Who would have ever guessed, even a month or two ago, that transgender bathrooms would become among the most contentious public-policy debates in an already heated presidential election year?

Yet here we are, thanks in large part to an ill-considered, discriminatory North Carolina law requiring that transgender persons use public bathrooms corresponding to the gender of their birth. That’s a clunky way of saying that if you were born a boy, you’re a boy, so use the boys bathroom. Same for girls.

Of course this really isn’t about bathrooms. Prejudice is the real problem.

The law not only shows a complete lack of understanding about what being transgender actually means, but a lack of interest in even trying to understand. The LGBT community understandably took offense, but this goes far beyond an LGBT issue. This is about treating people with respect and protecting those in need. This is about rising above the personal biases of others to do what’s right.

Bruce Springsteen took a stand, canceling a North Carolina concert in protest and in so doing helped turn a spotlight on the issue. New Jersey is among several states and cities either considering or having already adopted a ban on state-sponsored travel to North Carolina, as well as Mississippi, which has enacted a law allowing businesses to deny services to gay people.

President Barack Obama then raised the stakes on May 13 with a directive ordering public schools to allow students to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity. While the directive doesn’t force states to comply, it carries with it the implication that federal funds would be withheld from defiant locales.

Later, in his first public remarks on the directive, Obama explained that transgender children, like others who are part of a minority group, are often the targets of bullying. “I think that it is part of our obligation as a society to make sure that everybody is treated fairly, and our kids are all loved, and that they’re protected and that their dignity is affirmed.”

Well said, but what seems obvious to some isn’t nearly so clear to others. Reaction to Obama’s action among his critics has been predictably incendiary. Some say this is another egregious example of the president trying to dictate a liberal agenda to the masses. Others sound like Civil War-era states’ rights advocates masking their real motivations. Still others complain that transgender access to bathrooms of their choice will invite attacks from predators and perverts, as if somehow those would-be predators have just been waiting for non-discriminatory transgender laws to act upon their impulses.

It’s all a smokescreen for what most people are unwilling to say — that many who oppose transgender access do so because they want to impose their own morality and religion on others, the same motives that have for so long generated resistance to gay marriage. They don’t understand transgender people, so they dismiss them as lesser beings, unworthy of governmental rights and protections based upon their “abnormality.”

That’s the core of discrimination. That’s what has to be stamped out, at every turn, everywhere it exists. States should not be allowed the right to apply discriminatory practices because too many of their own citizens — or rather, too many of their powerful citizens — are bigots.

This shouldn’t be that hard. How many transgender students are walking the halls of any particular school? How often would anyone encounter them in the “wrong” bathroom, and how many would even care? It’s not the students who typically have a problem with any of this; it’s the parents. And it’s sad.

Struggling with gender identity is something incomprehensible to most people. Coping with it is a daunting challenge in a society that is too often unforgiving and unsympathetic of those who aren’t like everyone else. Transgender people are already at odds with themselves and confront varied forms of bullying along the way. They certainly don’t deserve to have government piling on with more abuse.

If officials in North Carolina and other states can’t do the right thing, then Washington has to step in and do it for them.