Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s vetoes.

Those bills banned transgender girls from participating in women’s sports, prohibited minors from receiving certain gender-affirming care and barred school instruction on gender identity in early grades.

SB 516 has yet to be scheduled for a committee hearing, but one of its sponsors is Sen. Vickie Sawyer, an Iredell County Republican who successfully brought the transgender sports ban last session.

Sawyer declined to comment on the bill, telling reporters before a committee hearing she was “not prepared to talk right now.”

In 2023, when Sawyer introduced the ban on transgender women in sports, she said “this bill is not against anybody, but it is for all women.”

The bill’s filing came on the same day that dozens of activists supporting LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights came to the North Carolina Legislative Building to advocate for more protections for their communities.

Democratic lawmakers filed over 10 bills along these lines, including legislation to codify the right to contraceptives and in-vitro fertilization, ban conversion therapy and repeal the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors.

While they acknowledged the bills were unlikely to see the light of day in the Republican-controlled legislature, they said it was still important to speak out.

During Democrats’ press conference, Rep. Allison Dahle, one of the few openly LGBTQ+ members of the legislature, repurposed a famous quote from a German pastor during the Holocaust.

“First, they came for the transgender (community), and I did not speak out because I was not transgender,” she said. “Then they came for the lesbians, and I did not speak out because I was not a lesbian. Then they came for the gay men, and I did not speak out because I wasn’t a gay man. And then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me — and that’s where we’re headed.”

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