RALEIGH (LifeSiteNews) — The North Carolina legislature has voted to enact a new law comprehensively cracking down on the transgender agenda and its threats to religious freedom and conscience rights (plus impose new limits on the pornography industry and further protections for parental rights), overriding a veto from Democrat Gov. Josh Stein.
HB 805 declares that male and female, defined based on biology, will be the only sexes recognized in the state, requires non-coerced written consent and age verification for posting pornographic material online, mandates pornography sites adopt procedures for removal of images upon request, bans public funding of “transitions” for gender-confused minors (surgical and chemical), establishes civil remedies for “transitions” on non-minors, requires parents be allowed to opt students out of classroom content conflicting with their religious beliefs, requires parents be given access to school library books for review, forbids schools from requiring students to share sleeping quarters with members of the opposite sex, and requires the state to preserve original birth certificates even when a certificate is changed.
Stein vetoed it July 3, claiming that it added “divisive, job-killing culture wars” to an early draft that only had the porn provisions, which he supported. Yet on July 29, the House voted 72-48 to override his veto, and the Senate voted 30-19 to do the same, making it law despite the governor’s objection.
“We applaud the NC House and Senate for taking this needed and common-sense step to protect women and girls, and to reaffirm parental rights in our state,” reacted North Carolina Values Coalition Executive Director Tami Fitzgerald. “NC needed to define two sexes by biology in the law so that women are not robbed of safety, dignity, and opportunities. We needed to stop public schools from forcing girls to share sleeping quarters with boys.”
“We needed to give victims of experimental medical and surgical ‘gender transition’ interventions a path to justice for their injuries instead of leaving them in the cold,” she added, also highlighting the need to protect women and girls from exploitation through online pornography.
“And we needed to give parents the ability to opt-out of educational materials that conflict with their beliefs and protect their children from exposure to sexually explicit content in schools. We’d like to thank the General Assembly for taking bold action this session to ensure that families in our state have the best conditions to thrive and flourish,” Fitzgerald continued.
It is a dictate of progressivism that gender is no more than a matter of self-perception that individuals are free to change at will. But according to biology, sex is not a subjective sense of self but an objective scientific reality, established by an individual’s chromosomes from their earliest moments of existence and reflected by hundreds of genetically-based characteristics.
Yet for years LGBT activists have worked to promote “gender fluidity,” the idea that sexual identity is separate from biology and discernible only by personal perception, across public education, libraries, health care, and cultural traditions such as school homecomings and athletic competitions.
Critics warn that their efforts have yielded a wide array of harms, both to the physical and mental health of gender-confused individuals themselves as well as to the rights, health, and safety of those who disagree, such as girls and women forced to share intimate facilities with males, female athletes forced to compete against biological males with natural physical advantages, and individuals forced to affirm false sexual identities in violation of their consciences, scientific fact, and/or their religious beliefs.
A large body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “reassignment” procedures fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”
