In 2016, North Carolina 鈥� a law saying people have to use the bathroom matching the sex on their birth certificate.
There was huge pushback, boycotts of the entire state. The political fallout led to the .
Bathroom bills have reemerged in recent years, passing in eleven Republican-led states, from . Mississippi lawmakers to the governor's desk last week. But the high-profile boycotts, rollbacks of company expansions and canceled concerts haven't followed suit this time.
So what happened?
The path from 2016 to now involves political strategizing, legislative polling, and a clear learning from past defeats. And women's sports.
2016: "An unmitigated disaster"
The national reaction to North Carolina's 2016 bathroom bill, House Bill 2, was without precedent.
PayPal that would have brought 400 jobs and the NCAA. Performers from to canceled performances. The AP estimated the cost of lost business to the state would reach over the next twelve years.
Erin Reed, a journalist and activist who , described it as "an unmitigated disaster for the Republican Party in the state."
By 2017, the bill was .
"And so, following that," explains Erin Reed, "there was a good four year period where anti-trans legislation sort of took the back seat. They kind of licked their wounds and they stepped back. And they started planning."
At first, Republicans across the country tried to distance themselves from the issue. In 2016, then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump criticized the North Carolina bill during a .
A year later, that offered legal protections to transgender students who want to use bathrooms that conform with their gender identity.
"There have been very few complaints the way it is. People go, they use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate," he said at the time.
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a in 2018 that "Getting into the bathroom wars 鈥� I don't think that's a good use of our time."
But five years later, DeSantis making it a crime for transgender people to use public restrooms that do not correspond with their sex assigned at birth.
Looking beyond North Carolina, and beyond bathroom bills
Terry Schilling with the , a conservative think tank, helped bring transgender bathroom bills back to the political forefront. He says after 2016, he met with North Carolina Gov. McCrory to talk about what happened and started strategizing.
Schilling says their main focus was on which states would, for one reason or another, not be vulnerable to economic boycotts. And they decided on two:
"They really can't boycott Texas. It's just too big, and it's too much of an economic powerhouse," explains Schilling. "And they certainly can't boycott Florida, the home state of Walt Disney World."
And they also looked beyond bathroom bills. Schilling says his group considered legislation keeping gender identity out of civil rights laws, or trans women out of domestic violence shelters. But nothing really clicked. Until a few years ago.
"The women's sports issue was the first thing that really took off," says Schilling, "because it had that magic formula of having an incredible amount of public support amongst the American people, but also politicians were willing to run on it and campaign on it."
And they did. By 2021, 10 states passed laws barring transgender athletes from participating in women's sports. That increased to .
Schilling says opened the door for the legislation that followed. Policies care for kids and limiting how s. And a return of bathroom bills.
"I don't think you could have done it by just focusing on the bathrooms," says Schilling. "I think it would be dead right now without the women's sports issue."
The current landscape
With LGBTQ restrictions in about , some observers argue the sorts of boycotts that took place in 2016 aren't feasible. California last year on state business travel to states with anti-LGBTQ policies.
"I do believe that now is a totally different time, because it's now like a threshold issue for being a serious Republican," says American Principles Project's Terry Schilling.
In January, to implement a bathroom bill, requiring people to use and government-owned buildings that match their sex assigned at birth.
Lawmakers this year introduced bathroom bills in several other Republican-led states, like Arizona, Georgia, Idaho Iowa and West Virginia.
But journalist Erin Reed wonders whether proponents of these bills will see the same support in the general electorate when they face reelection.
"I don't think that it's going to win them elections. Now, where it may win them is in primaries," Reed says. "This is not the first LGBTQ moral panic, and it won't be the last...and I think that right now we are in that period where people are getting hurt."
The Biden administration is attempting to block some bathroom policies, saying they e. are challenging the move in court.
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