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Among the bleak election results for Democrats in 2024, North Carolina stood out as an exception: gubernatorial candidate Josh Stein, the Democratic attorney general, won in a landslide against scandal-ridden Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson. Democrats also kept Stein's old office and a number of other statewide positions.

Despite extensive gerrymandering, Republicans even lost their supermajority in the state House. Crucially, this meant that if future far-right legislation were to make it to the governor’s desk, a united Democratic bloc would be able to sustain Stein’s vetoes. Here, as elsewhere, LGTBQ+ voters overwhelmingly cast their ballots for the party’s candidates — and helped Democrats secure key wins — for just this reason.

While plenty of trans people in N.C. are understandably skeptical of the Democrats, for reasons we'll delve into later in this piece, there was some cautious hope that the party’s gains would stave off the anti-trans laws that have proliferated around the country, especially in the South.

Over the past few months those hopes were demolished.

Two anti-trans bills, HB805 and SB442, passed the far-right General Assembly earlier this summer. The first, a sweeping anti-trans law targeting everything from the use of state funds for trans healthcare to changing gender markers on birth certificates, passed with all but a single Democrat — Rep. Dante Pittman — against it, though there were a number of notable “excused” absences from other Democrats in the state House.

SB442 was a different story, one that should have served as a warning sign for the eventual fate of HB805. The bill was supposedly written against the non-existent spectre of children being seized from parents if they didn't get their pronouns right. In reality, the bill sanctions and protects the intentional abuse of trans youth, according to Corinne Green, TNN’s policy advisor.

North Carolina prohibits child placement agencies from denying or delaying the opportunity to become an adoptive parent on the basis of race, color, national origin… and now, transphobia.

Under SB442, agencies aren’t allowed to refrain from placing trans youth with transphobic adoptive parents, a situation rife for abuse or even murder. Given that far-right officials in other states have threatened to seize trans children from supportive parents, it also starts to lay the groundwork for further atrocities, as well as giving N.C.'s notoriously arbitrary courts an opening to further chip away at trans rights.

“If you do not already have a trans youth to do felony abuse to, a trans youth will be provided for you,” Green bleakly summed up on Bluesky following SB442’s passage.

While N.C. Senate Democrats unanimously voted against SB442, this time eight Democratic representatives joined Rep. Pittman in support of the anti-trans measure — including Rep. Cecil Brockman, who is openly bi.

Like many other places across the country, North Carolina has its share of “Gay Inc.” non-profits, who are, in theory, supposed to act as the voice of queer and trans communities when it comes to pressuring the establishment. In practice, as former Gay Inc. vet and academic Myrl Beam, who popularized the term, noted, “dominant voices within the LGBT movement are focused on a narrow ‘equality’ agenda, organizing for inclusion into existing systems of power” and furthering their own careers. This happens even at a cost of damaging the vast majority of queer and trans people oppressed by those same systems.

In N.C. these groups are loath to ever criticize Democrats even when they directly take bigoted stances against trans and queer people. Accordingly, they made statements against SB442, as well as the more clearly party line HB805, but stopped short of targeting any Democrats who supported those bills. So did LGBTQ Democratic organizations.

“These are vulnerable kids who have already faced trauma, rejection and instability — and now extremist politicians want to legally sanction more harm in the very homes meant to protect them,” LGTBQ Democrats of North Carolina declared in a May 7 Instagram post about SB442. “Denying a young person's identity is not 'parenting' it is abuse...We believe every child deserves safety, affirmation and love — not conditions, not conversion and not cruelty.”

“This dangerous bill targets trans youth in foster care,” Equality NC stated in a June 17 Facebook post, adding that the bill encourages “discrimination in adoption and foster care,” “undermining support for trans youth” and “weakening child welfare protections.”

Despite the Democratic votes in favor of the two anti-trans bills, as SB442 and HB805 reached Gov. Stein's desk in late June, Rep. Allison Dahle told the Washington Blade that she was “as confident as I can be” that he would veto both bills, and that even the Democrats who'd voted for the measures in the legislature wouldn’t help Republicans override Stein’s vetoes.

