CARY, N.C. — With the primary election just three weeks away, Republican gubernatorial front-runner Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson is campaigning on the issue of transgender people and restrooms.
"If you're a man on Friday night," Robinson told a crowd of supporters at a recent event in Cary. "And all the sudden on Saturday you feel like a woman, and you want to go in the women's bathroom in the mall, you will be arrested — or whatever we got to do to you. We got to protect our women."
That's an echo of a 2016 bill that regulated which restrooms transgender people could use. The bill, known as HB2, provoked a tremendous international backlash, including a boycott that cost the state billions of dollars in lost investments, jobs and events, before the law was partially repealed the next year.
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