North Carolina is suing the US department of justice over its attempts to bar the state upholding the "bathroom Bill" requiring transgender people to use public toilets corresponding with the sex listed on their birth certificates.
The legal action marks an escalation in the standoff over the law that has pitted conservatives defending state protections against the Obama administration seeking to protect the civil rights of transgender people.
The contentious law has led to musicians such as Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam to cancel shows in North Carolina and a backlash from big business.
The state’s Republican governor, Pat McCrory, brought the lawsuit in response to the justice department’s demand that North Carolina drop the bathroom law known as “House Bill 2” or “HB2” by a deadline on Monday.
The department said the law, passed in March, violates civil rights protections and North Carolina could lose billions of dollars in federal government funding if it failed to comply.
Mr McCrory said the Obama administration was “attempting to rewrite the law and set restroom policies for public and private employers across the country, not just North Carolina”. He has described this as “a national issue that applies to every state and it needs to be resolved at the federal level”.
The state’s legal complaint called the law a “common sense privacy policy” and justice department’s demand that it be repealed “baseless and blatant overreach”.
"This is an attempt to unilaterally rewrite long-established federal civil-rights laws in a manner that is wholly inconsistent with the intent of Congress and disregards decades of statutory interpretation by the courts," he said.
In the legal action against the justice department, including US attorney general Loretta Lynch as a co-defendant, the governor asked the US district court in the eastern district of North Carolina for a declaration that the state bathroom Bill is lawful under the 2013 Title VII and Violence Against Women Reauthorisation Act.
‘Radical interpretation’
The governor calls the department’s position a “radical reinterpretation” of this law and says the US Congress does not define sex as something that can be chosen.
Mr McCrory and other Republicans have argued in emotive language that the bathroom law would prevent sexual assault, though the governor said he was not aware of any cases in North Carolina of transgender people using their identity to access a public toilet and molest someone.
Critics say the law effectively enables discrimination against transgender people.
"In filing this lawsuit, the governor is not only on thin ice but no ice at all," said William Yeomans, a law professor at American University who spent more than a quarter of a century working on civil rights cases at the justice department.
Mr Yeomans said that the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers North Carolina, upheld the Obama administration's view of civil-rights law in a legal case taken by a transgender student in Virginia banning him from a boy's toilet.
“His claims that this is dramatic federal overreach are simply nonsense at this point so he is making a public relations play,” he said.
