‘[Roy Cooper] declined an interview request for this article‘
He became governor supporting trans rights. Now, it’s seen as a liability.
Hannah Knowles
Washington Post
August 18, 2025
When Democrat Roy Cooper ran for North Carolina governor in 2016, transgender rights seemed like a winning issue for him and his party. Businesses were boycotting the state for passing first-in-the-nation, GOP-led restrictions on bathroom use, and Republicans nationwide were wary.
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Nearly a decade later, with Cooper running for Senate, Republicans want trans issues front and center — a testament to how dramatically the politics have changed. Today, it’s Cooper who would rather not talk about it.
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Republicans are eager to attack Cooper’s record on trans issues, betting that warnings of “radical gender ideology” will help them hold onto one of their most competitive seats in 2026. Cooper, who campaigned heavily on the bathroom bill fallout in 2016, launched his campaign last month talking about pocketbook issues and health care, making no mention of LGBTQ rights. He declined an interview request for this article.
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In the years after the bathroom bill fight in North Carolina, conservatives “reshaped the narrative that Democrats were winning on and made it a liability,” Wilson said.
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North Carolina plunged into the center of a national debate over LGBTQ rights in March 2016 when its Republican-controlled legislature passed HB2, better known as “the bathroom bill.” The law barred transgender people from using the bathroom matching their gender identity in government-run buildings. It was intended to override a local antidiscrimination ordinance in Charlotte.
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Cooper, then the state’s Democratic attorney general, refused to defend the law in court and called it a “national embarrassment.” When he beat McCrory by a fifth of a percentage point that fall, many Republicans blamed the bathroom bill fallout.
“We have decided that North Carolina is welcoming,” Cooper said in his victory speech. “We have decided that North Carolina is a place where people of all kinds can come together.”
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North Carolina soon repealed HB2. But conservative activists did not give up on the issue nationally and had new allies in the Trump White House. Early in Trump’s first term, the administration revoked federal guidance that transgender students have the right to use bathrooms that match their gender identity.
In 2023, GOP lawmakers in North Carolina advanced bills to ban gender transition care for minors, bar trans students from women’s sports and ban almost all public school instruction on “gender identity, sexual activity, or sexuality” before fifth grade. By then, they were part of a wave of similar legislation around the country rather than a national focal point.
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Cooper, then governor, vetoed the 2023 bills on women’s sports, school curriculum and gender transition care, but a GOP supermajority in the legislature overrode him.
“For campaign purposes only, Republicans are serving up a triple threat of political culture wars using government to invade the rights and responsibilities of parents and doctors, hurting vulnerable children and damaging our state’s reputation and economy like they did with the harmful bathroom bill,” Cooper said in a statement at the time. The sports issue was already handled by parents, schools and athletic groups, he said.
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But Republicans have already made gender identity central to their attacks on Cooper. An anti-Cooper ad from the Senate Leadership Fund, a leading Republican super PAC, focuses heavily on the Democrat’s gender-related vetoes and echoes Trump’s ad from 2024: “Roy Cooper sides with they/them.”
Read more here.
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