North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) was forced to acknowledge that there has not been a single case in North Carolina in which transgender protections have been used to commit crimes in bathrooms, after Fox's Chris Wallace pressed him repeatedly.
Previously, Gov. McCrory parroted the debunked conservative media myth that a “boy who thinks he's a girl” could go into a girls bathroom and pose a sexual assault threat. During a May 8 interview on Fox Broadcasting Co.’s Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace repeatedly asked the governor whether there had been any convictions in North Carolina for “using transgender protections to commit crimes in bathrooms.” McCrory was forced to admit “Not that I'm aware of.”
Fox News has a history of stoking fears of sexual assault and misbehavior in restrooms to oppose equal access to public accommodations for transgender people, even promoting several fake stories about harassment in restrooms. From the May 8 edition of Fox Broadcasting Co.’s Fox News Sunday:
CHRIS WALLACE (HOST): How many cases have you had in North Carolina in the last year where people have been convicted of using transgender protections to commit crimes in bathrooms?
GOV. PAT MCCRORY (R-NC): This wasn't a problem. That's the point I'm making. This is the Democratic Party and the left wing of the Democratic Party --
WALLACE: But have there been any cases of this?MCCRORY: Not that I'm aware of.
WALLACE: Have there been any cases in the last five years?
MCCRORY: Why did the Democratic Party in Houston, Texas --
WALLACE: But I guess the question is, forgive me, if I may, sir, why not just then let it go? If there's not a case of transgender people going in and molesting little girls?
MCCRORY: I haven't used that at all. This is an issue of expectation --
WALLACE : Well, you did say a boy who thinks he's a girl going into a girls bathroom.
MCCRORY: And that's where there's an expectation of privacy. When you go into a restroom, or your wife goes into a restroom you assume the only other people going into that restroom or shower facility is going to be a person of the same gender. That's been an expectation of privacy that all of us have for years.
WALLACE: But if there's no problem, then why pass the law in the first place?
MCCRORY: There can be a problem, because the liberal Democrats are the ones pushing for bathroom laws. And now President Obama and one of my successors as mayor of Charlotte wants government to have bathroom rules. I’m not interested in that. We did not start this on the right. Who started it was the political left. In Houston, Texas, and Charlotte, North Carolina. And now, frankly, in Washington, D.C.