On July 2, Campaign for Southern Equality called for the governor to veto both bills, noting that if passed “they will be some of the cruelest and most restrictive anti-LGBTQ laws in the country — as well as incredibly harmful to trans folks.” Not for the first time, trans rights proved an afterthought for CSE.

The next day Stein signed SB442 into law. He issued no signing statement. There was no press conference. No well-practiced, pained expression. No overwrought words about what a difficult decision it had been. No empty reassurance about somehow still having the backs of trans youth in the state’s foster system. Instead, one of the most egregiously anti-trans child placement laws in the country was sandwiched right between the Neighbor State License Recognition Act and a bill sprucing up regulations for retirement communities in a list of legislation he’d signed.

The far-right NC Values Coalition quickly issued a giddy press release praising Stein for approving the anti-trans law. N.C.'s Gay Inc. organizations, by contrast, promptly went silent on the issue.

On Facebook, Equality NC posted a video collage of pride imagery set to Montell Jordan’s 1995 single “This is How We Do It,” while LGBTQ Democrats of North Carolina put up seemingly AI-generated praise for Congressional House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and seemingly AI-generated condemnation of the President’s budget bill.

The same day that Stein signed SB442 he also vetoed HB805, alongside a number of bills banning “DEI.” He dubbed them “mean-spirited” and an effort to “distract us by stoking culture wars that further divide us,” a line commonly used by Democrats who want to seem like they're supporting trans people without directly acknowledging our existence. It was a notable retreat from even the previous governor’s rhetoric.

Dahle, who’d earlier predicted both bills facing veto and defeat, did not return calls from TNN for comment.

For once I will agree with the Gay Inc. orgs, to a point. SB442 is despicable. It is dangerous. It is cruel. It is a threat.

It did not magically stop being so when a Democrat signed it.

The absence of even the most basic rebuke of Stein’s approval of SB442 from the mainstream organizations supposedly there to advocate for queer and trans communities also sent a giant signal to other Democrats that they, too, could turn against our rights. After all, they wouldn’t face any real, public political consequences for doing so. A few weeks after SB442’s sanctioned abuse became law, the General Assembly reconvened to try to override Stein's vetoes, including of HB805, the broader anti-trans bill. If Democratic legislators held the line, the bill would go down in defeat.

They did not. While Pittman (who had helped to pass the bill through the state House in the first place) voted against overriding the veto, Democratic Rep. Naseef Majeed (who'd had an “excused absence” during the initial vote) sided with Republicans this time to ensure HB805's final passage. He was also one of the nine Democratic House legislators who'd backed SB442.

While the snowballing betrayal of the trans community is appalling, it is also far from surprising. The backlash against, and eventual “repeal” of, HB2, N.C.'s infamous bathroom bill of the mid-2010s, is often held up as an example of how anti-trans laws used to draw far more widespread condemnation. But the reality was never that simple. Nor has the state Democratic Party been the friends to trans and queer communities they like to pretend during campaign season.

To get a clearer idea of what we're up against, why what's happening in North Carolina matters for trans people around the country and what we can do about it, we need to delve into some history.

Throughout much of the 20th century the North Carolina Democratic Party tried to present itself as the quieter, more reasonable alternative to its peers throughout the South. While other governors were giving rabidly racist speeches, Democrats like Gov. Terry Sanford blandly talked about the need for progress and civil rights (but not too fast).

This was, as so much else in our story, a facade over a far harsher and more complicated reality. Even as they built more infrastructure, roads, universities and schools than many other regimes in the region, North Carolina Democrats also enshrined some of the harshest anti-union laws in the country.

