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Proposed North Carolina transgender sports bill could be HB2 all over again

So we’ve learned nothing.

That’s the only way to look at House Bill 358, the latest attempt by Republicans in the North Carolina legislature to codify legal discrimination against transgender people, five years after they did the same thing with House Bill 2, to this state’s eternal indignity and shame.

It’s HB2 II.

The bill, which would ban transgender girls from high school girls’ sports teams, is a draconian solution to a problem that doesn’t actually exist. It’s enforceable only by genital inspection, as dystopian a phrase as ever concocted.

Even if this monstrosity somehow passes the legislature, Gov. Roy Cooper assuredly won’t sign it and supporters are unlikely to have the votes to override his veto. But the sports community is once again watching closely, and prepared to act again.

While there are legitimate concerns about how to best handle the question of transgender women competing against cisgender women, the science and best practices are still evolving. There will certainly at some point, with time and research, be a solution that works for everyone.

This isn’t it.

There isn’t a wave of transgender girls “taking over” women’s sports, just as there wasn’t an epidemic of bathroom assaults that called for the gross overreach of HB2, the so-called “bathroom bill.” All there is are kids — and this bill specifically targets children, not adults — trying to find their way in a world that isn’t as friendly or familiar to them as it is to us.

Because it’s a hard concept for most people to approach let alone comprehend, transgender people are an easy target for this kind of culture-war posturing, just as gay marriage was only a decade ago. (Remember Amendment 1?) These kinds of bills have become trendy across the country, with three anti-transgender bills under consideration in this North Carolina legislative session alone.

One particularly onerous Senate bill that would make gender-related health care for minors illegal has already been sidelined. Another that would allow doctors to refuse care to transgender individuals on religious grounds remains under consideration. But HB 358 seems to have the most momentum, because it hides behind a seemingly reasonable premise — that transgender girls have an innate athletic advantage over cisgender girls — that has yet to be substantiated, in science or in practice.

The NCAA and the Olympics already allow older transgender women to compete in women’s sports if they undergo a year of hormone treatment that suppresses testosterone levels. Because those levels build throughout puberty and young adulthood, there’s still medical uncertainty about their effect on athleticism at the high-school level.

Many transgender girls have already taken puberty-blocking drugs that limit their testosterone levels anyway, negating the supposed advantage they would have. And what about cisgender girls with naturally high testosterone levels; should they be prohibited from competition as well?

Not only do transgender girls make up a tiny fraction of the adolescent population, California’s high school association has let transgender girls compete against other girls since 2014 without a ripple. A lone lawsuit in Connecticut filed by cisgender female runners who lost to a transgender competitor has gotten a ton of attention, but the Associated Press found almost no instances of a problem in any of the states considering similar bans.

Nor is there any concern about transgender boys competing against cisgender boys. Could they not have comparable physical advantages at the high-school level? No one seems concerned about that, because cloaking this kind of rhetoric in “women’s rights” hides the true evil of it.

It’s fear-mongering for the sake of fear-mongering, which was at the heart of HB2, and look at the damage that did to the state. How quickly we forget the days when North Carolina was a national pariah. Strictly in the sports context, it cost North Carolina not only an NBA All-Star Game and an NCAA basketball weekend in Greensboro but nearly four full years of NCAA championships, the latter averted literally on the last possible day by the partial repeal engineered by Cooper after he took office.

The NCAA said it will “closely monitor” bills like HB 358, and there’s no reason to expect a different set of consequences this time around. The Triangle alone is scheduled to host 15 NCAA events over the next five years and the NCAA hasn’t hesitated to pull events out of North Carolina in the past. It moved seven in 2016, including the first and second rounds of the 2017 basketball tournament, when the NCAA had enough of North Carolina’s inaction. The ACC moved all of its neutral-site championships out of the state, including the 2016 football title game in Charlotte.

Charlotte eventually got its All-Star Game, the concerts and conventions and NCAA championships came back, the state’s reputation slowly recovered, and even the most hard-headed HB2 advocates had to realize that whatever they were trying to accomplish, it wasn’t worth the cost. Nor have bathrooms been an issue since.

The political dynamic has changed since then, which makes this bill less likely to pass, but the NCAA and ACC are both watching closely, and we’re still letting targeted hate and bigotry set the agenda while everyone else is set to pay the consequences.

It’s HB2 Part Deux. Hopefully, we’ve learned from our past mistakes.