State Senate Republicans are backing a bill that defines two biological sexes – male and female – and defines gender as biological sex, and adds new regulations for state prisoners and birth certificates. It's the latest volley in a years-longpoliticalculture war that has increasingly focused on transgender people.
While the N.C. House passed a similar bill in May, the Senate version was amended into a bipartisan House bill protecting victims of online sexual exploitation.
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"We can't ignore the biological realities, and we believe our state laws should reflect that," said Sen. Buck Newton, R-Wilson, in a committee hearing Tuesday.
Newton said the bill, by specifically citing President Donald Trump's executive order on the topic, "further ensures that our state maintains eligibility for any and all federal funding and program participation."
The amended bill defines biological sex as indicated by "reproductive potential or capacity, such as sex chromosomes, naturally occurring sex hormones, gonads and nonambiguous internal and external genitalia present at birth, without regard to an individual's psychological, chosen or subjective experience of gender."
"There seems to be a great deal of confusion amongst some in our society about the fluidity of sex, and it is time that we clarify once and for all what most people recognize to be obvious, which is that there's only two sexes," Newton said.
"We see it play out in women's sports. We see it play out with safety and security in locker rooms. We see it play out in places where two genders are put in intimate spaces together against their will," Newton said. "It's time to just make this clear in the law, once and for all."
"I actually don't understand why this chamber is so obsessed with genitalia, but here we are," said Sen. Sydney Batch, D-Wake, who said the measure ignores scientific reality.
"There are individuals, infants that are born, who are intersex," Batch said. "This bill does not allow for a definition that's based in science."
Newton answered that the infant's sex chromosomes could be used to identify its sex in such a case, but Batch responded that those chromosomes can also be ambiguous in some cases. She asked whether the bill's author consulted any doctors or geneticists in writing the definition.
"I personally haven't had those conversations," Newton conceded. "I've read a lot of literature, especially over the years, about this sort of thing, so I don't think I'm totally ignorant about it."
The measure would also ban the N.C. Department of Public Safety from using state taxpayer funds to pay for sex reassignment surgery for inmates in the correctional system.
Sen. Mujtaba Mohammed, D-Mecklenburg, noted that state Secretary of Adult Corrections Leslie Cooley Dismukes recently told Senate lawmakers the state has never paid for such a surgery. But Newton said lawsuits could force the matter.
"We think it's important that we draw the line now before anybody attempts to do such a thing," Newton said.
The amended House Bill 805 would also require that if a person's gender is changed on their birth certificate due to reassignment surgery, the old birth certificate would have to be attached to the new one for all official uses of the document. Critics said that would forcibly "out" a transgender person.
Some House sponsors of the bill were present at the meeting. Rep. Laura Budd, D-Mecklenburg, lamented that the gender provisions had been inserted in the anti-exploitation bill, which she said would implement very important protections for women and minors.
"When we take this bill and we layer it with those things, we're not doing good for people in North Carolina," Budd said. "It becomes a political football."
The bill was scheduled to receive a vote in the Senate Judiciary Wednesday afternoon, but it was removed from the day's calendar Wednesday morning.