Transgender Bathroom Debate: List Of North Carolina Boycott Grows After San Francisco Symphony Protest

The San Francisco Symphony announced Monday it would cancel two concerts it had planned in North Carolina to protest the state’s “bathroom law,” which requires transgender people to use the bathroom that matched the gender printed on their birth certificates.

The symphony had performances scheduled for April 5 and 6 at The University of North Carolina’s Memorial Hall in which they planned to play music by John Cage, Béla Bartók and Gustav Mahler. But it told ticket holders in an email it was withdrawing from the shows because of the law that constrains anti-discrimination protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

The controversial law says that discriminating against others based on “race, religion, color, national origin or biological sex,” is illegal, but fails to include people’s sexual orientation and gender identity among these discriminatory factors. The law also prevents smaller city governments from installing their own anti-discrimination laws for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people or from passing any increase in the minimum wage.

The San Francisco Symphony represents the latest performance group to avoid having any association with the state after it passed the “bathroom law” commonly known as House Bill 2 in March. Rock stars Bruce Springsteen and Ringo Starr, famed violinist Itzhak Perlman and the National Basketball Association are among those that had events scheduled in North Carolina but them moved elsewhere because of the law.

Joshua Weilerstein, artistic director of the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne in Switzerland, said last week he would donate the money he had made while conducting the North Carolina Symphony in October to Equality NC, an organization dedicated to securing equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people based in Raleigh, North Carolina.

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, the Republican politician who signed House Bill 2 into law, conceded on Dec. 5 to losing his bid for re-election to Democrat Roy Cooper, the Los Angeles Times reported. At least two thirds of North Carolina voters opposed House Bill 2 in the government race.

Michael Tilson Thomas, the music director of the San Francisco Symphony who is openly gay, told the New York Times the orchestra was motivated to act in accordance to the policies of San Francisco’s Mayor Edwin M. Lee, who decided to prohibit city employees in publicly funded positions from traveling to North Carolina on business because of the law. While the orchestra members are not funded by public dollars, Thomas said they wanted to act as cultural ambassadors for the values the city of San Francisco holds dear.

Brent Assink, executive director of the San Francisco Symphony, said in a statement Monday that the orchestra waited until Monday to announce the concert’s cancelation in hopes that the state law might have been overturned by now.

“We would have loved to perform at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a community that in many ways is consonant with our own San Francisco Bay Area,” Assink said in the statement. “But we also feel we must join our city, our state, the NBA, NCAA and the many artists, organizations and businesses who have chosen to not visit or contribute economically to North Carolina until legislation denying protection for the LGBT community has been overturned.”

When asked about the “bathroom law” in April, President-elect Donald Trump said he hoped it would be reversed, citing the significant economic impacts it has had on the citizens of North Carolina, PBS News reported on April 21. After the law was signed, Deutche Bank abandoned its plan to add 400 employees in the state, and Paypal opted out of opening a 400-employee operation center in Charlotte, North Carolina.