Captain Fantastic is the latest to enter the House Bill 2 fray.
In an opinion piece on The Hill, British musician Sir Elton John took on Gov. Pat McCrory over the bill, calling it discriminatory toward the LGBT community and criticizing spending state money to defend it in court.
“Forcing transgender people to use the bathroom of a gender with which they don’t identify isn’t just inconvenient or impractical,” John wrote. “For many, especially young students still grappling with their transition, it can be traumatic, and at worst, unsafe.”
John, 69, called for McCrory to meet with people in the transgender community, saying people who write and support such legislation “need a lesson in compassion.”
John, who is gay and married to 53-year-old filmmaker David Furnish, is the founder of the Elton John AIDS Foundation and stated in his piece that transgender women are 49 times more likely to be living with HIV. John said that the employment discrimination transgender people face as a reason for the heightened risk of HIV, saying many transgender women are pushed “into sex work as their only option for economic survival.”
John has been a long-time activist in the LGBT community. In 2013, he openly criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin for Russia’s law against distributing information about homosexuality or transgenderism to people under age 18. The two are expected to meet next month when John is scheduled to perform in Moscow on May 30th and at an ice palace in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city and Putin’s birthplace. He last performed in North Carolina in March of 2015, playing at Crown Coliseum in Fayetteville, N.C.
His primary home is in Berkshire, England, but John also owns residences in Beverly Hills, Atlanta, Nice, London’s Holland
Park,
and Venice.
