RALEIGH, North Carolina, November 27, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – Electoral politics are playing out over transgender teenagers and bathrooms.
On Saturday, North Carolina governor Pat McCrory asked Attorney General Roy Cooper to defend a Virginia school district that won't let a girl with gender dysphoria use male restrooms and other facilities. McCrory, a Republican, said that he wanted to back the district against the Obama administration's legal brief in favor of Gavin Grimm.
However, Cooper's office rejected the request – and his campaign immediately attacked McCrory for his letter.
“This week, [McCrory] found another group to politicize,” spokesman Jamal Little said in a statement. “Adolescence is hard enough without being bullied by an elected official. Next week, who knows who'll be the target of a governor whose only path to re-election is dividing North Carolina.”
McCrory said that the Obama administration's threat to pull federal funding from Gloucester, Virginia to is an “extreme position [that] directly contradicts the express language of federal law and threatens local control of our schools. It also disregards the safety and privacy concerns of parents and students.”
A spokesperson for the governor gave mixed messages in an e-mail on Monday. Graham Wilson originally told The Charlotte Observer that McCrory is “not opposed to transgender bathrooms” but “supports leaving that and other decisions to the local officials.”
However, two hours later, Wilson said the original statement was in error, and that “Gov. McCrory is not in favor of transgender bathrooms.”
McCrory was attempting to join South Carolina in defending the school district, which has been under fire as part of the Obama administration's rewrite of Title IX. The federal Department of Education has said the anti-sex discrimination law applies to people with gender dysphoria – something that many parents, some students, and some legal experts say is neither good policy or legal.