As McCrory returns to political arena, transgender rights debates again at the fore

Former North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory is back in the political arena and, so too, are transgender rights issues that defined his final year in office.

McCrory, a Republican from Charlotte, announced Wednesday morning that he was running for U.S. Senate in 2022. U.S. Sen. Richard Burr is not running for a fourth term, leaving a rare open seat that has attracted multiple Republican and Democratic candidates.

His announcement came hours before North Carolina state lawmakers debated a bill that would bar transgender girls from competing on girls’ sports teams in the state.

As governor in 2016, McCrory signed House Bill 2, North Carolina’s so-called “bathroom bill,” that required people in schools and other government buildings to use the bathroom of the gender on their birth certificate and prohibited localities from expanding their nondiscrimination ordinances. Republicans in the state legislature acted after Charlotte added LGBTQ protections to its nondiscrimination ordinance.

The new law led to a corporate backlash against the state with businesses and sports organizations pulling events. Months into Gov. Roy Cooper’s administration — Cooper narrowly defeated McCrory in 2016 — he signed a compromise repeal bill.

“I’m glad that’s a fight that’s behind North Carolina. I’m glad to see Charlotte, which started that among the Democrats, has moved on and so have I,” McCrory said in an interview with The Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer on Wednesday.

“There are a lot of issues, including that issue, that need to be allowed to be discussed that doesn’t involve the cancel culture. It needs fair discussions.”

Cancel culture has become a broad term used to describe everything from people losing their jobs for their behavior to businesses boycotting states over policies they disagree with. Major League Baseball moved its All-Star Game and several corporations have rebuked Georgia in recent weeks after passage of a package of election laws.

“This cancel culture has got to end and the identity politics has gone way too far, especially on the left,” McCrory said. “We’ve got to end the identity politics and cancel culture and we need to be judged by our individual character, heart and souls.”

McCrory’s loss in the 2016 election is often attributed to the economic fallout and backlash over HB2, including the removal of high-profile NBA and NCAA events from the state.

Democrats, in their first messages after McCrory’s entry into the race, tried to re-litigate the issue.

Democratic state Sen. Jeff Jackson, a candidate in the Senate race, sent a fundraising appeal that called McCrory “the former governor whose ‘claim to fame’ is passing a horrific anti-LGBTQ bathroom bill.”

McCrory “was voted out of office after he embarrassed North Carolina on the national stage while costing the state thousands of jobs,” said Stewart Boss, the spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

New laws about the rights of transgender people — including access to health care for people under 21 and sports-related issues — are back in the spotlight in North Carolina and across the country.

In North Carolina, lawmakers have introduced three bills:

• The “Save Women’s Sports Act,” which would require athletes in middle school and high school to play on teams based on a person’s reproductive biology at birth.

• The “Youth Health Protection Act,” which would prevent doctors from performing gender reassignment surgery for transgender people under 21.

• The “Health Care Heroes Conscience Protection Act,” which would expand protections for health care providers who refuse to perform health care services “on the basis of conscience.”

The bills have attracted national attention, in particular for a provision in the Youth Health Protection Act that would require state employees, including teachers, to notify parents in writing if their child displays “gender nonconformity.”

McCrory, on his radio show Wednesday, vowed that his campaign would not be constrained by political correctness or cancel culture — features he said he insisted on during his three-plus years on the radio.

“I’m going to change the game and be honest about the complex problems we have in our society,” McCrory said. “Again, we’re not going to play the cancel culture game. That was one of the great strengths of President (Donald) Trump was he didn’t care about the cancel culture.”

Trump has routinely called for boycotts and for people to be fired.

Several cities and towns in North Carolina have expanded their nondiscrimination ordinances this year to include LGBTQ protections after expiration of a moratorium in the compromise bill that repealed HB2.

For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Under the Dome politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Megaphone or wherever you get your podcasts.