Nearly a decade after lawmakers rushed House Bill 2 (also known as HB2, the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act and the “Bathroom Bill”) through the General Assembly in a single day, the political logic behind it endured. What began in 2016 as a state-level fight over a Charlotte nondiscrimination ordinance has since evolved into a broader strategy that has been sharpened, refined and repeatedly redeployed. The same strategy that once thrust North Carolina into a national backlash now shapes how transgender people are targeted in law, culture and public life across the country.
HB2 was never just about bathrooms. It was about power, about who gets to define belonging and about how fear can be used to mobilize voters. In the years since its passage, the law has been partially repealed, re-branded and legally reshaped, but its influence has not disappeared. Instead, it has reemerged in new bills, familiar talking point and renewed efforts to regulate where transgender people can exist safely and openly.
The Strategy Takes Shape
In 2025, Democratic lawmakers in North Carolina warned that Republicans were once again advancing discriminatory legislation. The proposed Women’s Safety and Protection Act would define “biological sex” in state law, restrict access to restrooms, locker rooms and sleeping quarters in public facilities and limit the ability of transgender people to update gender markers on birth certificates and driver’s licenses. Rep. Julie von Haefen, a Wake County Democrat, described the proposal as a “rehash of HB 2,” adding, “didn’t we learn our lesson?”
The groundwork for this moment was laid years earlier, during a push by then-Governor Pat McCrory, who used Charlotte as both a catalyst and a test case. In early 2016, Charlotte City Council passed a nondiscrimination ordinance extending protections to LGBTQ+ residents, including allowing transgender people to use restrooms that align with their gender identity. The ordinance was set to take effect on April 1. It never did.
Within hours, Republican legislative leaders called a special session. HB2 was drafted, introduced, debated, passed and signed into law in a single day. The bill overturned Charlotte’s ordinance before it could take effect, stripped cities and counties of the authority to enact their own nondiscrimination protections, mandated bathroom access based on sex listed on a person’s birth certificate and curtailed legal recourse for people experiencing discrimination.
At the time, McCrory and legislative leaders framed the law as a matter of privacy and safety, but the timing told a different story. HB2 arrived in an election year as McCrory faced a difficult reelection campaign. The bathroom debate offered a wedge issue designed to mobilize conservative voters through fear and misinformation. Jeff Jackson, then a Democratic state senator from Charlotte said that lawmakers “didn’t anticipate this level of blowback.” “They really believed this was a lay-up,” Jackson said. “As it turns out, the world has changed faster than they thought.”
The Fallout at Home
North Carolina was immediately thrust into the national spotlight. Lawsuits followed within days. The U.S. Department of Justice sued the state, arguing that HB2 violated federal civil rights laws. Business leaders began to speak out, and civil rights organizations warned that the bill would invite harassment and discrimination against transgender people rather than prevent it.
The economic consequences soon followed. PayPal canceled a planned expansion in Charlotte that would have created 400 jobs. Major entertainers, including Bruce Springsteen, pulled concerts. The NCAA and NBA relocated championship events, including the 2017 NBA All-Star Game, a loss estimated at roughly $100 million for the Charlotte region alone. The Associated Press later estimated that HB2 would cost North Carolina nearly $3.8 billion in lost business over 12 years.
The state’s reputation took a significant hit, and so did McCrory’s political standing. In November 2016, he narrowly lost reelection to Democrat Roy Cooper. While analysts caution against attributing the loss to a single issue, HB2 was central to the race. So was Charlotte’s mayor.
Jennifer Roberts, the city’s mayor, became a national figure almost overnight. She defended the nondiscrimination ordinance as Republican lawmakers moved to override Charlotte’s decision through sweeping state preemption. “This legislation is literally the most anti-LGBT legislation in the country,” Roberts said. “Discrimination is never right and discrimination is not good for business. This is a bad bill for the Tarheel State,” she added. Advocates praised her leadership, while conservative officials targeted her relentlessly. HB2 dominated her tenure and reshaped the city’s political landscape. Roberts’ reelection loss in 2017 underscored how swiftly the state responded when local leaders challenged its approach to LGBTQ+ protections.
In 2017, under mounting pressure from the NCAA and business leaders, lawmakers partially repealed HB2, replacing it with House Bill 142. While HB142 removed the explicit bathroom mandate, it preserved state control over local nondiscrimination laws and imposed a moratorium on new local protections for years. For transgender North Carolinians, the damage had already been done.
From State Experiment to National Playbook
Nationally, the lessons of HB2 extended beyond North Carolina. The law demonstrated that targeting transgender people through bathroom access could be politically mobilizing even when the economic fallout was severe. HB2 quickly became a reference point, with similar bills appearing in other states. Over time, the focus expanded beyond bathrooms to sports participation, healthcare, drag shows and limits on legal identity documents.
What shifted was not the strategy, but its reach. By the early 2020s, anti-transgender legislation was no longer experimental. It became coordinated. In North Carolina, lawmakers introduced restrictions on drag performances in 2023. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott signed a sweeping bathroom bill in 2025 applying to schools, prisons and government buildings. That same year, the Trump administration announced proposals that would strip Medicaid and Medicare funding from hospitals providing gender-affirming care to transgender youth, pressuring providers nationwide to abandon care regardless of state law.
That coordination accelerated after President Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024. Federal resistance weakened, national rhetoric hardened, and what once carried reputational risk increasingly became a reliable signal to a conservative base mobilized around culture-war politics. The deterrents that shaped the response to HB2 in 2016 now move forward in a political climate far less inclined to push back.
In North Carolina, the law’s aftershocks continue to surface in local disputes. In 2023, a false accusation involving a transgender woman at the Waynesville Recreation Center prompted a police investigation that found no wrongdoing. Even so, the incident reignited familiar debates about bathroom access and public safety.
Nearly ten years later, HB2’s legacy is not confined to a single statute. It endures as a political blueprint. What once provoked national outrage and economic backlash now advances in a political climate shaped by conservative political power, weakened institutional guardrails and a fragmented media landscape.
For the transgender community, the consequences are deeply felt. Each new bill builds on the last, narrowing where people can exist safely and openly. For North Carolina, the unresolved question is whether the state has absorbed the lessons of the damage HB2 inflicted, or whether it is prepared to repeat that history under a different name.
HB2 may be a decade old, but its impact remains very much alive.