Early last week, North Carolina lawmakers reached a decision to repeal House Bill 2 by signing into law House Bill 142. HB2, also known as the “bathroom bill,” is one of the most controversial laws in recent years to come out of the state. Many students at NC State expressed their disappointment with the newly signed bill, as they found in it a continuation of the same infringement on the rights of LGBT people found in HB2.

Technician sat down with J Hallen, the president of the GLBT Community Alliance (GLBTCA) and a junior studying business administration, who provided personal thoughts and insight on the recent appeal and encouraged students to join the organization and make use of the many services GLBTCA provides.

What was your reaction to the HB2 repeal?

My first reaction was that Cooper had sold us out. Sold us out as in the LGBT community in North Carolina. The bill that came in instead of HB2, HB142, did nothing but just further the ridiculous notion that HB2 had and, really, it wasn’t a good compromise.

What is your opinion regarding the NCAA’s deadline?

In my opinion, the NCAA should’ve held strong and said “unless there’s complete full repeal of HB2, then we’re going to continue pulling out of the state.” Simply put, HB142 continues that same discrimination, and I think that the NCAA shouldn’t have accepted this half-hearted compromise.

What is the aftermath of HB142?

It puts all public restrooms and accommodations, locker rooms, changing rooms etc. under the control of the state legislature. It means, in terms of the bathroom component, nothing’s going to change from HB2. Trans people are still going to [be] prevented from using the bathroom that matches with their own gender identity, and I do not see that improving any time soon, at least under the current legislature.

Local governments are not allowed to put into place nondiscrimination ordinances in terms of private employment practice or public accommodations. That’s to include the LGBT community but [it’s] also going to negatively impact groups like the veterans’ community, which doesn’t have a huge number of anti-discrimination laws.

Furthermore, on top of all of this, there’s no requirement that this kind of restriction is going to end on Dec. 1, 2020. If there’s a Republican governor that’s coming in … or if Cooper were to stay, we could see an increase of that time period that would just lead to more nondiscrimination laws from not being [able] to pass.

What do you think of the student body’s initial reaction?

I think that one of the benefits of being a student at NC State is that we’re very close to the legislature. We’re very close to the governor’s building. I was out at the rallies, at the protests surrounding this new bill coming in, at the legislature, at the governor’s mansion starting at around 8 a.m. on the day of HB142 coming in, and I was really glad to see a large number of NC State students that showed up to those protests. I made posts on social media about those, and I had a huge amount of interaction, and I think that, at first, a lot of NC State students were confused. They hear ‘Oh, HB2 is getting repealed! This is a good thing!’ but once they started to realize the negative impact of HB142, they started to side with the LGBT community and rally against this discriminatory bill.

What is the way forward?

I would say it is a multistep process. The first step is getting involved and getting educated. So read up on the current litigation going on around LGBT issues, especially in regard to Title IX, as that is especially important for us here as students at a public university. As the next step to that, I would say, signing up for email lists of local organizations… And, as a third step after those two, I would just say show up*. There’s always rallies that need people to go to them. There’s campusing opportunities, there’s phone-banking opportunities. If we could have just a few more NC State students show up to each of those events, so much progress could get done, so many more people can be educated and so many more voters could be reached.

Do you have anything else to add?

The continuation of these negative policies is very detrimental to trans people and the LGBT community in general …When you start to ‘other’ people, you start to view them as subhuman. When you start to view people as subhuman, you start to ‘other’ them. There’s more potential for violence against them. I think that we need [to focus more] on normalizing trans people and stop seeing trans people as ‘other’ and bringing us all together in seeing that these are people who should be celebrated and their identities should be celebrated instead of mocked.

More information about GLBTCA can be found at https://getinvolved.ncsu.edu/organization/296.

* Editor’s note: This story initially misquoted Hallen. The article has been updated to reflect the correct quotation.