Starting Jan. 1, the state of North Carolina officially recognizes only two sexes, male and female, after Republican lawmakers passed a wide-ranging bill targeting the transgender community.
The bill, House Bill 805, titled Prevent Sexual Exploitation/Women and Minors, began as a bipartisan piece of legislation aimed at protecting people who have explicit content of themselves posted on pornography websites.
However, Republicans later tacked on a bevy of conservative restrictions on transgender rights and K-12 education.
Democratic Gov. Josh Stein vetoed the bill in July, accusing lawmakers of engaging in “divisive, job-killing culture wars.”
Republican House Speaker Destin Hall defended the legislation, saying it “would enshrine in law simple concepts that are just common sense.”
The General Assembly overrode Stein’s veto later that month, with one Democrat joining Republicans to achieve the required supermajority vote.
Many of the bill’s changes have already taken effect, but the state’s official recognition of only two sexes began Thursday.
Daniel Siegel, deputy legal director for the ACLU of North Carolina, said the provision was “designed to punish” transgender and nonbinary individuals, alongside intersex people, who are born with sexual anatomy that does not neatly fit into a male or female sex classification.
“The statute aims to deny the very existence of these minorities, asserting that a person’s sex is immutably male or female and cannot change from what is designated at birth,” Siegel said.
The bill notes that a person’s gender identity may not align with their biological sex, but states that their identity “shall not be treated as legally or biologically equivalent to sex.”
It also references President Donald Trump’s executive order on biological sex, which instituted a similar policy for the federal government.
Helping kick off a Trump appearance in Rocky Mount this month, state Senate leader Phil Berger cheered the executive orders. “We’ve implemented here in North Carolina many of them at the state level,” Berger said, “including defining the two sexes, male and female, in North Carolina state law, defining them based on biology, not ideology.”
Transgender people will still be able to change the sex designation on their birth certificate, but HB 805 requires the state to keep a copy of the original document and file them together, rather than replacing the outdated record.
“This could have the effect of outing someone if they need to provide a certified copy of their birth certificate,” Siegel said.
In addition to defining sex as only male and female, HB 805 bans the use of state funds for gender-affirming care for people in prison, allows parents to ban their children from checking out any library book they object to and extends the time period wherein a patient can sue providers of gender-affirming care for malpractice.