A Few Triangle Businesses Take Super Brave Stance Against NC’s Gender Confused Bathroom Law

02 Apr, 2016 by William Teach

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Why, yes, liberals are still having hissy fits over the gender confused bathroom law

(Raleigh News And Observer) There’s no more men’s room at Durham’s Old Havana Sandwich Shop. No women’s room, either. That’s because owners Roberto Copa Matos and Elizabeth Turnbull decided last week to change their restaurant’s single-stall bathrooms into unisex restrooms.

The couple are among the bar, restaurant and small-business owners in the Triangle who are expressing their opposition to the controversial new law that requires transgender residents to use the public restroom of their biological sex.

“For us, it just made a lot of sense,” Turnbull said this week. “It just never seemed like a pressing issue until it was.”

So, they didn’t care in the least until they could pander to a some hardcore Progressives and a tiny number of gender confused people. This is a completely brave, brave stance, what with those bathrooms being single stall, eh?

Like Old Havana Sandwich Shop, some businesses converted or plan to convert their single-stall bathrooms to unisex. Others used the opportunity to remind customers they already have unisex bathrooms. Some hung signs opposing the law. A few struggled with what, if anything, they might be able to do with their multiple-stall, gender-specific bathrooms to make transgender customers feel welcome. (snip)

Like the owners of Old Havana, Durham restaurant owner Mattie Beason decided to change the men’s and women’s single-stall bathrooms into unisex restrooms at Mattie B’s Public House. “It was in response,” Beason said this week. “It’s giving our state a bad reputation.”

Chris Carini, who has owned Linda’s Bar & Grill in Chapel Hill for five years, bought signs to change two of his single-stall bathrooms to gender neutral. The restaurant also has gender-specific bathrooms. “It’s the right thing to do,” said Carini, who emphasized he trains his staff to make everyone feel welcome and that this move is a continuation of that training.

I’m waiting for the brave, brave shop owners to convert their multi-occupancy bathrooms to unisex and/or allow gender confused people to use whichever bathroom they want. Just about everyone doing this has single occupancy bathrooms.

Sean Wilson, owner of Fullsteam brewery in Durham, said he tried to install unisex bathrooms in 2010 when the brewery opened, but the city wouldn’t approve it. The brewery is so large that big, multistall bathrooms, which ended up being gender specific, were required, he recalled. Wilson said he has two options: either add a third bathroom or modify the current ones. “It’s not an easy fix,” he said.

Sure it is: they can just put up a sign saying the gender confused can use whichever biological bathroom they identify with. Absolutely nothing within HB2 stops this, and, in fact, allows it. Since HB2 reinforces that state law takes precedence over local law, Durham (which is a vastly left leaning city and county) cannot stop it. Take a Brave stance, Sean! Make the bathrooms open for transgenders! You can do it man, it’s an easy fix.

If there’s any business with multi-occupancy bathrooms that have made them gender neutral or made a specific announcement that transgenders can use whichever they want here in NC, I’d love to know.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.