While crackdowns on civil rights demonstrators and the Black liberation movement in N.C. may not have drawn the same headlines as places like Selma — authorities were often more careful than governments elsewhere in the South — they were still plenty brutal. From the '40s through the '70s, riots against the segregated status quo rocked North Carolina cities from the mountains to the sea, sparked by everything from the abuse of Black soldiers to crackdowns on colleges to, of course, racist police violence.

Heading towards the ‘80s, the state government and the well-heeled boosters of N.C. business and tourism portrayed open riots and Klan violence as a thing of the past. But in 1979 local and state law enforcement knowingly turned a blind eye (or actively collaborated) with the KKK and neo-Nazis when they conspired to attack anti-racist organizers in Greensboro. This culminated in white supremacists opening fire on a multiracial anti-Klan march in an infamous massacre. The fact that the anti-racist demonstrators murdered by the Klan that day also were also involved with a serious union organizing push in the textile mills was not a coincidence.

This, more than marketing brochures and ribbon cuttings, revealed the reality of the “Old North State.” Historian William Chafe, tracing a history of oppression that extended from the 1898 Wilmington coup d'etat and massacre all the way to the modern day, summarized it perfectly.

“This same progressive mystique has served as an exquisite instrument of social control, defining the terrain of political discussion in such a way that African Americans, factory workers and field hands have found it virtually impossible to break through the veil of civility and insist on change,” Chafe wrote in 1998. “Black citizens continue to be politically isolated, wages in North Carolina continue to stagnate as some of the lowest in the nation, and most of the state's economic growth continues to cluster in metropolitan counties increasingly populated by newcomers.”

And when the social order was truly threatened, he continued, “the ultimate weapons of violence and demonization could always be employed. For the progressive mystique existed hand in hand with a less attractive but ultimately decisive willingness to use caricature, mass hysteria, fear and violence to maintain the racial status quo.”

Sound familiar?

Fortunately, the people of a place are not the same as its governments. Beyond the walls of that blood-soaked fortress plenty of communities under fire have survived, connected and fought against oppression with incredible bravery.

While the South is often written off — like many Southern queer and trans people I've been told to move more times than I can count — we've always been here. A 2023 analysis by the Williams Institute and the National LGBTQ Task Force found that 36 percent of LGTBQ people in the U.S. live in the South, a far higher percentage than any other region of the country. Despite all we face, that number is growing, not declining —and not for nothing.

Politically the state is far more fractured than it appears, and often more radical. Queer land projects lie across a mountain from fundamentalist compounds, lily white suburbs with enthusiastic Trump-backing gentry spill into mostly Black rural areas with a long history of working class organizing.

While resilient, queer and trans people in N.C. have historically been on the wrong side of the status quo, facing “the ultimate weapons” Chafe wrote about, especially as an overwhelmingly working class demographic under a notoriously anti-labor state regime.

In 1996, when Democrats still held a firm lock on most of North Carolina's political power, including the state Senate and the governor's mansion, they passed a draconian ban on equal marriage by overwhelming majorities. Gov. Jim Hunt, touted as one of the region's leading Democratic progressives, signed it.

In 2010 Republicans gained majorities in both branches of the General Assembly. This was in no small part due to Democratic complacency and a consistent refusal to make any real changes to the status quo to draw in broader support.

In their very first session, the newly Republican-dominated legislature sought to enshrine discrimination even further into the state constitution by adding a marriage equality ban to it. But they had an obstacle. Their majority in the N.C. House was too thin to reach the three-fifths support required to place such a measure on the ballot.

But, in a pattern that remains depressingly familiar, Democrats bailed them out, with 10 representatives joining the Republicans to make sure hatred got its day.

By the mid-2010s a combination of extensive gerrymandering and continued Democratic fecklessness resulted in a far-right lock on the legislature despite its increasingly unpopular decisions.

In 2014, a federal court struck down the state's prohibitions on equal marriage, and the following year the Obergefell ruling did the same nationwide. As railing against equal marriage lost political utility in the face of legal failure and growing public rejection of de jure homophobia, the far-right turned to targeting trans people as a wedge issue — and because they hate us and seek our annihilation. North Carolina would end up being one of their first testing grounds.

