Like all other people, transgender people go to the bathroom to pee. Afterwards, they may even take a moment to comb their hair or just look in the mirror. Overall though, their habits in the restroom are just like yours.

But Wednesday night the North Carolina legislature passed – and Governor Pat McCrory signed – a bill that bans trans people from bathrooms that don’t match the sex they were assigned at birth. There are 40 similar bills being considered in at least 16 US states that echo this now-successful piece of legislation, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

Transgender restroom use: America's next battle for equality and recognition | Nico Lang Read more

This shocking win not only signals a red alert in the fight for full LGBT equality, but also something more disgusting: a clear message has been sent by North Carolina conservatives, sure to be emulated nationwide, that it doesn’t matter if trans people live or die.

I’m not jumping to conclusions here. An analysis of data compiled by the National Transgender Discrimination Survey last month shows that when young people are denied access to a restroom that aligns with their gender identity, their rates of suicide go up.

Translation: not allowing trans youth to use a bathroom only perpetuates feelings of isolation or depression that lead 41% of transgender people to attempt kill themselves at some point in their lives, compared to the 4.6% in the general population.

This finding should be at the forefront of everyone’s minds as this bill takes effect in North Carolina, and as other proposed legislation moves forward in states like Kansas, where officials have proposed a bill that would allow someone to sue a public school if they saw a transgender person in a bathroom that didn’t match their sex assigned at birth. (Who is going to be checking people’s genitals if this passes? And isn’t that assault?)

Beyond the research, suicide in North Carolina is a very personal topic for many activists and leaders I have spoken to over years reporting on LGBT violence in the state, where sources have told me that this is one of the biggest concerns they see in their community daily.

Since 2014, the city of Charlotte, which passed the original LGBT non-discrimination ordinance that sparked this new anti-trans bill, has had at least four trans youths take their own lives. One of them was a local homecoming king.

Rodney Tucker, executive director of the local LGBT center there, told me this one morning after Deonna Mason, a black transgender woman, was found dead on the highway after being accidentally hit by a state patrol car in the same city, and then misgendered in the media.

But high trans suicide attempt rates seem to consistently fail to be a concern for those whose only focus is “protecting” non-trans people in bathrooms, though studies have consistently shown that trans people using the restroom that aligns with their gender identity does not lead to violence or crime.

Before the North Carolina bill was passed in the house, Republican representative Dean Arp told the chamber that it was “common sense” to stop transgender people from using the restrooms they desired because “biological men should not be in women’s showers, locker rooms and bathrooms”.

His arguments, and others, were based on protecting their children from the “monsters” they made of transgender people – children he actually seems to not really care about completely, because passage of this latest bill puts $4.5bn in Title IX funding for schools in jeopardy, since blocking transgender youth from bathrooms has been consistently found to be a civil rights violation.

As he and his colleagues continued to use women and children as a misplaced reason for codifying bigotry, for the assault on the most marginalized sector of the LGBT community. North Carolina lawmakers failed to listen to the people who testified before them prior to the vote, saying that this was a terrible idea. That this would harm their lives.

That, for me, is the most frightening part of all this: the fact that, despite local and national outcry and increasing civil parity, these conservatives still cannot see LGBT people – like me – as humans, who deserve to use restrooms in comfort, and who deserve to live.