The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a legal brief Tuesday calling for a federal judge to prevent North Carolina’s transgender bathroom bill.
The 70-page legal brief asked a federal judge to prevent North Carolina’s transgender bathroom bill, referred to as House Bill 2, reports the Charlotte Observer. The brief claimed that “excluding transgender men and women from bathroom and changing facilities consistent with their gender identity causes significant and irreparable physical, psychological, economic, social, and stigmatic harm to transgender people.”
The legal brief argued that HB2 violates the Violence Against Women Act, an act to improve criminal justice response to domestic violence and crimes against women, and Title IX, which the Obama administration interpreted to allow transgenders into the bathroom of their choice. It claimed that HB2 was “factually baseless” and that transgenders must be allowed to use the bathroom of their choice because denying them that choice “interferes with medically necessary treatment.”
HB2, passed this past March, said people must use the bathroom according to their biological sex, not the sex they claim to be. After much protest, the North Carolina state legislature made some revisions to the bill, which allowed transgenders to be recognized by a “certificate of sex reassignment,” but the bill still prevented transgenders from using the bathroom of their choice. Both sides of the aisle protested the bill’s revisions.
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch stated back in May that the Department of Justice was working to stop HB2. After the DOJ filed the legal brief, Lynch claimed that North Carolina’s “bathroom bill” only hurt transgenders even more, reports WCNC.
“More to the point, they created state-sponsored discrimination against transgender individuals, who simply seek to engage in the most private of functions in a place of safety and security – a right taken for granted by most of us,” Lynch said.
The legal brief claimed that it will most likely win the case due to a recent ruling from the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. The court ruled that a Virginia school district must allow a transgender student to use the bathroom according to her “gender identity.”
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