In 2016 the North Carolina legislature decided to put this horrific strategy into practice. The result was HB2, the notorious “bathroom bill,” which banned trans and non-binary people from using any bathroom that differed from the gender marker on their birth certificates in schools, local and state facilities. The law was clearly a slap-dash affair, as it didn't even specify how this would be enforced.

This was supposedly in response to Charlotte city council adding protections for trans people to its local non-discrimination ordinance. But the political calculus went well beyond that.

In 2012 Republican Pat McCrory had trounced conservative Democratic Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton and taken the governor's seat, so N.C. Republicans had a trifecta for the first time in living memory. Unlike many outside the state, they were quite aware that much of the population hated them. They quickly moved to redraw voting districts and overhaul multiple other parts of state government to ensure they never lost power again.

While gerrymandered districts entrenched them in the legislature, Gov. McCrory's statewide re-election was on much shakier ground. Republican legislators were closely connected to the far-right think tanks and policy circles that were pushing a shift to targeting trans people. Rabid transphobia seemed just the thing to mobilize conservative voters and target a population they hated.

While coverage of HB2, and the ensuing international outrage in response to the law, dubbed it the “bathroom bill” and a thoroughly Republican project, there was a bit more going on under the surface.

HB2 wasn't just shoved through over solid Democratic opposition. In that old, familiar pattern with anti-queer and trans legislation in N.C., two Democratic representatives joined Republicans to support it.

The bill also went further than just bathrooms. It banned local non-discrimination ordinances and, importantly, forbade any attempts to pass local minimum wage protections. As always, attacks on trans people are closely linked to those on other communities on the front lines and, of course, on labor.

The sheer, nonsensical vindictiveness of HB2's bathroom provisions drew a wide backlash. Companies pulled events and planned expansions in N.C. The Obama administration, while not great on trans issues, showed far more spine than their later Democratic successors and actually threatened to yank key federal funding. HB2 faced multiple lawsuits and McCrory became a national laughingstock.

Intended to rally far-right support, the bill actually had the opposite effect. Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper, while no leftist, took more of a public stance in favor of trans rights, at least in rhetoric, than any statewide Democratic politician before (or, honestly, since). Despite Trump sweeping the state that year, McCrory narrowly lost to Cooper.

The economic losses from HB2 continued to mount (tallying in the end to an estimated $400 million). While North Carolina gentry are plenty bigoted, the far-right had broken one of their cardinal rules: they'd fucked with the money. By the Fall of 2016 elite lobbying groups like the North Carolina Restaurant and Lodging Association were already shouting at legislators to repeal HB2.

A flurry of negotiations followed, with governor-elect Cooper pressuring the Charlotte city council to adopt a “compromise” originated by tourism industry groups: repeal their local trans protections (then the subject of an ongoing legal battle against HB2) in return for scrapping the law. The council complied in advance, and nevertheless, HB2 persisted, as legislators refused any move to repeal.

In return for ditching trans rights rather than fighting on, they got nothing. Sadly, the lesson would not be learned.

By the end of the year the Electoral Integrity Project, which monitors elections in 153 countries, rated North Carolina “no longer functionally a democracy” due to gerrymandering, the targeting of marginalized voters and the legislature arbitrarily changing laws on a whim with zero transparency. Their analysis placed it “alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies.”

“North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair redistricting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project,” political scientist Andrew Robinson, who worked on the report, wrote in a column in the News and Observer.

In March 2017 the NCAA tournament announced they'd pull out of the state if HB2 stayed on the books — basketball is basically its own religion here — and even plenty of rich conservatives told legislators in no uncertain terms to knock it off.

But the Republicans had a problem. Plenty of them who'd been happy to use bigotry as an election year issue were ready to cut bait, but the more rabid among their ranks really hated trans people. They didn't have the votes in their own caucus to do what the NCAA and their wealthiest donors were demanding.

