In Charlotte, there is a controversy over whether a transgendered person should use the bathroom assigned to his or her biological sex or to the sex with which he or she identifies. The Charlotte Observer has the story here. This post doesn’t address that issue directly, but instead concerns a related question that the story prompted me to ponder: is it illegal for a man to use the ladies’ room? There doesn’t seem to be much law directly addressing this topic, or the similar if not identical issue of whether it is illegal for a woman to use the men’s room. A few states have considered enacting specific crimes targeting restroom usage by the opposite sex, as noted by the Huffington Post here and here. But it doesn’t sound as though any of them have passed, leaving me to consider more generally-applicable crimes. Here are the main possibilities: Trespass. There’s a strong argument that a man entering a ladies’ room is a person who has, without authorization, entered a building of another and so is guilty of first-degree trespass. G.S. 14-159.12. One might argue that a restroom is not a building but a room within a building. However, it may qualify as a building under G.S. 14-159.11, which defines the term as “any structure or part of a structure . . . enclosed so as to permit reasonable entry only through a door.” Supporting that interpretation is Com. v. White, 538 A.2d 887 (Pa. Super. Ct. 1988), where the court affirmed [...]
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