Advocates call on NC to reintroduce bathroom restrictions for transgender people

Kyle Ingram, The News & Observer on May 12, 2026

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RALEIGH, N.C. — A socially conservative group is calling on North Carolina lawmakers to reintroduce broad restrictions on bathroom usage by transgender individuals, a decade after the controversial passage (and subsequent repeal) of House Bill 2.

At a press conference on Tuesday outside the legislative building, the N.C. Values Coalition pushed for the state to ban transgender women from using women’s bathrooms in K-12 public schools and universities.

“Allowing students to access the opposite sex bathroom is harmful for all involved,” Ashley Vaughan, the group’s communications director, said. “Gender-confused students deserve care and compassion, but allowing them to access the opposite sex bathroom only adds more chaos and confusion to their lives.”

The coalition was joined by high school students from Cabarrus County, who said they did not wish to encounter “biological males” in the school restroom.

The press conference was frequently interrupted by a handful of counterprotesters, who accused the group of attempting to erase the existence of transgender people.

“Groups like NC Values Coalition and Moms for Liberty are leading the charge (to) erase LGBTQ-identifying people from North Carolina,” Heather Redding, one of the counterprotesters, said. “They are doing incredible harm to trans kids, in particular by limiting their access to anything that validates their identity.”

Redding also raised concerns about how such restrictions could be enforced without invading students’ privacy.

Asked how a hypothetical bathroom bill should enforce the restrictions, Vaughan said “people would be required to use the bathroom that corresponds with the biological reality that is listed on their birth certificate.”

There have been numerous reported cases of individual citizens mistakenly suspecting someone as transgender and questioning their presence in the bathroom that corresponds with their biological sex.

Several Republican state senators introduced a bathroom bill, Senate Bill 516, last year, which would have required many public restrooms to only be used by members of the designated biological sex. But the bill never got a hearing.

When Republican lawmakers passed HB2 in 2016, North Carolina was the first state in the country to enact bathroom restrictions aimed at transgender individuals.

The bill faced major backlash, with analysts estimating that the state’s economy was expected to lose billions of dollars as businesses withdrew plans to invest in the state. Canceled or delayed events ranged from the NBA All-Star Game to a Bruce Springsteen concert.

In 2017, the legislature repealed the bathroom restrictions in HB2; it has not passed a similar bathroom bill since.

But now, nearly half of all states have adopted some form of transgender bathroom restrictions, and the Trump administration has issued a series of executive orders targeting the transgender community.

In 2023, North Carolina Republicans enacted a series of bills targeting transgender minors, after overriding Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s vetoes.

Those bills banned transgender girls from participating in women’s sports, prohibited minors from receiving certain gender-affirming care and barred school instruction on gender identity in early grades.