For the first time in most of a decade, the votes of Democratic legislators were a hot commodity. With economic pressure bearing down and the Republican leadership desperately needing their support, they had immense leverage to kill HB2 once and for all.

They proceeded to completely waste it.

Instead of holding out for repeal, most of the Democratic caucus joined the GOP to pass HB142, which made just enough cosmetic changes to HB2 to get the NCAA and other corporations off their backs. In fact, it preserved the worst of the bill, including keeping the prohibitions on local non-discrimination rules in effect for years to come. Even on the bathroom front it inserted byzantine regulations that still meant trans people would need a court case to use a public restroom. Gov. Cooper promptly signed it.

Queer and trans people around the state tagged it “HB2.0” and rightly pointed out this was a gross betrayal. Legal organizations dubbed it a “fake repeal.”

Pressured by this (and wanting to exercise some leverage), even prominent figures in Gay Inc circles condemned the measure. Then-state Rep. Chris Sgro (later the communications director for HRC and now a lobbyist for Meta) pointed out that it “doubled down on discrimination.” Even when the NCAA lifted the boycott, they noted they were doing so “reluctantly.”

In the weeks and months after, Democratic legislators went about their usual annual circuit of town halls. But members of the public showed up in force, angry about their backing of HB2.0. The Democratic politicians repeatedly, pointedly refused to call on trans speakers, especially trans women.

While they'd initially joined wider trans communities in condemning the bill, over the years HB2.0 was in effect the state's Gay Inc. groups increasingly turned to gatekeeping and shutting down more radical activism. With their upper ranks overwhelmingly staffed by cis gay gentry, they’d become more focused on preserving their careers and funding now that the equal marriage fights were over. Like the “white moderates” rightly condemned by the civil rights movement, they became part of that “exquisite instrument of social control” that propped up the status quo.

One stark example played out later that same year, when trans activists in Asheville asked local candidates at a forum hosted by Campaign for Southern Equality point blank if they'd pass a non-discrimination ordinance with teeth, in defiance of HB142, and then go to court to defend it.

Allison Scott, one of the non-profit's directors, seized the mic and changed the question to something more “pragmatic,” in her words. She asked officials only to commit to some vague non-discrimination measure at some future point, after HB142 had expired. Trans people even pressuring Democrats with an inconvenient question was beyond the pale for CSE.

After all, the organization's higher-ups had their political prospects to think about.

In 2021, once the ban on local non-discrimination protections finally expired, CSE headed up an effort to pass such laws in cities around the state. But many of the ordinances were quietly, intentionally written to have little to no effect, with minimal penalties and byzantine legal processes aimed at protecting bigoted business owners and landlords rather than those they hurt.

From her perch as a Buncombe County commissioner, CSE executive director Jasmine Beach-Ferrara even admitted as much, emphasizing the law’s purpose was to “communicate values” rather than penalize bigotry. She also waxed rhapsodic about what good people far-right religious bigots actually are.

In an event later that year Scott let slip that they watered down the ordinances not just for business owners and landlords (bad enough already!), but rather to ensure unanimous support from (mostly Democratic) local elected officials. And sure enough, in the first year after Asheville's toothless ordinance went into effect, for example, precisely zero discrimination complaints were resolved in the victim’s favor. Eventually, locals stopped filing them entirely.

Not coincidentally, Beach-Ferrara and Scott were both running for office in 2022, for Congress and Asheville city council, respectively. They wanted headlines without offending Democratic donors. It didn't work. Beach-Ferrara had directed millions in public tax incentives to notorious arms dealer Raytheon and threatened protesters with arrest. Scott backed brutal police crackdowns on the homeless. Combined with their open contempt for any queer (let alone trans) person justifiably unsatisfied with the status quo, their bids for office imploded.

Both lost, in no small part because of a lack of support from the left. Democratic statewide judicial candidates, generally a good barometer for how many votes someone can get just by having a “D” beside their name in a general election, drew slightly more votes in solidly blue Buncombe County than Beach-Ferrara did.

