By Tim Hipps
Texas was perhaps the biggest winner and North Carolina the biggest loser in NCAA fallout from the Tar Heel State’s public facilities privacy and security act, according to a study presented in March at the 2018 Sport & Recreation Law Association Conference in San Antonio.
Professor Lauren McCoy of Western Kentucky University and associate professor Kerri Cebula of Kutztown University studied North Carolina’s House Bill 2 (HB2), better known as the “bathroom bill,” and presented “The Impact of ‘Bathroom Bills’ on Sport Events: Policy and Planning for the Future” at SRLA’s annual meeting. in The Alamo City. [delete]
A bathroom bill is legislation that defines access to public facilities, especially bathrooms, for transgender individuals. Access under this legislation is determined by an individual’s assigned gender at birth, the sex on a person’s birth certificate, or sex determined by gender identity. School settings were the initial focus of these bills, according to the study.
An anti-discrimination provision that required potential host cities of NCAA Championship events to provide an environment that is safe, healthy, and free of discrimination was adopted at the NCAA Board of Governor’s meeting in April of 2016.
HB2 reversed Charlotte’s anti-LGBT ordinance and any other local ordinances that expanded LGBT protections in a one-day specially convened session and set a statewide definition of protected classes against discrimination. Therefore, use of restrooms/changing facilities in government buildings were based on an individual’s sex designation on their birth certificate, which in North Carolina, could only be changed after sex reassignment surgery.
“The NCAA has a very broad policy allowing for transgender individuals to participate, and when you put them in this situation, now you have individuals on a women’s team who are going to have to find a men’s locker room at the event and it’s going to create logistical nightmares,” McCoy said.
North Carolina remains the only state to pass the legislation but it has been considered by others. The study revealed that 16 states considered restricting bathroom access to the gender assigned at birth, or biological sex. Six states considered legislation pre-empting municipal or county-level anti-discrimination ordinances, and 14 considered legislation limiting transgender student rights at school.
“With North Carolina being challenged consistently on a legal basis, because of that, there’s a lot of fear to do the same thing,” McCoy explained.
“The economic impact is really also what is hitting them,” Cebula added. “They see that North Carolina had a $400-million impact, and that’s not including PayPal deciding not to place their headquarters in North Carolina.”
Sports organizations were quick to support unfavorable public response to North Carolina’s bathroom bill. The NCAA moved seven championship events from North Carolina in 2016. The Atlantic Coast Conference, despite being headquartered in Greensboro, North Carolina, [delete] pulled the 2016 ACC football championship game from Charlotte. Ditto for the 2017 NBA All-Star Game, which the league moved from Charlotte to New Orleans.
Six states — California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New York, Vermont and Washington – imposed travel bans forbidding their schools to compete in North Carolina or any other state that passes a bathroom bill.
“California right now bans travel to Alabama, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas,” Cebula said. “They do have exceptions for contractual obligations that were signed before Jan. 1, 2017, so Fresno State played at Alabama [last] year and San Jose State played at Texas.”
Going forward, however, the bans could become more troublesome.
“What really is affected, especially for California schools, is of course a push for the football championship and then the teams in the championship need to have a stronger strength of schedule,” Cebula said. “But in California a school cannot play in seven states which have very strong football teams, it’s going to hurt their chances of getting to the college football playoff and the national championship game and they could potentially lose a lot of money without being able to participate in those events.”
The Texas Association of Business opposed the Lone Star State’s version of a bathroom bill, citing a $400-million loss of business in North Carolina, according to the study.
“The Texas Association of Business that looked into the bill before they passed it, knowing how much North Carolina lost, they said: ‘Wait a minute, it’s not about a specific quality, it’s about how much money is it going to effectively cost the state? It’s just not worth it,’” McCoy said.
When the Texas bill was in consideration, the NCAA threatened to remove the men’s basketball championship 2018 Final Four from San Antonio, and the NFL noted that Texas would not receive any more Super Bowls if the bill became law, the study revealed.
“The threats have been there [to pass another bathroom bill],” Cebula said. “In Texas, when the NFL told Jerry Jones ‘We’re not putting a Super Bowl in your stadium if y’all pass this legislation,’ so much for that.
“The teams are not doing direct lobbying. They’re saying it publically, or they’re saying it to the owners, and then the owners are going to the state and saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to lose all this money for not having the NBA All-Star Game, or for not having the Super Bowl. You need to think about that before you pass this legislation.”
“The Texas business association that looked into the bill before they passed it, knowing how much North Carolina lost, it’s a GOP-run association, and they said: ‘Wait a minute, it’s not about the specific quality, it’s about how much money [it is] going to effectively cost the state? It’s just not worth it because it’s something that you really can’t enforce,’” McCoy said. “You’d basically be doing actual genital checks to make sure.”
The Dallas Stars, scheduled to host the 2018 NHL Draft, also went on record to protest the legislation with a public statement.
Meanwhile, North Carolina faces a dilemma like no other.
“The money that is running our Republican party in North Carolina is insane,” said Barbara Osborne, J.D., a professor and coordinator for the graduate program in the sport administration specialization at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “The only thing we can hope to do is to elect them out of office, but because of the gerrymandering that was nearly impossible. So we now have two Supreme Court decisions that have said that you can’t racially gerrymander and you can’t politically gerrymander, but for our next election, all of those precincts are still in there gerrymandered state. … They’re just stupid.”
