North Carolina Enacts Legislation Defining Sex as Male and Female Only
As of January 1, North Carolina has officially recognized only two sexes: male and female. This change is part of a comprehensive legislative bill led by Republican lawmakers that targets transgender rights.
The legislation, known as House Bill 805 and formally titled Prevent Sexual Exploitation/Women and Minors, initially aimed to protect individuals from having explicit content of themselves posted online without consent. However, it later expanded to include several conservative measures affecting transgender individuals and educational policies.
Although Democratic Governor Josh Stein vetoed the bill in July, calling it part of “divisive, job-killing culture wars,” the General Assembly successfully overrode the veto with enough support to pass the bill into law by the end of the month.
The legislation’s new definition of sex began this Thursday, with Republican House Speaker Destin Hall describing it as a law that adopts “simple concepts that are just common sense.”
Critics, however, argue that the bill discriminates against transgender, nonbinary, and intersex individuals. Daniel Siegel, deputy legal director for the ACLU of North Carolina, stated that the law aims to deny the existence of these groups, asserting that a person’s sex is unchangeably male or female as determined at birth. “The statute aims to deny the very existence of these minorities,” Siegel remarked.
While the bill acknowledges that gender identity might not match biological sex, it declares that identity will not be treated as legally equivalent to one’s sex. The legislation echoes a prior executive order by former President Donald Trump, which also focused on biological sex classification at the federal level.
State Senate leader Phil Berger, in support of the bill, noted that many of the executive orders from Trump have been adopted at the state level, including the definition of sex in North Carolina law as based on biology.
Despite the changes, transgender individuals still retain the ability to alter the sex designation on their birth certificates. However, House Bill 805 mandates that the original document remains on file, which could potentially reveal a person’s transgender status if a certified copy is required.
Beyond redefining sex, the bill also prohibits state funding for gender-affirming care for incarcerated individuals, grants parents the power to prevent their children from borrowing certain library books, and extends the timeframe for patients to file malpractice lawsuits against providers of gender-affirming care.
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