How HB 805 Got Ruined
by Woodrow Barlow on July 26 2025
HB-805, which is titled the “Prevent Sexual Exploitation of Women and Minors Act”, didn’t start as an anti-trans bill. The original draft was authored by House Rep. Jackson.
The original draft focused on:
- Requiring pornography publishers to keep extensive records showing age and consent for all their performers.
- Requiring pornography website operators to promptly facilitate deletion requests from people appearing in content that has been posted without their consent.
- The enforcement and penalties resulting from failure to comply.
It was a pretty reasonable bill and it drew bi-partisan support. The House sent the bill to committee, where it underwent some (harmless) improvements, and then the house passed the bill.
The Senate is where things went sideways. The bill was sent to the Rules and Operations of the Senate Committee, where it got completely ruined.
Once the Senate Rules Committee was done, the updated draft included:
- Imposing a trans-exclusive and biologically flawed legal definition of “male” and “female”.
- Extending the statute of limitations for medical malpractice lawsuits specifically related to gender-affirming healthcare to an unprecedented 10 years, which is clearly designed to increase the risk for medical professionals to offer these services in North Carolina.
- Allowing parents to ban their children from reading arbitrary books, requiring schools to create systems to facilitate these bans, and requiring school librarians and teachers to enforce these bans on an individualized basis.
- Requiring that, if any aspect of a North Carolina birth certificate must be updated, the updated copy will be attached to the original copy. Any time the birth certificate is distributed, the entire history will be distributed together as a single multi-page document.
- No state funds shall be used, directly or indirectly, for any gender-affirming healthcare on inmates. This also means the State Health Plan, funded by the government, must not cover these medical costs.
- There is a deeply-nested carve out that would protect members of the SHP from any change, except that it is connected to a trigger clause which has already been met, so this does nothing and implies that all gender-affirming coverage will end.
According to the bill history, this occurred between May 27 and June 18. Unfortunately, the committee documents for this period do not show any activity on HB 805, so I can’t see who inserted these changes.
Somehow, this still wasn’t enough, because Senate Rep. Buck Newton tacked a few more terrible amendments on top.
The final ratified bill includes all of the Senate’s trash, left un-changed when it came back to the House. The bill crossed Governor Stein’s desk July 3, at which point he vetoed it. On July 29, the House and Senate will be voting on whether or not to overturn the veto.