In 2022, North Carolinians again denied Republicans a supermajority — until Rep. Tricia Cotham, who ran as a fairly progressive Democrat, switched parties to rectify the misguided will of the voters.

So we reach 2025, when Democrats that voters sent to the capitol to stop the far right — despite some of the most extreme gerrymandering in the world — have again teamed up with them. The rest of us pay the price.

“As the South goes, so goes the nation,” W.E.B. DuBois said, drawing the links between Jim Crow and America's wider capitalist hellscape.

It was bleakly, eternally prescient. Sadly, the left — including the queer left — has far too often written off the region, while our enemies have always seen it as a place to consolidate power and hone their tactics. It is telling that there is far more attention paid to raising money for trans people leaving the South than there has ever been to strengthening the far larger numbers of us who are here to fight for our homes and for each other.

DuBois' words are, in many ways, doubly true for N.C. Like HB2 debuted a strategy that the far-right has since deployed around the country, it was also a harbinger of the pattern that continues to threaten our existence — how willing Democrats were to throw trans people under the bus to maintain an oppressive status quo. Today’s surrenders by N.C. Democrats to increasingly severe anti-trans laws are a similarly ominous sign. What starts here never stays here, and what starts here won’t stop until we stop it.

Former Gov. Cooper, who announced a U.S. Senate run in late July, is already facing a propaganda barrage tarring his lukewarm rhetorical support for trans rights as “radical gender ideology.” Given the track record of N.C. Democrats, odds aren’t great on him mounting much of a defense.

Importantly, we are not the only community facing these kinds of betrayals, often from the same officials. Rep. Carla Cunningham, who also supported SB442, provided the key vote to override Gov. Stein's veto of legislation requiring local law enforcement to cooperate more closely with ICE, even throwing in a xenophobic tirade so bigoted the state NAACP publicly condemned it. Cunningham then joined with Rep. Shelly Willingham, another supporter of that anti-trans bill, to override the veto of a law allowing Duke Energy even more latitude to pollute.

I make it no secret that I haven't had any faith in the Democratic Party for a long, long time. I'm an anarchist for many reasons, and their actions are at least a few of them.

But it's worth asking a sincere question to those still invested: What's the use of a party that repeatedly fails to do the one thing it's elected to do? What’s the point of supporting those who will just side with our enemies?

We could ask the same about those still supporting Gay Inc. Whatever the arguments for their tactics in the past, the plain truth is they've utterly failed now. While they may still hold a (weakening) grip on a lot of formal organizing within the state, there are other alternatives.

The more radical advocacy of Southerners on New Ground, the community coalitions against anti-homeless crackdowns and the massive post-Helene mutual aid effort spearheaded by networks of locals show the way forward. There are many different ways to organize against the threats we face, outside of the ones we’re told are our only options.

The fact that so many communities are under attack alongside us must also be the start of something better, of widespread organizing in solidarity against our common enemies. We can start with the fact that the same rich assholes keep betraying us, and the same rich assholes want us all gone. Together, we can give them the only answer they deserve: we’re not going anywhere.

Rather than a sanitized tale of how much better things used to be, the actual story of HB2 — its “repeal” and all — is much more instructive for understanding everything that’s happened since. The far-right accurately read that Democratic officials were willing to ditch trans people, and that their lack of any real commitment to human rights for all can quickly be exploited, all the way from initial “legitimate points” compromise to outright abandonment.

For the rest of us it teaches a different set of lessons: that if you want to hit even the most die-hard bigot where it hurts, you target their money and power. Then, when centrists tell you to compromise and let up the attack you laugh in their faces.

North Carolina Democrats, like their colleagues around the country and their predecessors all the way back to segregation, will not yield an inch until the costs become too high for them to do anything else.

The ivy of civility still covers the old wall of coercion.

It is far past time to tear it down.

— Edited by Corinne Green

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