A North Carolina school board decided on Tuesday that students should be allowed to carry defensive sprays and razors — with one member suggesting they might need these tools in light of HB2, the controversial state law that requires students using bathrooms in public schools to use bathrooms according to the sex on their birth certificate.

“Depending on how the courts rule on the bathroom issues, it may be a pretty valuable tool to have on the female students if they go to the bathroom, not knowing who may come in,” school board member Chuck Hughes said, according to the Salisbury Post.

Other board members questioned the wisdom of changing these rules and were skeptical that pepper sprays would only be used for self-defense. The school board’s lawyer, Ken Soo, mentioned cases where defensive sprays have been used against teachers. Nonetheless, the board voted in favor of changing the policies.

North Carolina is currently amid a legal battle over HB 2, which the U.S. Department of Justice says is in violation of the Civil Rights Act. The department filed a suit against the state this week. 

North Carolina isn’t the only state to wade into this issue. The fight against trans people’s use of bathrooms, as well as cisgender people who don’t conform to a self-chosen bathroom monitor’s expectations about how women and girls should dress, is heating up across the country. 

A spate of anti-LGBT bills are either being considered or recently passed through state legislatures. Bills focusing on policing trans people’s use of bathrooms have become particularly common. Kansas, Tennessee, Washington, South Dakota, and South Carolina have all considered bills limiting trans rights, including their access to the bathroom. 

This issue often presents itself in schools, as conservative lawmakers use the defense that they’re trying to protect kids as a justification for discriminatory legislation. In Illinois, a group of over 50 families and the conservative Thomas More Society filed a federal lawsuit claiming a trans students infringed on their children’s privacy and caused them trauma. In California, the Westboro Baptist Church protested at school in the Los Angeles Unified School District that added a gender-neutral bathroom. In Wisconsin, a trans college student was kicked out of the women’s locker room at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the university initially drafted a new policy that still treated a trans student changing in front of cis students as harassment. 

One bizarre development in the conservative backlash against changing policies that allow trans people to simply pee in the bathroom corresponding to their gender are the protests taking place in bathrooms. After Target announced that employees and customers can use the bathroom that is most tied to their gender identity, more than half a million people signed a boycott of Target and some conservative groups have been encouraging cisgender men to occupy women’s bathrooms as a form of protest. The American Family Association, the same group that organized the boycott, has been encouraging cisgender men to “test” the policy by going into Target bathrooms.

Even though they accuse trans women of pretending to be trans to sexually abuse cisgender women, conservative groups don’t seem similarly concerned that cisgender men may be sexual predators posing as protesters concerned about cisgender women’s safety. To oppose men going into women’s bathrooms, these groups are indeed sending men into women’s bathrooms. A man protesting Target’s bathroom policy was taken in police custody after dispatchers were told there may be an active shooter in the store. He was unarmed. The man was charged with disorderly conduct and police said the protester “provoked a breach of the peace causing panic among store employees and customers,” according to The Washington Post.

Update: The board member who made the comment about high school students using pepper spray in light of challenges to HB 2 said he changed his mind about allowing students to carry pepper spray, Hughes told BuzzFeed News on Wednesday.

“We’re a strong board and we’re going to reevaluate this and maybe change it … I personally will vote to put pepper spray back into the prohibited items list along with razor blades, guns, knives, and other items that are not okay to take on school campuses,” Hughes said to BuzzFeed News.

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