Actually, Doug Clark's blog is called Off The Record, but let's not quibble:
The Democratic governor is engaged in damage control today. He even called me, even though my take and the N&R editorial favored the compromise while acknowledging its drawbacks. We spoke for 23 minutes, mostly on the record. Cooper insisted yesterday's bill represents "nothing but forward movement" for North Carolina and ticked off the reasons why.
By repealing HB 2, it removes any directive on bathroom use. "People can go where they want," he said, meaning that transgender men can use men's facilities, transgender women can use women's facilities as they always have. Gone is the language requiring them to use the bathroom corresponding to the gender on their birth certificate.
I've been hawking social media today to gauge responses, and have seen a lot of analyses that point out what this deal has actually accomplished, versus yesterday's seeming consensus that it was HB2 all over again. But those who do support this move need to be real damn careful, and not create false hope. Just because HB2's bathroom/birth certificate bullshit is no longer statute, it doesn't automatically follow that, "People can go where they want." If it wasn't a problem before, if transgender men and women didn't have to "hold it" or make 2-3 trips home every day just to use the bathroom, that part of the Charlotte Ordinance wouldn't have been needed in the first place. It was a problem, and still is a problem, because without protections every trip to a public restroom is a gamble. And after a whole year of HB2 controversy, that gamble probably feels a lot more dangerous than before. Here are some other facets that may have been overlooked yesterday:
http://ift.tt/2nG2Yeu
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