NC Republican Lawmaker Proposes Banning Trans Teachers Who Don’t Dress According to their ‘Biological Sex’

North Carolina state legislator Erin Paré has said she’ll propose what is effectively a ban on trans teachers and promised to make it an ‘election issue.’

The Wake County Public School System has found itself targeted by anti-trans legislator Erin Paré over its hiring of a trans teacher | Image: Wikimedia Commons

Over the past few years, Republicans have increasingly turned public schools into an important testing ground for many of their anti-trans policies. Whether it be laws restricting trans people’s sports participation and bathroom access or policies allowing trans people to be misgendered and limiting kids’ exposure to ‘gender ideology,’ they all have one thing in common: they all started with schools.

However, these attacks certainly haven’t stopped with schools. Six years after Idaho House Bill 500 targeted school sports, trans adults now find themselves banned from most competitive activities, including some where their gender is irrelevant, like chess, fencing, and billiards. Five years after Tennessee House Bill 1233 imposed a bathroom ban on public schools, trans people in Idaho now face 5-year prison sentences if they use a bathroom that aligns with their gender identity in any business open to the public. Four years after Florida passed its so-called ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law, the Trump administration is floating putting warning labels on any media that features trans characters. Three years after Arkansas House Bill 1468 granted teachers a right to misgender trans people, Louisiana passed a law allowing trans people’s employers and co-workers to harass them about their identities in any context. And the list goes on.

But these restrictions haven’t satisfied anti-trans conservatives, who are now turning their attention towards trans teachers. Earlier this year, Transitics published a critical report on an attempt by Kentucky Republicans to quietly push through a bill that would’ve banned all trans people from teaching by declaring them mentally ill. And although the proposal quickly garnered opposition and ended up failing, Republicans haven’t backed down, and the Texas GOP even recently adopted a platform that calls for a total ban on trans teachers. Nevertheless, doing so would be easier said than done and would likely run afoul of the current Supreme Court’s interpretation of federal employment anti-discrimination law.

However, North Carolina Republican State Rep. Erin Paré believes she has found a different approach.

Yesterday, Paré, who wields a significant amount of power as the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, made a post on Facebook calling out an unnamed elementary school in her district—which is part of the Raleigh-area Wake County Public School System—for hiring a “transgender biological male” music teacher (whom Paré later described as “a trans person who interviewed as non binary”) and allowing them to “dress as a woman.” Despite saying she had “brought [her constituents’] concerns to the attention of the Wake County Public School System,” she also claimed that WCPSS “does not have a policy addressing this issue.” Because of that, she said, it “may be time to introduce a bill requiring gender-appropriate professional attire for public school employees” to “protect children from being exposed to more complex and mature gender-identity questions and concepts at too young of an age.”

Although Paré claimed in the same post that she “[doesn’t] care how adults choose to live outside of the professional work day,” it’s worth noting that she has supported laws that restrict the rights of trans adults in the past. This includes last year’s House Bill 805, which makes it more difficult for doctors to provide gender-affirming care by expanding their susceptibility to malpractice lawsuits from detransitioners and additionally targets trans people’s birth certificates.

Then, a few hours later, she made a separate post claiming the school had forced every teacher to wear a t-shirt at its ‘Parent’s Back-to-School Night’ that day due to “needing to obscure the [trans teacher] wearing a dress at school issue.” She sarcastically remarked that, to the school, it was “ok to administer a dress code to hide a potential controversial issue from parents, but not ok for a typical school day in the presence of children.” It must be mentioned that according to a community note under the post, WCPSS schools usually ask their employees to wear school t-shirts during these events.

However, unfortunately for Paré, she’s going to have to wait to act on her proposal. The deadline for filing bills in the NC House passed well over two months ago, and as such, assuming she isn’t defeated this November, the earliest she’ll be able to introduce it is next April. That said, a bill isn’t her only move: Paré also pledged to make trans teachers an ‘election issue’ and has already begun attacking her opponent for being a ‘transgender activist.’

Legal experts have pointed out that Paré’s dress code idea would likely violate the Supreme Court’s 1989 ruling in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, which established that employers cannot discriminate against their employees for not adhering to gender stereotypes. In 2020, this interpretation was expanded to explicitly protect transgender Americans. That said, in more recent years, the court has signaled a willingness to make exceptions for these protections when children are involved, and as such, the possibility that the court will create a carveout cannot be discarded.

Regardless of its fate, like the anti-trans proposals that came before it, one thing is clear: the push to restrict trans people’s gender presentation will not stop with schools. Already, some states have tried passing ‘drag bans’ that are vague enough to impact anyone who isn’t dressed according to their ‘biological sex.’ Meanwhile, in other states, multiple trans teachers have even been fired or forced to resign just because of who they are. These attacks have shown no sign of stopping; if anything, they’ve only gotten more widespread. And unless something changes, it seems that it’ll only be a matter of time before Paré’s proposal—or one like it—is signed into law.