Yesterday, North Carolina repealed a law enacted last year requiring people to use the restroom corresponding to their birth sex. The repeal was motivated by various boycotts and threats of boycotts, the most effective of which was the NCAA's threat not to hold any further national tournaments or "final four" events in the basketball-crazed state. The repeal was backed by the Chamber of Commerce and most large businesses.
Transgender advocates were not satisfied with the repeal, however, because it left intact (at least through the year 2020) a moratorium on local municipalities passing their own bathroom laws to give special privileges to transgendered persons.
This story underlines something that conservative social commentators such as Mark Steyn have emphasized: it doesn't matter who wins political elections so much as it matters who wins the culture. The Left controls the culture in the United States, and the Left has decided that transgenderism shall be the next civil rights crusade in America, the next case analogous to that of the freed black slaves in the South. As we noted here, the Trump administration dropped the Obama administration's overreaching attempt to use Title IX to force public schools throughout America to allow biological boys to use the girls' restroom, and vice versa. So the matter was left up to the states.
The conservative state legislature of North Carolina had passed a bill, HB 2, requiring people to use the restroom of their birth sex, but the forces that control the culture were able to use the institutions they control--education, the NCAA, big sports, big business, media, entertainment etc--to boycott North Carolina and force the legislature to repeal the conservative measure. In this case, big Leftist media worked hand-in-glove with transgender activists to create the conditions leading to repeal. The Associated Press published its own "analysis" claiming that the various boycotts--primarily the NCAA boycott--would cost businesses in the state $3.76 billion in lost revenues over the next 12 years. So naturally big business and the Chamber of Commerce put enormous pressure on the state legislature to repeal the law.
Again, the most important lesson here is that control of the culture is much more important than control of the actual levers of governmental power.
For those who say this is just a secular political issue, I beg to differ. Transgenderism is a rebellion against God's created sexual order. God created them male and female, a biblical fact we too often fail to appreciate the full implications of.
"But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name" (John 1:12).