There is a bill in the NC House (HB 562) intended to target transgender people. It doesn't say so on up front, but the bill increases the penalty for second-degree trespass from 20 days maximum to 120 days maximum if the offense occurs "in a multi-occupancy bathroom, shower or changing facility."

So is everyone safe now?

The New England Journal of Medicine has weighed in on how the bathroom issue affects the health of transgender people in an article entitled Beyond Bathrooms — Meeting the Health Needs of Transgender People by Mark A Schuster, Sari L. Reisner and Sarah E. Onorato which appeared in the July 14, issue.

New York architect Esther Sperber has been thinking about he problem. The solution she has arrived at is architectural in nature: Bathrooms By Size

Sperber suggests that labeling restrooms by size, as opposed to gender, would eliminate the arguments favoring “bathroom bills” like North Carolina’s House Bill 2, which effectively prohibit transgender people from using public facilities that correspond with the gender identity. In the clip, Sperber explains why she believes that such categorizing would not only function better for those who don’t fit into a traditional male/female gender binary, but also address other issues, like long lines at women’s restrooms.

I like to think that good architecture can solve problems,

--Sperber

Vermont is one of the states in which transgender people theoretically have equal rights.

I'm sure that's what AJ Jackson thought when he sheepishly walked into the boys' bathroom at Green Mountain High School in Chester, VT recently.

But the way some of his classmates see it, A J was still Autumn Jackson, a girl in boys’ clothing, who had violated an intimate sanctum, while two boys were standing at a urinal, their private parts exposed.

And that has led to students channeling their parents.

So, there has been an incident in the Charlotte-Mecklenberg School District.

A trans boy who is a student at Olympic High School had to use the restroom. The school district has plans for a designated facility, but it is not ready yet, so the trans students used the boy's restroom. As the student pulled his pants down to use the toilet, a cisgender student walked in on him.

That student saw the image and immediately walked out.

Jacqui Oesterblad from Liberal with Words has one of the best responses to the "bathroom bill" controversy that I have read in a while.

Controversy over transgender people’s access to public bathrooms is not new—Arizona had a bathroom bill fight back in 2013. But the issue has risen to prominence in the past few weeks because of the recent hubbub in North Carolina, where the backlash to the bathroom bill led Bruce Springsteen and Bryan Adams to cancel concerts, PayPal and Deutsche Bank to cancel planned expansions, and porn site XHamster to shut down access from North Carolina-based IP addresses. The consequences for North Carolina may even include the loss of over $4.3 billion dollars in federal education funding.

Why, despite the economic and legal consequences, do states like North Carolina fight so hard to prevent transgender people from peeing?

The far-right likes to claim they are fighting to protect women and children.

So let’s talk about some little girls who need to be protected.

Earlier today the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia heard arguments about Gavin Grimm's request to use the boys bathroom at school. Grimm and the ACLU are suing the Gloucester County School Board.