People who see me in public sometimes call me ‘ma’am’ and other times call me ‘sir.’ Either one is alright with me. What I wear, how I look, and what gender of potential spouse I might someday bring home to test for family compatibility have no bearing on the fact that I grew up with you. You taught me about the love of God, the value of hard work, the benefits of spending time outdoors, the importance of history, and how tomato based barbecue is a dangerous heresy. I love you. I would never hurt you, and nothing about my appearance changes that. HB2 is not keeping predators away. It is making me nervous about visiting and making life hard on a daily basis for NC residents, also your neighbors and cousins, who might identify as things like gender nonconforming or trans.

You are safe from me. I wish I could tell you that makes you safe, but you are in more trouble than you know. The oldest threat to your well-being in Southern history is on the move: wealthy and powerful people using bigotry and scapegoating to consolidate ever more money and power. These people distract you with hot button issues, pretend to care about your values, play to your worst impulses, and pass laws that serve their own interests and no one else’s. Then, they laugh at you and call you stupid hicks behind your backs for letting them. Traditionally, the wedge of choice was race, but bigotry is getting diversified just like everything else these days.

The actual and spiritual descendants of the wannabe feudal lords who held our distant ancestors as indentured servants, beat fortunes out of our Black neighbors and cousins during slavery, squeezed sharecropping families for all they were worth, and worked textile millworkers to death well into the 20th century are still here. They are still not our friends. Their interests and yours will always be opposed. You want North Carolina’s economic pie to get bigger so that your hard work gets you a decent living. They would be okay with the pie getting smaller so long as they can hoard more of it for themselves. You like capitalism plus a social safety net. Their ideal economic system is feudalism with no room for your children to be upwardly mobile.

They are creating a transgender bathroom problem that does not exist so that they can keep you distracted while they quietly dismantle things like the public education system that has helped perpetuate and grow North Carolina’s middle class. If they get what they want, North Carolina will sink into the kind of poverty and backwardness you see further south. Some elements in state politics would rather have you thinking about strangers’ genitals than jobs, roads, and especially schools. Unless you worry less about who uses which disgusting public toilet and more about your mass-exodus of teachers, you will be remembered as the generation that singlehandedly squandered over 200 years of our ancestors’ hard work and sacrifice.